Last week’s calamitous meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky made clear the disdain Trump has for Zelensky, and Trump’s determination to end the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Zelensky rushed back across the Atlantic, where he met with European leaders in the hopes of shoring up their support. Most European countries have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to Zelensky and promised increased aid—with Britain and France suggesting that they could send peacekeeping troops to enforce a potential deal—but it remains uncertain whether Ukraine will have sufficient leverage without American backing. On Monday, the White House announced the suspension of all military aid to Ukraine until Trump determines that Zelensky is “ready for peace.” What should Ukraine and its allies be trying to accomplish now, and what realistically can keep the country secure going forward?
I recently spoke by phone with Angela Stent, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations who has served on the policy-planning staff in the State Department. She is also a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution whose most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Putin may not even want a relatively favorable peace deal, whether the Biden Administration should have leaned harder on Zelensky before Trump’s return, and whether European security guarantees matter without American support.
What do you think the Ukrainians should be trying to get right now from their allies? What is the most important thing that they need?
What they need is, first of all, an agreement that if they do have to make at least temporary territorial concessions, there will be robust security guarantees to back up any ceasefire. If there are to be negotiations, there has to be credible deterrence. Otherwise, there is absolutely no indication that Russia won’t wait and regroup and pursue the same goals later on—in other words, subjugating Ukraine, carrying out regime change, and making sure that Ukraine remains essentially in the Russian sphere of influence.
Britain and France said that they would potentially send peacekeeping troops. Even if those countries have nothing like the military of the United States, they still have nuclear weapons. Is that a sufficient deterrent?
I think it would be very difficult for that to work if you didn’t at least have the backing of American airpower and explicit American support. We also have to remember that Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, said again recently that Russia will not accept any European peacekeeping troops, meaning any country that’s a member of NATO, in Ukraine. Now, is that negotiable? Who knows? But, yes, let’s say the British and the French were there. Without really robust U.S. backing, I’m not sure how much that would deter Russia, particularly if we’re in a situation where NATO’s Article 5 is maybe not credible anymore. [Article 5 states that NATO countries will defend fellow-members who are attacked.]
Why is U.S. backing necessary? Is it because American military power would be required to successfully fend off Russian incursions or just because the knowledge of American backing would be enough to deter Russia from acting in the first place?
Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, said, essentially, We do have our own power. But I think the military backup is really tied to deterrence. In other words, the knowledge that the United States is willing to back up the Europeans would be a deterrent to the Russians.
The other crucial issue is whether Ukraine can get back territory that was taken from it by Russia. Is that a lost cause at this point?
I think everyone acknowledges, and I think privately Ukrainians understand, that at the moment, given the military situation, it’s very hard to see Ukraine taking back the territory that Russia has occupied since February, 2022. That doesn’t mean that they would be willing to acknowledge that this territory is gone forever. But I think even at the end of the Biden Administration, and even if Kamala Harris had won, there was an understanding that any kind of deal would have to involve at least the temporary recognition of the loss of some of these territories. Now, the Russians, of course, are saying that Ukraine would have to accept the loss of four regions—which Russia formally annexed in September of 2022—entirely. But Russia doesn’t control any of those four annexed regions entirely. So one of the sticking points could be that Ukraine would still want to claim as its territory areas in these four regions that Russia doesn’t control. But Ukrainians and their allies will have to recognize that they’re not going to regain the territory they had in February, 2022, let alone what they had in 1992, after Ukraine became independent, because that included Crimea, which they lost in 2014 along with parts of the Donbas. I think they recognize that probably that would be the solution at the moment. But, again, it only works if you have something to deter the Russians from going further.
Is your reading of the current military situation that Ukraine in fact should want some sort of peace deal sooner rather than later because of the concern, especially without American backing, that its battlefield prospects are only going to get worse?
Yeah. The Russians have been very slowly taking more territory back. They’ve been doing it incrementally, and they’ve incurred huge losses, but they are still taking territory. Both countries have a mobilization problem, but the Ukrainian mobilization is more difficult because they don’t have North Korean soldiers coming and fighting for them. [North Korea has reportedly sent more than ten thousand troops to aid Russia in the conflict.] So, you know, they are having trouble mobilizing people. Their military future looks very challenging—particularly if U.S. military aid dries up, and we don’t know now how much intelligence sharing there’s going to be between U.S. agencies and Ukrainians, either. We don’t know whether Elon Musk will continue to allow the Ukrainians to use Starlink. So there are all kinds of uncertainties there that I think would point to Ukraine understanding that it probably does have to come to some agreement, which Zelensky has said it would, but under the right circumstances.
I read an interview with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, a couple of months ago, and he was asked whether the United States should have pushed Ukraine toward a peace deal earlier in the war. And his answer was that Ukraine is a sovereign, democratic country, and the United States had no business pushing them to agree to a deal that would require them to give up their sovereign territory. I have a lot of sympathy for that perspective as a kind of moral outlook on how the United States should go about its business in the world. Let’s put aside the question of whether it’s normally so generous with other countries and respectful of their sovereignty. If you start from the premise that there was a fifty-per-cent chance that Donald Trump was going to come into office again, and something like what we are seeing now was going to play out, do you think the Biden Administration erred?
If you go back to the first peace agreements that were discussed shortly after the war broke out, in March and April of 2022, there are a number of reasons why they fell apart, and a major one was the discovery of all of these Russian atrocities outside Kyiv, in Bucha and in other places. I think the aftertaste of all that maybe was one reason that inhibited Biden from pushing harder. But even in those negotiations, the Ukrainians felt that the Russians were not being serious and hadn’t sent high-level people.
I guess the question is, if the Biden Administration had tried to push the Ukrainians toward peace earlier, were the Russians really interested in this? The other thing is that in 2022, and at least for part of 2023, it did look like the Ukrainians were really doing much better militarily and that they were really pushing the Russians back. After that, the Biden Administration’s policy, obviously, as stated, was, you know, “It’s up to them. We’ll support them.” But the issue was that we never supplied them with enough weapons quickly enough to have enabled them to have done better militarily.
