Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating all the parties on his own side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with superstructure intended to be jettisoned in the course of getting to yes. Or to put it another way, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things.
On the face of it, Russia’s first response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine contain several major deal-breakers that the Ukrainians could never swallow. First and foremost, the Kremlin demands international recognition that Ukraine’s Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhiye and Kherson provinces are now part of Russia. Given that Russia does not actually control the entirety of the latter four regions – including the provincial capitals of Zaporozhiye and Kherson cities – Moscow is technically demanding that Kyiv actually cede even more land than it has already lost.
Ukraine voluntarily handing even more territory to Putin is an obvious nonstarter, and the easiest of the Kremlin demands to throw overboard. But the formal recognition of a de jure redrawing of Ukraine’s international borders is almost as inconceivable. While many Ukrainians recognise that the occupied territories will never be returned, the formal partition of the nation’s borders is a humiliation too far. It’s also, as a matter of international law, not something that is in the gift even of Trump.
International borders are a matter for the United Nations. There are many partitions- most notoriously of Cyprus, Palestine and China/Taiwan – which are still not formally recognised by the UN. Other new nations, for instance South Sudan, Eritrea, or even Korea, are not acknowledged by their neighbours. India and Pakistan are still wrangling over Kashmir 75 years after their independence. So the Kremlin’s demand that the world recognise its newly-won sovereignty over occupied Ukraine is hardly realistic. The best that Moscow can hope for is an updated version of a formula already agreed at talks in Istanbul in March 2022 – an agreement by Kyiv to ‘review’ the status of the occupied territories in 15 years’ time.
Other Russian demands were already effectively conceded at the Istanbul talks – notably Ukraine’s future neutrality. Since imminent membership of Nato has never actually been on the cards for Ukraine either practically, politically or legally, this should be an easy concession to make. All that is actually being surrendered is Ukraine’s aspiration to join at some future date and not the actual prospect of membership, which is non-existent. In fact Ukraine was constitutionally neutral from 2010 until 2015. The sticking point is that neutrality is being imposed once more at Moscow’s demand, which is a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Nonetheless, according to four participants at the Istanbul talks, staying out of Nato was a price Kyiv was willing to pay for peace.
Two Kremlin demands stalled the Istanbul talks: ‘de-militarisation’ and ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine. In practice, this meant restrictions on the size of Kyiv’s army and scrapping laws the Kremlin claimed discriminated against Russian speakers and insulted the memory of second world war veterans.
Limits on Ukraine’s armed forces – currently not only the biggest in Europe but larger by far than all of the European Union and Britain’s standing armies put together – are another deal-breaker. But a Korean-style demilitarised zone on both sides of the border may be a feasible work-around, as long as it’s far deeper than the 1.5 km buffer envisioned in the Minsk accords of 2014-15 which were honoured mostly in the breach.
The only truly new issue in the latest Russia-US talks that was not discussed in Istanbul three years ago are European peacekeepers. The Kremlin has been adamantly opposed. Russia’s abrasive foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been characteristically blunt and categorical in his insistence that no Nato troops should be stationed in Ukraine. Indeed, it is curious that the UK and France have spent so much effort gathering a ‘coalition of the willing’ of peacekeepers when this was obviously never going to be acceptable to the Kremlin.
Russia may be bogged down in Ukraine, but it remains undefeated militarily as Putin – or possibly the older of his body doubles – emphasised when he showed up in Kursk wearing military fatigues to celebrate the crushing of a Ukrainian incursion after five months of fighting. Trump claims to have a strategy in case Putin refuses to make a deal in the form of more painful sanctions. And indeed sanctioning importers of Russian oil and gas would cripple the Russian economy. But it would also cause energy prices to rocket and deprive Europe of a fifth of its oil and gas, which it continues to import from Russia.
In sum: Putin cannot be compelled to sign a peace deal. Neither can he be bullied, much as Trump would like to try. He must agree voluntarily. A briefing paper prepared by an FSB-adjacent think tank and leaked to the Financial Times yesterday by a European intelligence service advises the Kremlin to take a much harder line. Insisting on the ‘the complete dismantling’ of the current Ukrainian government is one suggested demand, plus wholly demilitarised zones on the Ukrainian side of the border only. By those hawkish standards, Putin is so far being relatively modest in his demands.
The outline of the path to peace – and the obstacles on that path – are now clear. They’re pretty much the same as were on the table in Istanbul – just as the front lines have changed little since the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv in April 2022. Back then it was Russian intransigence, rather than Boris Johnson’s message of European support, that caused the talks to break down and transformed the invasion into a grinding three-year war. This time round, it’s up to Trump to find a formula to persuade, or cajole, Putin into cutting his losses, give up his fantasies of controlling Ukraine and finally choosing peace.
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