Friday’s “peace summit” in Anchorage was not about peace. It was about war, specifically how Russia can continue to fight a war Vladimir Putin believes he is now winning, while pretending he wants “peace”. It was about the rehabilitation of a disgraced leader wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It was about an opportunistic rapprochement between two great powers whose heads of state are eager “to do business” with one another. None of this has anything to do with bringing lasting peace to Ukraine.
The meeting in Alaska produced neither a ceasefire nor a credible commitment to a durable peace agreement. It also conspicuously did not include Ukraine, the country which Russia has invaded and occupied twice since 2014. Nor did it include Ukraine’s peaceful democratic neighbours, whose future sovereignty and security depend on whether or not any “deal” Donald Trump makes with Putin will effectively deter Russia from attacking them in the future, a condition that hinges on a long list of unknowns.
This ranges from whether or not the Kremlin will accept European troops in Ukraine as part of a post-peace deal security guarantee, to the credibility of US “Article 5-like protection” of Ukraine against a future Russian attack, to Putin’s insistence on dealing with the “root causes” of the conflict, which conveniently change, depending on his audience.
Common threats, common borders, common interests
One of the most important aspects of any major diplomatic process aiming to end a costly and violent war is often one of the most overlooked: How might any agreement (or lack thereof) resulting from a bilateral summit between major powers affect an occupied and war-torn country’s neighbours? Are their security interests central, or peripheral, to a “peace process” focusing on ending a war in a neighbouring state?
The security interest of Ukraine’s neighbours in the EU and NATO – including member states which were invaded, occupied and (in the cases of Eastern Finland, Eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Moldova) annexed by Soviet troops during the Communist era – was a non-existent topic at the summit. The only discussion of “neighbours” was Putin’s attempt to remind the world that the US and Russia are separated by a mere 4 kilometres in the Bering Strait, a barely concealed attempt to flatter Trump, make him feel like a “friend”, and warm him to his “neighbour’s” bargaining position on war and territorial conquest.
President Trump’s sudden adoption of the Russian position to skip a ceasefire – normally a firm precondition to serious peace talks, not a contested item on a summit wish-list open to bargaining or “changing one’s mind” on the flight back home – and move straight toward a full peace agreement may convince him that the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets is on the horizon. At the same time, Trump’s pivot away from insisting on a ceasefire will incentivise Putin to continue to give the orders to kill more Ukrainians and seize more Ukrainian territory before accepting a “peace agreement” he will almost certainly break, just as the Kremlin did when it made a mockery of the Sarkozy Peace Plan for Georgia in 2008.
At the very least, Trump’s quixotic policy flip aligning the US with Russia puts him at diplomatic odds with both Ukraine and the EU, who insist on a durable ceasefire before peace negotiations can begin. None of this is good news for Ukraine’s regional neighbours, for whom the stakes of any eventual peace agreement are only second to what Ukraine stands to gain or lose. Kremlin TV propaganda mouthpieces making regular nuclear and “genocide” threats against not only Ukraine but also Ukraine’s regional neighbours in NATO, in particular Poland, as well as Germany, France and the UK, puts their security anxiety in bold perspective.
The art of spontaneous multilateralism – will it work?
Trump prefers bilateral negotiations and the perceived bargaining leverage it gives him. This includes maintaining the option, as any rapacious real estate developer would do, to play other actors off one another, including traditional US allies, in the hope of “getting a better deal”.
The Oval Office meeting scheduled for Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was originally supposed to follow Trump’s preferred bilateral model. The last bilateral Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelensky in late February, however, devolved into a shocking political reality TV spectacle of tag-team brow-beating and humiliation of the president of the country holding the line against Russia’s attempt to take back its empire and reestablish its old geopolitical sphere of influence.
The remedy? A spontaneous offer of multilateral support on the part of seven European leaders comprising the “Coalition of the Willing”. The only representative from the militarily vulnerable eastern flank of NATO planning to attend is Finnish President Alexander Stubb; others on the list include the UK prime minister, the president of the EU Commission, the German chancellor, the French president, the Italian prime minister and the secretary general of NATO.
The main collective message will be that appeasement and territorial concessions are not the only path to peace, that any agreement with Russia must be credible and enforceable, that the security interests of Ukraine’s neighbours on NATO’s eastern flank must also be protected, and the transatlantic alliance is inviolable.
Despite some optimism that a unified European front will persuade Trump not to be swayed by Putin into the worst-case scenario of approving a “land-for-peace” swap in return for uncertain security guarantees, which would create the incentive for the Kremlin to defect from any agreement and pursue future cross-border invasions in the hope of causing a split in NATO over the invocation of Article 5, possible disputes may threaten the security interests of both Ukraine and her neighbours.
For example, the EU holds fast to the doctrine that international borders cannot be changed by force. EU leaders are also on the same page as Zelensky on the topic of territorial concessions, which the Ukrainian president says he could not do even if he wanted to, since the Ukrainian constitution prohibits it.
These potential clashes may ultimately doom the meeting if Trump sees territorial concessions as the only path to a “deal” with Putin – and the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff expressed hope that Putin would stop the war and give up certain territories Russia currently occupies in exchange for full control of Donetsk and Lukhansk. Which territories would be given up remains unclear. But what remains virtually certain is that Ukraine will not cede control of the four cities comprising its “fortress belt” in the Donetsk oblast, control over which would position Russia for further attacks into the Ukrainian heartland.
Further conquests in Ukraine would also embolden the Kremlin to threaten Ukraine’s regional neighbours, notably Moldova and the Baltic states, which figure centrally in Putin’s dream of reestablishing the borders of the old Soviet Union, the country that trained him to be a loyal KGB officer, the cultural successor of “historic Russia”, and the geopolitical legatee of the empire his idol Peter the Great founded in 1721.
The Wild East and the ‘5 per cent solution’
The Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, will be effectively representing Ukraine’s neighbours on the eastern flank of NATO at Monday’s meeting at the Oval Office. Stubb is an experienced and effective diplomat and statesman who understands acutely the specific set of interests at stake for the sub-set of countries in Ukraine’s geo-strategic neighbourhood which are especially vulnerable to a Russian military attack.
Stubb will likely remind Trump of the commitment Finland, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states have made to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence (which includes 1.5 per cent on related infrastructure), with a high probability that several regional countries (notably Poland) will ultimately spend considerably more. A reassertion of the US commitment to the defence of the NATO alliance and acceptance of the Article 5 obligation as non-negotiable may be something he receives before he leaves the White House.
Whether or not members of the “Coalition of the Willing” are able on Monday to convince Trump to reject territorial concessions in return for peace may ultimately have the knock-on effect of either initiating, or blocking, a geopolitical process where two ambitious leaders resolve to carve out their respective spheres of influence in a series of mini-Yalta summits, the first of which began on Friday in Alaska. If the “Coalition of the Willing” succeeds, we can expect the preservation of at least some critical aspects of the liberal international security order of the past eight decades.
If they do not, it remains to be seen if a “peace deal”, even if rooted in territorial concessions, will lead to President Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But it will very likely lead to multiple public nominations for the Nobel Appeasement Prize.