The way forward for Ukraine after the Putin summit

Even for those of us who favor flexible diplomacy, Friday’s made-for-TV encounter between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin in Alaska was a bit much. The pageantry of the reception, while brief and restrained in some ways, was still tough to watch when one of the participants was an indicted war criminal and mass murderer.

I do not recall quite as much pomp and circumstance when Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term. That meeting was opposed by much, if not most, of the foreign policy establishment; I supported it as preferable to war preparations (which had previously been underway) and worth a try. The three meetings Trump had with Kim in 2018 and 2019 ultimately went nowhere, though at least further movement toward war was halted—and North Korea has not tested a nuclear weapon since, despite the fact that it has built a lot more nuclear weapons and also tested a lot more long-range missiles. The North Korean case is instructive, I believe, because it serves to remind us that there are not necessarily any huge costs to diplomacy with unpalatable leaders, but there are no guaranteed benefits, either, and that we should never lose sight of our core goals in such summits.

The obstacles to peace between Russia and Ukraine are daunting, and no one should expect major progress anytime soon. The two sides have completely different views on whether “land swaps” are feasible, and if so, on what terms. The ways in which Europe and perhaps the United States and Canada could provide security reinforcers to Ukraine are completely undeveloped at present (though Lise Howard and I have tried to suggest alternative security architectures that would help do so, short of NATO membership for Ukraine). The sequencing of when and how various sanctions on Russia would be lifted as part of a deal has not been discussed.

To take another example from the history of Korea, the last time that the United States was involved in diplomacy to end a war that it was part of itself—a war that it realized it could not likely win but also could not afford to lose—was in Korea in the early 1950s. By mid-1951, the front line was nearly frozen, yet it took two years to negotiate peace, with issues over the return of prisoners of war proving to be the main obstacle, until a newly inaugurated President Dwight Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea if a deal were not soon struck.

I hope it will not take two more years to negotiate peace in Ukraine. But it could, and we need a policy that settles in for the long haul—meaning tougher economic pressure on Russia very soon. It is fine for Trump to give Putin a short reprieve on the implementation of tougher sanctions to improve the atmosphere for talks, but it should only be a short one, since everyone knows that Putin is the one who started this war, and Putin is the one who wants it to continue. If Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, Putin wants to add his name to the pantheon of Russian leaders, most of all Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who built the modern Russian empire toward the beginning and end of the 18th century. The United States also needs to prepare to sanction many more international ships illicitly carrying Russian oil, pass another congressional aid package for Ukraine (even if smaller than last year’s), and encourage European allies to begin seizing $10 billion a month in frozen Russian assets and transfer those assets to Ukraine. The West and Ukraine need to flip the calculus about whose side time is on.

Once diplomacy does really get going, hopefully within weeks or months at most, Americans and Europeans alike need to psychologically prepare themselves for a deal that would be the least-bad solution to this war rather than a good outcome. There will be no World War II-style unconditional surrender by the other side; there will likely be no World War I-style outcome with the previous adversaries undergoing regime change from within. We will have to hold our noses and help support a deal with a man in the Kremlin whom we don’t like and cannot trust. And however extraordinarily painful it will be for Ukrainians, we will likely have to ask them to agree to an arrangement that probably leaves Russia in de facto control of around one-fifth of their territory—as long as we can all figure out a way to ensure that the war will not start again sometime down the road. That would hardly be a victory in the sense that Americans like to pursue, historically. But it could produce a sovereign, secure Ukraine with 80% of its prewar land and people and closer links to the West (even if without NATO membership) than ever before. That would be a far preferable outcome to either an outright defeat or a “forever war” that drags the country down for years to come.