Phone a friend

Putin, a dictator responsible for unleashing the largest war in Europe since 1945, has now been rewarded for doing so with a phone call from the leader of the free world, despite the fact that ballistic missiles continue to rain down on Ukrainian cities and bloody battles rage unabated in eastern Ukraine and the Russian military loses 1,000 servicemen a day. 

According to Trump, Putin is now seeking peace, despite the fact that the Russian dictator hasn’t made a single concession as a goodwill gesture to show his genuine interest in resolving the war. Any Putin-Trump peace deal likely to be brokered may result in peace for Trump and Putin, but it will not result in peace for Ukraine.

Trump’s message was clear. If you are sufficiently forceful and consistent in your desire to commit war crimes and redraw the world map, then your perseverance will ultimately be rewarded, and you’ll be granted a direct dialogue with the US, while your victims will be shut out and ignored, alongside Washington’s traditional allies. Other dictatorships around the world, principally China, which will have been monitoring the situation closely, will now feel far more at ease pressing ahead with their own neo-imperialist plans.

While detailed proposals being made in any peace negotiations have not been forthcoming, the strategy is clear. Ukraine will not receive clear security guarantees and, most importantly, will not be granted NATO membership. The great powers see no need for somebody representing Ukraine to be present as they begin carving up the country, ultimately laying the groundwork for a new world order, something that has long been Putin’s ultimate objective. For the first time in recent history, not only has the US neglected its moral obligations to an ally such as Ukraine, it has signalled its readiness to abandon the rest of Europe, leaving it to square off against Russian aggression on its own.

Putin’s accurate reading of Trump’s indifference to human rights abuses and his prioritising of personal connections between cynical businessmen over moral qualms is now paying off. Those who lost their homes or loved ones in the war, as well as anybody who fought to defend Ukraine’s right to exist for three years, will have inevitably hoped that when peace came, it would look very different. Likewise, as staunch supporters of the post-war consensus who had dared to hope that the use of brute force, the annexation of territory, and mass deportations were a thing of the past, Europeans also dared to hope for an honourable peace.

Yet history has proven those who say that a bad peace is better than a just war to be correct again and again. If the Trump administration succeeds in bringing peace to Europe for even a few years, it would enable Ukraine to preserve its independence and to reinforce itself against any future Russian aggression with the support of the European Union, where there is a broad political consensus on the urgent need for a radical Europe-wide increase in European defence spending.

However, those who believe that the fallout from any Trump-Putin peace deal could be felt worldwide are also likely to be correct. 

Instead of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, we are at present drifting towards a 21st century Yalta Conference where instead of being held to account for their crimes, autocrats will be invited to carve up Europe as they see fit. As such, Europe must act to guarantee Ukrainian independence in general, and its political stability in particular, and do so independently of its erstwhile US “ally”, which now effectively shares the Kremlin’s imperialist worldview.

Of course, once the initial euphoria generated by the phone call dies down — and there’s only so long Trump and Putin can wax lyrical about their two countries’ shared World War II histories — and peace negotiations finally get underway in earnest, they will inevitably hit a stumbling block, as even this US administration is unlikely to hand the Kremlin everything it wants on a plate. 

Here again, there’s precedent: while champagne corks popped in the Kremlin when Trump was first elected in 2016, the jubilation was ultimately short lived as the Trump administration eventually imposed more sanctions on Russia than the Democrats had.

However, Trump’s willingness to totally bypass his European allies by beginning negotiations with Moscow without preconditions, combined with the revolutionary atmosphere in the US itself, may be taken by Putin to be a sign that he can get whatever he wants: from swallowing up four annexed Ukrainian regions in addition to Crimea to a militarily hobbled Ukraine at risk of being engulfed in domestic political instability, at which point Russia may swoop in and swallow the country whole before turning its attention to the remaining European targets of its revanchist fantasies.

That the next major meeting of world leaders is due to take place at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference is an irony lost on nobody, ominously mirroring as it does the ignominious and ultimately futile attempts to appease Hitler made in 1938. The very idea that a US president could decide the fate of Europe in cahoots with a Russian dictator without Europe’s involvement risks putting the world back on a path to world war.