Peace in Ukraine remains as distant as ever

As the year draws to an end, and the anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House approaches, the war in Ukraine still rages on. For all his grandiose campaign-trail statements of having “the war settled in one day”, the likelihood of any kind of peace agreement by the end of Trump’s first year back in office is vanishingly slim.

It’s hard to imagine that less than two months ago, Trump slapped sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two largest oil companies, as “a result of Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process”, and was close to giving the go-ahead to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.

Since then, the tide has turned decisively against Ukraine and its embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Battered by an ongoing corruption scandal at home, which at the end of November prompted the resignation of his widely detested chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, Zelensky also finds himself once again out of favour with the deeply mercurial Trump. 

The American 28-point peace plan that hit the headlines in late November turned out to be a version of a Russian proposal that had been circulating under the radar for months, and demanded nothing less than Ukraine’s capitulation. Subsequent rounds of diplomacy have revised the proposals and Trump is clearly getting frustrated that Zelensky will not (indeed cannot, according to Ukraine’s constitution) give up land that too many Ukrainians have given their lives to defend. 

It has been more than a decade since Russia first attempted to annex the Donbas and a Russian victory on the battlefield remains firmly out of the question. The Economist recently calculated that at the current rate, it would take until June 2030 for Russia to fully occupy the four regions it claims to have annexed, and more than 100 years to capture the whole of Ukraine. Even though its pace of gains on the battlefield accelerated in recent weeks, the front lines have moved very little in the last three years, and no large city has changed hands.

Moscow now claims to have finally taken Pokrovsk, nearly 18 months after the battle for the key frontline city in Donetsk region began. But Ukrainian soldiers retain a toehold in the north of the once strategic city and have not given it up yet. The battle for Pokrovsk alone has cost Russia around 100,000 casualties, while the number of Russians killed or wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 is approaching a staggering 1.2 million.

But Putin cares nothing for the lives of his people. What Trump still fails to realise is that the Russian dictator has no intention of ending the war unless his maximalist demands are met: Russian control of the entire Donbas region, a ban on Ukraine ever joining Nato, and Ukraine’s “denazification” which, broadly, is Kremlin-speak for returning Kyiv to Moscow’s sphere of influence. For Putin, anything less would mean backing down, and if there’s one thing the last quarter of a century in Russia has taught us, it’s that Putin doesn’t back down. Ever. 

The second thing that history has taught us is that Putin is a wily old fox and knows just how to play the people he wants to influence. Enter Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff - a fellow New York real-estate developer, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. They are both clearly looking at Russia through dollar-tinted spectacles, urging any kind of peace deal that will enable them to get their grubby paws on a share of Russia’s energy and mineral wealth. 

Renowned for being swayed by the last person he held a conversation with, Trump seems to be under Witkoff’s spell. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that at a meeting held ostensibly to talk about Ukraine, Witkoff and Kushner discussed business deals between the US and Russia - including a joint mission to Mars involving Elon Musk’s SpaceX - with Putin’s chief negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, the head of one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds.

Leaked phone calls reported by Bloomberg in late November revealed that Witkoff was coaching Dmitriev and another Putin aide, Yuri Ushakov, in how best to persuade Trump to view things from Russia’s perspective. As the historian Timothy Snyder posted on X, “Witkoff is not buying the Russian narrative, he is selling it”

We all know that Trump loves a deal. With his advisors promoting Russia as a land of opportunity for American investors, and Kremlin-linked businessmen offering potential energy and rare-earth minerals deals to US companies - some with links to Trump’s family, the Ukraine peace process is turning decidedly sordid.


View this article at https://www.lisa-cooper.com/blog 

Photo by Tong Su on Unsplash