While President Donald Trump’s claim to have ended eight wars across the globe may be a bit of an exaggeration, he has certainly made the effort and undoubtedly had a significant impact in all of those cases. You can read about each of the eight here, and decide for yourself how much credit he deserves.
The one he keeps saying was the one he thought would be easiest – Russia and Ukraine – has proven to be the hardest. There are reasons why that is the case.
Russia plans to keep the parts of Ukraine, namely the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, and Crimea, that they currently control. Many believe that Russia views Ukraine as an appetizer as it seeks to restore as much of the Soviet empire as it previously controlled, often citing Hitler and the Sudetenland as the very definition of appeasement of the sort that the West might be falling into again.
But has the failure of Russia to decisively win this war against Ukraine shown that in fact they are a bit of a paper tiger, other than their nuclear arsenal?
Ukraine says that it’s not prepared to cede any of that land to Russia. But it appears that maybe they are, if they are brought into NATO, or are at least given the Article 5-like security guarantees that are currently offered to them by Trump’s negotiators as a limited-time offer, meaning if Russia attacks them again, then the U.S. and NATO are all-in, even if that means war against Russia.
Trump clearly wants to end the war, both because he truly wants to see the slaughter and destruction end, and he wants to once again show that peace through strength combined with the art of the deal can lead to peace and prosperity for long suffering countries and people. Ukraine and the U.S. also signed a minerals deal last April that is not contingent on a peace deal, but that would certainly jumpstart the mining. And there is the matter of some $250 billion of frozen Russian assets being held in the West, since the war began.
Trump is unhappy that some European countries continue buying Russia’s oil, and thus are helping to finance Russia’s war against Ukraine. And Trump’s MAGA base, is absolutely opposed to U.S. security guarantees. What if such a deal is made, and Russia does one of those “minor incursions” that Joe Biden seemed to be willing to accept, just one month before Russia took him up on it?
The money flow from the U.S. to Ukraine has largely stopped at somewhere around $200 billion between February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and now. The aid has come in the form of security assistance, economic aid for governance and development, humanitarian aid, and operations. Nearly 70% is from the Department of Defense, now known as the Department of War, and nearly a quarter has come from the State Department and USAID.
In the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by the Senate and sent to the White House on Wednesday, the total authorized for Ukraine is $400 million over the next two years.
Less than two months into this war, I noted that Europe had provided less than $5 billion in aid to Ukraine, while having purchased $30 billion worth of oil from Russia, while claiming to be fully united in support of Ukraine. By the end of just the first year of the war, the European Union had paid more than $160 billion to Russia for fossil fuels.
In 1994, Ukraine, at the time possessing the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, gave up its nukes as part of the Budapest Memorandum, believing it was in exchange for similar security guarantees. Ukraine had inherited its nukes from the then-recently collapsed Soviet Union and agreed at the time to transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia for dismantlement. The U.S., the UK and the Russian Federation pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders, and to refrain from the use or threat of military force.
Russia sees itself as winning this war, so why would they be expected to agree to NATO type guarantees? While the 1994 agreement is generally described as having been “political assurances” rather than a binding mutual defense treaty, its ineffectiveness was revealed with Russia’s taking of Crimea in 2014 with no military pushback.
As The Hill described it, “Russia illegally held an election and annexed the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine in 2014. In response, the U.S. and European allies led a sanctions campaign which fell far short of its goals in weakening Russia and preventing further action in Ukraine.”
Former President Barack Obama later claimed that “Part of what happened was, both myself and also [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, who I give enormous credit for, had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbas and through the rest of Ukraine.”
Where things appear to stand today is that the Trump administration wants to see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accept the current battle lines as a territorial compromise, which basically means giving up most of the Donbas region, while also giving up on its ambitions to become part of NATO. This would be in exchange for security guarantees of some sort, and the creation of a demilitarized zone.
Russia says it wants a comprehensive peace deal as opposed to a ceasefire that would give Ukraine the opportunity to regroup. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on Wednesday that they are prepared to use “military means” to achieve their goals if these diplomatic efforts fail, and that Russia’s initial goal of what it calls “liberation of its historical lands,” is still its goal.
The question for those who want to see the war continue until Ukraine achieves its goals of driving Russia out of Crimea and the Donbas, is whether that is at all realistic.
The bottom line is that it’s hard to see how the goals of the three parties, not to mention Europe’s role in any final or interim agreement, can be reconciled. We’ll see if this war can be stopped before it spreads or just continues to destroy so many lives and cities. Pray for peace as winter blankets these two war-torn countries.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
