National Interest

by Andreas Umland

    Ultimately, there can be no peace in Ukraine without credible Western security guarantees to Kyiv’s sovereignty.

    President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 with the promise of ending the Russia-Ukraine War within 24 hours. Initially, the new administration spent months sending friendly signals to Moscow. However, by mid-July, Trump adopted a tougher stance. He approved the sale of American weapons to Ukraine and repeatedly threatened secondary sanctions against Russia’s trading partners. The initial 50-day deadline for Russia to back down, set for late July 2025, was reduced to 10 days.

    A few days later, however, the administration signaled that the anticipated trade showdown between the two superpowers and their partners would not occur. Instead, the White House announced a meeting between Trump and Putin scheduled for August 15 in Alaska. According to reports, preliminary negotiations between American and Russian negotiators have revealed signs of a potential agreement on the long-awaited truce.

    Washington’s latest flip-flopping vis-à-vis Moscow is merely a new expression of the incoherence of the administration’s Russia policy. In a strange turn of events, President Trump’s economic and military threats against Russia were followed shortly thereafter by equally vocal attempts to appease Putin. Now, the idea is that the two superpowers will decide the fate of Ukraine at a historic US-Russia summit.

    However, it is doubtful that the new round of talks will yield any politically significant and lasting results. As with other issues, Russia has been staging negotiation theatrics on the Ukraine issue since 2014. These are intended to impress and beguile both its own population and the international community. In hundreds of talks, dozens of summit meetings and numerous signed documents, Russia has repeatedly declared its desire for peace in Ukraine over the years. However, the intense bilateral and multilateral negotiations that took place before and after February 2022 had little impact on preventing and then changing the course of the war.

    On the contrary, the West’s repeated allowances, Ukraine’s forced concessions, limited arms deliveries to Kyiv and an indecisive sanctions policy encouraged Moscow to embark on new adventures. The occupation of Crimea in February 2014 was followed by its official annexation to Russia a month later. Shortly thereafter, the Donbas War—a covert Russian assault, rather than a Ukrainian civil war—began in April. In July 2014, Russia shot down a Malaysian passenger plane carrying over 200 EU citizens with impunity. In mid-August 2014, the invasion of eastern Ukraine began with the first large-scale regular troop deployments. After several smaller waves of escalation, the full-scale invasion of mainland Ukraine finally began in February 2022. Since then, Russia’s warfare and occupation policy in Ukraine has become more terroristic and genocidal with each passing month.

    Even after 11 years of war, the United States—like other countries—has learned little from the fruitlessness of its intense diplomatic negotiations with Russia. The second Trump administration not only denies, for domestic reasons, the sobering experiences of the Obama and Biden administrations with the Kremlin but also overlooks the inconclusiveness of the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 regarding the Donbas War.

    In the upcoming negotiations, Putin will demand not only territorial concessions but also other restrictions on Ukraine’s sovereignty, even though or because he knows that no Ukrainian president can meet such maximalist conditions. A key question will be the extent to which Trump embraces Putin’s interpretation of the sources, nature and significance of Russia’s war of aggression. Moscow’s goal in the upcoming talks will be less of a lasting solution to the conflict than an improvement in Russia’s international position.

    By demanding concessions in contradiction to international law, Putin will seek to undermine the global order further, divide the Western alliance, weaken the West’s partnership with Ukraine, and, as far as possible, sow internal discord in Ukraine. Moscow will try to lure Washington and other Western capitals with sham concessions and promises of de-escalation. As it has done repeatedly since February 2014, the Kremlin will try to pass the blame to Ukraine for the collapse of negotiations it has already designed to fail.

    A temporary truce can be a part of this strategy if Moscow defines a period of ceasefire as being in Russia’s current diplomatic, military, economic and geostrategic interests. The Kremlin could use compromises and bombing pauses to undermine the unity and determination that have grown in Europe since 2025 regarding aid for Ukraine and to deepen the wedge that already exists between the United States and other NATO partners.

    A limited ceasefire would also offer an opportunity to regroup the Russian attack troops, consolidate the occupation regime in the annexed Ukrainian territories and call into question the West’s sanctions policy. Between 2014 and 2021, several periods of relative calm occurred in Donbas. However, these comparatively peaceful periods neither ended nor froze the armed conflict but instead paved the way for its escalation into a war of expansion and annihilation.

    Another option that may be in Russia’s current interest would be a limited long-range weapons ceasefire, with both sides refraining from missile and drone attacks beyond the front line. Over the past three and a half years, Russia has attacked many of Ukraine’s key infrastructure targets with varying degrees of success. However, Ukraine has adapted to these attacks over time and, for example, created a relatively resilient energy infrastructure.

    There have been major Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets in recent months, including in Kyiv. Russia’s massive attacks have often been able to overcome Ukraine’s air defenses, creating dramatic images of explosions in the Ukrainian capital, among other places. However, the military significance of the increased strikes on Ukrainian residential buildings, hospitals, cultural institutions and department stores remains low.

    In contrast, Ukraine has been repeatedly successful in recent months with long-range drone attacks on Russian military, industrial and infrastructure targets. Ukraine has managed to hit military bases, fuel depots, airports, refineries and other defense-related facilities in Russia’s deep hinterland. The dramatic detonations and fires in Russian industrial plants not only have increasing material significance for the Russian economy and army, but also a psychological effect on the Russian population and the global public. In the long-range drone war, Ukraine can use state-of-the-art technology to compensate for the numerical inferiority of its troops, with particularly high effect. Against this backdrop, it cannot be ruled out that Putin now wants to interrupt or even end this part of the war.

    The military partnership and alliance policy of the West toward Ukraine remains the linchpin of future negotiations. As long as there are no credible security guarantees for Ukraine, a ceasefire would only serve to allow both sides to regroup their military forces and economic resources, as well as to prepare their administrations and populations for the next round of escalation.

    Beyond the practical issue of Ukraine’s future security, there is the larger question of the United States’ and Eastern Europe’s future role in world politics. Washington and Moscow seemingly plan to negotiate the sovereignty and integrity of a European state in the absence of Ukrainian and European representatives. That is despite the fact that the United States provided “security assurances” and Russia even “security guarantees” to Ukraine in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

    Despite this agreement from three decades ago, the two nuclear-weapon states and permanent United Nations Security Council members now apparently plan to strike a deal that would make Ukraine a failed rump state. Yet, Ukraine is a fully recognized country, as well as a co-founder (as a Soviet republic) of the UN, a non-nuclear signatory to the NPT, a member of the Council of Europe and a participant in the OSCE. If not only Russia but also the United States signals disrespect for Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty, the world will move closer to the global disorder that prevailed before 1945.