President Donald Trump has long referred to the conflict in Ukraine as ‘Joe Biden’s war’. But in two weeks of whirlwind diplomacy, Trump has put his own stamp on the ongoing contest.
First, Trump dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow on 6 August. Then, after Witkoff failed to achieve concrete breakthroughs with the Kremlin, Trump stunned the world by inviting Vladimir Putin to Anchorage, Alaska.
When Putin rejected a ceasefire in Anchorage, Trump barrelled on nonetheless, pursuing a comprehensive agreement to settle the conflict. Three days later, with the world on tenterhooks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven European leaders met in Washington to counterbalance Putin and keep Trump onside.
That Trump has held the world in rapt attention is no surprise. His preferred operating method is to cultivate suspense. His disregard for convention, comfort with ambiguity, and willingness to sit with contradiction are unparalleled among world leaders. Yet Trump’s secret ingredient is the vast power of the United States, which transforms allies and enemies alike into supplicants. With one decision, Trump can tip the global balance of power – and everybody knows it. Anticipating – and trying to shape – Trump’s decisions are major preoccupations of world leaders today, most of whom are never quite sure where Trump stands and what he might decide next.
In Anchorage, Putin attempted to use Trump’s methods against him. The Russian leader, himself a former KGB operative, worked to spring a trap.
During the past several months of increased diplomacy, Russia has made expansive territorial claims that no Ukrainian can be expected to swallow. Moscow’s most recent offer, rendered in writing and presented to Ukrainian negotiators in early June, led with the demand that Ukraine surrender four oblasts, or regions, that Russia claims as its own: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Russia has taken nearly all of Luhansk, but it has established only partial control over the other three regions.
In Anchorage, Putin offered to freeze the frontlines in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and elsewhere in return for Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donetsk, the site of the most dogged fighting in recent months. On 1 August in Valaam, Russia, while sitting next to the Belarussian strongman, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Putin homed in on Donetsk. ‘We will regain it,’ he proclaimed confidently. ‘It is ours.’
Donetsk is critical to the military defence of Ukraine. The region’s strongholds, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, protect Ukraine’s central heartlands, including the city of Dnipro. Finnish President Alexander Stubb described these fortified cities as ‘a bastion against the Huns’, reportedly impressing Trump. If Ukraine abandoned tens of thousands of square kilometres in Donetsk, it would devastate morale nationwide, at a time when Ukraine’s AWOL rates have risen and manpower shortages remain acute. Moreover, forfeiting Donetsk would effectively open the gates to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Ukraine’s defensive positions there face almost exclusively toward Russia’s current lines, rather than toward its own fortifications in Donetsk. It would take years for Ukraine to build new positions in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia of a similar quality to what it already has in Donetsk.
This vulnerability would be less of a problem if Russia assented to real Western security guarantees for Ukraine, but Moscow is pouring cold water on any such arrangement. Russia’s June memorandum calls for Versailles-like caps on Ukraine’s military and rejects the idea of any Western troops on Ukrainian soil. After Witkoff argued that Russia had now assented to ‘game-changing’ security guarantees in Anchorage, rising to ‘Article 5 protection from the United States’, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took to the cameras to underscore that nothing had really changed.
Lavrov explained that any guarantees that did not include Russia were ‘a utopia, a road to nowhere’. Lavrov instead pointed to a draft peace treaty, negotiated during the early days of the full-scale invasion, which had called for a system of ‘guarantor states’. Under the terms of this treaty, never finalised, each of these so-called ‘guarantor states’ would possess a veto over any military operation in support of Ukraine. Included among that group of states, of course, is Russia itself.
By now it appears clear that Putin’s tempting offer in Alaska – Donetsk for peace – masked sinister intentions. Lavrov’s statements all but gave the game away. Putin sees Ukraine’s surrender of Donetsk not as an end to the war but as a stepping-stone toward the broader subjugation of the country.
Speculation ran rampant in the hours leading up to the meeting in Washington between Trump and his European counterparts that the US President might fall for Putin’s ruse. This anxiety evaporated during the meetings themselves, which unfolded under a genial tenor and ended in a show of unity. Trump reaffirmed his commitment to sell US weapons to Ukraine, and his positive reaction to Zelensky’s offer to purchase $90 billion in American kit reinforced the impression that he has overruled those advisers who seek to pivot to Asia at the expense of Europe. By Thursday, three days after the Washington confab, Trump was criticising previous US restrictions on Ukrainian operations inside Russia. Instead of ensnaring Trump, Putin may have trapped himself.
A new game is now afoot: to convince Trump that Putin, not Zelensky, will be responsible for the inevitable breakdown in negotiations in the coming weeks. To wit, Putin is attempting to wriggle free of Trump’s demand that the Russian leader soon meet with Zelensky. ‘When it comes to high-level meetings, they must be prepared in the most careful manner at all preceding stages’, Lavrov said on Wednesday before offering merely ‘to think about raising the heads of delegations’. Such comments will land with a thud in the White House.
Putin defied Trump’s demand for a ceasefire, and he is now rejecting the President’s call for a bilateral meeting. Trump may lose patience with Putin and slap major additional sanctions on Moscow. But Trump’s observation that Russia, unlike Ukraine, ‘is a very big power’ – as he said in an interview recapping the Alaska summit – could instead lead him to conclude that Ukraine’s resistance will ultimately prove futile.
European leaders have sought to counter that impression, noting time and again that Russia is only able to make incremental gains on the battlefield at the cost of stratospheric casualties. French President Emmanuel Macron recently reminded American audiences of Russia’s limitations when he said on NBC that Russia has only expanded its control over Ukrainian territory by less than one per cent in the past 1,000 days.
As foreign leaders attempt to divine Trump’s next steps, the Rosetta Stone may lie in the Middle East. Israel went to war with Iran without guarantees of US intervention. But by creating a slipstream of success and exuding the image of a winner, Jerusalem managed to persuade Trump to deal Tehran a major blow.
The parallel for Europe is clear: if leaders want results, they will have to serve ‘as the first line of defence’, as Trump put it last week in Washington, and convince the US President that he can tip the battlefield in Ukraine’s favour at an acceptable cost. Europe should seize on Trump’s ruminations on Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign and Putin’s rejection of a bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy to deliver the German Taurus cruise missile to Kyiv. Moreover, by tapping hundreds of billions of euros in Russian assets currently frozen in European jurisdictions, European leaders can lift the financial burden of supporting Ukraine from their own people and signal to Russia that war has a steep and enduring price.
Embracing this modus operandi may in time engender a new US foreign policy doctrine, in which Washington serves as a backstop for Europe rather than the tip of its spear. Whether this is Trump’s aim, he should nonetheless encourage Europe to act. Only battlefield setbacks and economic pain can push Putin to embrace a true spirit of compromise, and only a strong Europe can convince Donald Trump that the continent is a winner worth backing.