This text was originally published on the Warwick Ukraine-Belarus Hub blog on 12 February.
This was always going to be a busy week for discussions about Ukraine, with senior political figures gathering for the Munich Security Conference which begins on Friday (14 February). Yet the pace picked up markedly on 12 February following a 90-minute phone conversation between US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. According to Trump, the two leaders have agreed to begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. He also stated that the pair have agreed ‘to visit each other’s nations.’
Also on 12 February, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group met at NATO headquarters in Brussels. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s public remarks at that meeting give further indications about the US position going into negotiations. These two events have set the theme for discussions in Germany.
There is much to dampen the spirits of Ukrainians in the rhetoric coming from American officials at present, though one might argue that the Trump administration is really carrying on different negotiations from the ones ostensibly being reported. But to understand that argument we need to first of all look at what has been said.
Slim pickings for Ukraine
Trump may have reneged on his pledge to ‘end the war in 24 hours’ even before he took office, instead saying that he needed 100 days, but there has been frantic diplomatic activity behind the scenes. He spoke on 12 February to both Putin and Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelenskyy, but inevitably the talks with Putin are the ones being given media attention.
One reason that Trump’s confidence that he will broker an end to the war is so jarring is that Russian officials have given few signs they are prepared to make any concessions. Russian officials were stony-faced when Trump threatened more sanctions in January; Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations said it was ‘not merely the question of ending the war… It is first and foremost the question of ending the root causes of the Ukraine crisis.’ Putin has previously spoken dismissively about the value of a ceasefire, reiterating a series of demands that Ukraine must cede territory and renounce its NATO ambitions. Last summer Putin even claimed that he would not consider a ceasefire unless Ukraine ceded territory that Russia had not managed to capture by force.
Russia’s demands have therefore been an obvious obstacle to negotiations until now. The Biden administration and US allies always insisted that their commitments to Ukraine would endure and rightly refused Putin’s claims on Ukrainian territory. Now Trump and Hegseth have – on the surface at least – gone some way to accepting Putin’s demands at an official level. While one could argue that the Americans’ remarks are not new, they do appear to have removed any ambiguity.
Is the US abandoning Ukraine?
Trump likes to claim he is a skilled negotiator and yet the remarks from him and Hegseth this week could be interpreted as showing his hand far too soon. It is not certain, however, that Trump is playing the game everyone assumes.
Consider, first of all, the ‘playing cards’ Trump’s administration appears to have discarded at the very start of its direct talks with Putin. Hegseth may have affirmed US commitments to NATO, but he said Ukraine’s membership of the alliance was ‘not a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement’. That is unambiguous: no Ukraine in NATO.
Onto the discard pile as well goes Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The defence secretary asserted that a return ‘to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.’ He added that any such expectations were ‘illusory’. A clear signal that the US thinks Ukraine needs to make territorial concessions.
A third card thrown away is the threat of deploying any US troops. Not especially surprising – Biden’s administration was also clear that there would be ‘no boots on the ground’ – but in the context of peace negotiations the statement takes on a different character. Indeed, Hegseth rejected any idea that a peace operation could happen under the aegis of NATO and seems to have ruled out US peacekeepers being deployed to Ukraine.
There is no sugar-coating that Trump’s direct conversation with Putin, coupled with Hegseth’s remarks on Wednesday, direct and uncompromising as they were, did little to give hope to Ukraine of unwavering future support from the US. The prospects of Ukraine joining NATO have been slim all along though, with opaque diplomatic language such as a 2023 communique waffling that NATO ‘will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met’; the conditions were never publicly specified and the wording would have been far short of a promise even if they had been.
More importantly, Trump’s direct talks with Putin are part of other politics as well. News also broke earlier in the week of a prisoner exchange between Russia and the US. The White House crowed about having negotiated for the release of a US school teacher from a Russian prison on 11 February, as well as journalists imprisoned in Belarus. This success may explain why Trump’s rhetoric about Russia is warmer this week than it was a few weeks ago when he called on Putin to end the ‘ridiculous war’. If so, Trump’s warmth for Putin is not here all about Ukraine.
Driving a bargain with Europe
The more recognisable partners with whom Trump is also negotiating are America’s allies in Europe. An interesting feature of Hegseth’s remarks in Brussels was how extensively he dwelled on European states’ responsibilities. He said that Europe must provide the ‘overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine.’ He also implied a broader US military retrenchment in Europe, saying that Europeans must ‘take ownership of conventional security on the continent.’
The Trump administration’s gripes with European defence spending are well-known and often repeated. It is clear the US under Trump will not allow slack commitments from European states. Hegseth also made clear that if Europeans were to deploy troops to Ukraine as part of a peace operation, then the US would not consider them covered by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Article 5 may state that ‘The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’ – but it is qualified by Article 6 which delimits the territory covered and has been used to clarify (or alter) the scope of Article 5’s coverage in the past.
There may not be good alternatives to a peacekeeping force dominated by European troops. Zelenskyy recently suggested a minimum of 200,000 peacekeepers might be needed. Whether or not that number is credible is hard to assess, but it is double the number of United Nations peacekeepers currently deployed round the globe which suggests mustering such numbers without the US would be a tall order. A UN-endorsed peace mission would need Security Council approval, giving Russia a veto over its mandate and as such is unlikely to be viable.
Where next?
It is too soon to think the war will end quickly. Many around Putin will revel in the recognition Trump has given the Russian leader simply for picking up the phone. (But politics should involve talking to both friends and foes.) Putin may agree to a ceasefire and negotiations; he has little obvious to lose from walking away from talks at any time.
Will European leaders show that they do not condone the US and Russia deciding Ukraine’s future over the heads of the Ukrainians? For those in Moscow’s shadow, the US president’s rhetoric this week suggests recognition of a Russian sphere of influence. In fact, however, many possibilities remain and a large part of the conversations so far this week may have been about securing the release of prisoners and putting the onus for Ukraine's defence onto European shoulders.
Despite the evident concessions the US wants to see Ukraine make, we still have little idea how negotiations will play out. The US may have ruled out deploying troops to Ukraine, but military and other aid could yet flow from Washington to Ukraine. Trump has not excluded that possibility.
A favourite analogy of commentators on foreign affairs is Munich. The role of the Munich Agreement in the events leading to World War II left commentators crying ‘No More Munichs’ and severely discredited appeasement as a policy. Many will be accusing Trump of appeasement, and so it is to Munich that eyes now turn.
There had been talk that Keith Kellogg, the special envoy appointed by Trump to end the war, would present a US peace plan at this week's Munich Security Conference. The timeline slipped and the peace plan had already only been promised ‘in the coming weeks’ as this week began. More significantly, Kellogg’s name has barely been mentioned which – although he is expected to travel to Kyiv, and possibly Moscow, later this month – suggests his role has been slighter than originally envisaged. It is, as well, a reminder that Trump is shuffling his options and expectations from day to day.
US Vice President JD Vance will meet Zelenskyy in Munich on Friday. The world has learnt before that the Ukrainian leader often has a strong hand to play.
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