Ukrainian negotiators appear to have secured some changes to the 28-point peace plan from the United States, but Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskiy still have to discuss the most sensitive issues. If those talks go badly and Trump withdraws support from Ukraine, what can Kyiv’s European allies do?
Istanbul for slow learners?
After the initial shock of the 28-point US peace plan last week, European capitals recovered quickly enough to present their counterproposal by the time American and Ukrainian negotiators met in Geneva at the weekend. Now Kyiv has persuaded Washington to reduce the plan to 19 points, stripping out for now some elements with an international dimension that are outside Ukraine’s jurisdiction.
Trump has abandoned his Thanksgiving deadline for Ukraine to accept the plan and it could be next week before he meets Zelenskiy to discuss the most contentious issues. Chief among these are the demand that Ukraine cedes territory that Russia has failed to capture by force, and the nature of the US security guarantee to deter further Russian aggression.
The Europeans agree that Ukraine should not seek to regain territory it has lost in the war but they call for territorial negotiations to start from the current line of contact. They want the security guarantee to mirror Nato’s Article 5 commitment but they agree that Nato should not permanently station troops under its command in Ukraine in peacetime.
READ MORE
The US and Europe also agree on a progressive lifting of sanctions and that Russia could return to the Group of Eight (G8), but the two sides are at odds over the future of Russian financial assets frozen in Europe. The EU has been working on a plan to use these as collateral for loans that would fund weapons purchases for Ukraine, hoping that the assets themselves would be used in future for Russian war reparations.
The US wants to unfreeze the assets and to use $100 billion to fund reconstruction projects in Ukraine, with Washington taking half of the profits. In a further humiliation, Europe would be obliged to contribute a further $100 billion to the fund out of its own resources.
Ukraine’s war effort depends not only on American weapons (paid for by the Europeans) but on US intelligence that warns about incoming Russian attacks. Trump has already suspended intelligence sharing once to put pressure on Ukraine and he could do so again, perhaps permanently.
Ukraine’s European allies could not compensate for that loss and the EU would struggle to find unanimous support for seizing Russian assets to fund an escalation of support for Ukraine. European economic sanctions on Russia would also lose much of their bite if the US lifts its sanctions.
This means that although Ukraine and its European allies can influence Trump, particularly if Vladimir Putin is intransigent, they will probably have to accept some version of his peace plan. If this happens, the tragic irony will be that Ukraine and Russia came close to a peace agreement in April 2022, less than two months after the full-scale invasion, that was in many respects more favourable to Kyiv.
A draft communique from the Istanbul talks on April 15th, 2022, offered a more robust security guarantee, including the imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the event of renewed Russian aggression. It did not involve sweeping territorial concessions on Ukraine’s part and treated most territorial issues as unresolved with no western recognition of Russian control of occupied areas.
Under the 2022 plan, Ukraine would have become a neutral state and would renounce Nato membership but would be allowed to join the EU, just like under the new plan. Both plans reaffirm Ukraine’s non-nuclear status and a full judicial amnesty for war crimes.
An estimated 1.4 million people (one million Russians and 400,000 Ukrainians) have died since the start of the current conflict, almost all of them since the Istanbul talks in April 2022.
Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com
