It has been an eventful and, for Ukraine and its European allies, alarming past week or so. First they heard that US President Donald Trump had spent 90 minutes on the phone with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. In one stroke, Trump upended three years in which his predecessor, Joe Biden, had sought to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On the same day, February 12, Trump’s newly installed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told a gathering of senior defence officials in Brussels that Europe would no longer be the primary focus for US security policy, and that Ukraine could not hope to regain the territory Russia had illegally occupied since 2014, nor join Nato.
Hegseth added that not only would the US not contribute to any peacekeeping force in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, but that any European peacekeeping operation would not be done under the protection of Nato’s Article 5.
This was soon followed by the US vice-president, J.D. Vance, telling the Munich Security Conference that it was Europe, not Russia or China, that was the main security threat – the “enemy within” that fostered anti-democratic practices and sought to curtail free speech.
This week, a US team led by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sat down with their Russian opposite numbers led by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to discuss peace negotiations. Ukraine was not represented. Nor was Europe. Following that, and perhaps taking his cue from Hegseth, Lavrov declared that Russia would not accept any European peacekeepers in Ukraine – deal or no deal.
Meanwhile, Trump has taken to his TruthSocial media platform to repeat several favorite Kremlin talking points. Ukraine was responsible for the war, he said. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a “dictator” who had cancelled elections, and whose popularity with his own people was now as low as 4% (it’s actually 57%, at least 10 points higher than Trump’s rating in the US).
Trump also mocked Zelensky’s concern at his country’s exclusion from the Riyadh talks, telling reporters: “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
This leads us back to the Istanbul communique, produced at the end of March 2022 after initial peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Antalya, Turkey. Some US commentators have suggested Ukraine could now be better off had it signed this deal.
Istanbul communique
What happened in Istanbul, and how close Russia and Ukraine were to an agreement, has been hotly debated, with some arguing a deal was close and others refuting this.
Ukraine reportedly agreed to a range of concessions including future neutrality, as well as giving up its bid for membership of Nato. Russia, in turn, would apparently have accepted Ukraine’s membership of the EU. This concession, incidentally, is still on the table.
But there were sticking points, primarily over the size of Ukraine’s armed forces after a deal – Kyiv reportedly wanted 250,000 soldiers, the Kremlin just 85,000 – and the types of weaponry Ukraine could keep in its arsenal.
There were also issues about Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territory, particularly Crimea – this was projected to be resolved over 15 years with Russia occupying the peninsula on a lease in the meantime. Another Kremlin demand was for Zelensky to stand down as president, with the presidency being taken up by the pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
Negotiations continued through April 2022, only to break down when Russian atrocities were reported in Bucha, a town Ukrainian troops had retaken as part of their spring counter-offensive. But the fact is, an agreement was never really close.
The UK’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has taken much flack over reports that he urged Zelensky not to accept the deal. But there was never a realistic chance this deal would be acceptable to Ukraine. A neutral Ukraine with a reduced military capacity would have no way to defend itself against any future aggression.
Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia – led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries. As for joining the EU, it was the Kremlin’s opposition to Kyiv’s engagement with the EU in 2013 which provoked the Euromaidan protests and led to Russia’s initial annexation of Crimea the following year.
What next?
Kyiv signing the Istanbul communique may have quickly stopped the war and the killing. But the Kremlin has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted to adhere to agreements – you only have to look at the way it repeatedly violated the Minsk accords of 2015, which attempted to end hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
Further, a deal that rewards Russian aggression by agreeing to its taking of territory and demanding the neutrality of the victim would undermine global security, and encourage other illegal foreign policy adventurism.
If the Trump administration has the blueprint of a fair peace deal, it’s hiding it well at this point. Instead, European leaders have been put in a position where they must face the prospect of having to fund Ukraine’s continued defense, while coping with a US retreat from its security guarantees for Europe as a whole.
Either that or, as my University of Bath colleague Patrick Bury wrote on X this week, accept some pretty dire consequences.
Europe is facing a crisis that it could have prepared for after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. With Trump back in power, the relationship between the US and Europe appears increasingly fractured. But Europe too is bitterly divided over how to approach this crisis.
Britain and France initially talked up the idea of providing troops as peacekeepers in Ukraine – but Germany adamantly refused to go along with that plan. Both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer have since rethought the idea (although there is a report that the UK prime minister has considered a scheme for a 30,000-strong “monitoring force” away from the ceasefire line).
The Kremlin reacts to signals. While it was clearly preparing for the invasion in late 2021, Joe Biden’s statement that he would not send troops to defend Ukraine showed the limits to US involvement. A message that Europe is prepared to dispatch peacekeepers to Ukraine now would send a strong signal to Putin – and the Trump administration – that Europe is serious.
Stephen Hall is a lecturer (assistant professor) in Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Bath.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
1. Minsk II, sabotaged by the US and Europe.
2. We will never know if the Istanbul negotiations would have led to peace; Boris Johnson put the kybash on that, remember?
3. Now Ukraine is a wreck because of the geopolitical games by people like Biden, Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and all the rest. These people need to be in the dock at Nuremberg-style trials. They are criminals.
Today all the articles represent the desire of the English to do as much harm to Russia as possible. I am surprised by their courage, they are not afraid of a nuclear war at all. I would like to test Poseidon on the English, they have a very convenient location for testing a 100 megaton bomb. I think all the surviving Europeans would also be happy.
As I recall even Merkel said the Minsk accords were to buy time to arm up Ukraine. This is really about NATO expansion. Study some history, and watch Mearsheimer’s “primrose path” warning from 2015 that Ukraine would be wrecked. It was obvious to anyone but a neocon where this was going.
During the Cold War Austrian neutrality was a formula that worked very well to enable the reunification of the country. But demilitarization means *neither* side is allowed to turn it into a battering ram against the other. To argue that Ukraine is any better off, over a million dead later, and 10 million displaced, with many of its natural and industrial resources gone forever, than had it taken the deals offered in 2021 or at Istanbul after the war started in no way fits the evidence.