Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine cover art

Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine

Transatlantic unity at the White House disguises lack of progress towards just peace for Ukraine

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 At a high-stakes meeting in the White House on August 18, the US president, Donald Trump, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, hammered out the broad contours of a potential peace agreement with Russia. Their encounter was in marked contrast to their last joint press conference in Washington back in February which ended with Zelensky’s humiliation by Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance.The outcomes of the American and Ukrainian presidential get-together, and the subsequent, expanded meeting with leaders of the European coalition of the willing, was also a much more professional affair than Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on August 15. What’s more, the results of the meetings in the White House, while not perfect, are a much better response to the reality in which Ukrainians have lived for the past more than three-and-a-half years than what transpired during and after the brief press conference in Alaska.This relatively positive outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Over the weekend, Trump put out a statement on his Truth Social platform that “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately” — provided that he would accept Ukraine’s loss of Crimea to Russia and forego his country’s future Nato membership. This, and similar ideas of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine, were roundly rejected by Zelensky. Importantly, Kyiv’s position was fully backed by Ukraine’s European allies, with leaders of the coalition of the willing issuing a joint statement on August 16 to the effect that any territorial concessions were Ukraine’s to make or refuse.On Nato membership, the statement was more equivocal. European leaders asserted that Russia should not be allowed to have a veto on Ukraine’s choices. But with Nato membership often used as a shorthand for credible security guarantees for Ukraine as part of any future peace agreement, the reiteration of the commitment that the coalition of the willing as “ready to play an active role” opened up a pathway to Trump offering “Article 5-like protections” for Ukraine against future Russian aggression and promising “a lot of help when it comes to security”. A possibly emerging deal – some territorial concessions by Ukraine in exchange for peace and joint US and European security guarantees – became more certain during the televised meeting between Trump and his visitors before their closed-door discussions. In different ways, each of the European guests acknowledged the progress that Trump had made towards a settlement and they all emphasised the importance of a joint approach to Russia to make sure that any agreement would bring a just and lasting peace.As an indication that his guests were unwilling to simply accept whatever deal he had brought back with him from his meeting with Putin in Alaska, the US president then interrupted the discussions in the White House to call the Russian president. By then, signals from Russia were far from promising, with Moscow rejecting any Nato troop deployments to Ukraine and singling out Britain as allegedly seeking to undermine the US-Russia peace effort.When the meeting concluded and the different leaders offered their interpretations of what had been agreed two things became clear. First, the Ukrainian side had not folded under pressure from the US, and European leaders, while going out of their way to flatter Trump, held their ground as well. Importantly, Trump had not walked away from the process either but appeared to want to remain engaged.Second, Russia had not given any ground. According to remarks by Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, posted on the Kremlin’s official website, Russia would consider “the possibility of raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian parties”. This statement falls short of, but does not rule out, the possibility of the Zelensky-Putin summit, which Trump announced as a major success after the discussions in the White House yesterday.Such a meeting was seen as the next logical step towards peace by all the participants of the White House meeting and would be followed, according to Trump, by what he called “a Trilat” of the Ukrainian, Russian and American presidents. The lack of clear confirmation by Russia that such meetings would indeed happen raises more doubts about the Kremlin’s sincerity.But the fact that a peace process – if it can be called that – remains somewhat intact is a far cry from an actual peace agreement. Little if anything was said in the aftermath of the White House meeting on territorial issues. Pressure on Russia only came up briefly in comments by European leaders, whose ambitions to become formally involved in actual peace negotiations remain a pipe dream for the time being. And despite the initial optimism about security guarantees, no firm commitments were made, with Zelensky only noting “the important signal...
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