First the good news. The US is talking to Russia. Then the bad. Vladimir Putin has been phoned not by the current US president, but by a known admirer and sceptic of the US’s support for Ukraine, the president-elect, Donald Trump (the Kremlin has since denied the call took place). Could these two facts offer a path to peace?
Two years ago, Putin made a terrible mistake. He thought he could invade Ukraine and topple its leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He failed utterly. Ukraine’s forces pushed him back to the supposedly pro-Russian territory of his 2014 invasion. At talks in Istanbul months after this failure, Putin’s representatives might have settled for a ceasefire and the acceptance of some western security guarantee for Kyiv. The talks broke down with the west encouraging Ukraine to fight on. In what amounted to a proxy war on Moscow, the west attacked Russia and its people with the severest sanctions ever seen, while donating to Ukraine huge sums of aid.
Since then the west’s strategy has lost contact with reality. The plazas of Kyiv have become theatres for western politicians to strut their machismo, demand total victory and scuttle for home. Ukraine’s cities have been devastated, while somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 young Ukrainian service personnel have died and more than 6 million of its citizens have emigrated.
Western sanctions have failed completely to alter Russian policy. They have cemented a new alliance of autocracies. Their impact on western inflation, especially energy prices, has merely undermined western governments, helping topple those in Britain, Germany and now the US since the war began. As for the west’s use of Ukraine as a proxy in a “war of deterrence” against Russia, success in such wars is provable only with the hindsight of history.
Ending the Ukraine war is a choice that lies with the US, without whose support Ukraine collapses. But the end must come with negotiation. This has to mean going back to the failed 2014 Minsk and 2022 Istanbul agreements. There is no realistic alternative. That means a border drawn somewhere between “Russian” Ukraine and Kyiv’s Ukraine. Kyiv cannot recover Crimea. Russia must accept some external guarantee of Ukraine’s future security. Kyiv must accept that this stops short of Nato membership, while Russia must accept that Ukraine will develop some deal with the EU.
The BBC’s Moscow correspondent reported on Monday that Putin is on a high after last month’s Brics summit in Kazan, attended by 36 states not aligned with the west. In view of Trump’s call, the Russian leader might now be tempted to hold off from negotiations until his friend is in the White House.
That is a risk he should not take. Trump in office will be deluged with official and allied pressure to hang tough and stay fighting. Putin currently has Ukraine on the back foot and Nato in an uncertain mood. Joe Biden must be eager to end at least one of his wars before he goes. It might be possible to get a deal done before the chaos and uncertainty of the second Trump era begins.
The US should grab this moment and give Russia the way out it needs. Putin could dress up failure as pragmatism. Who knows, he could then welcome Trump to Moscow.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 13 November 2024 to add that the Kremlin denied the call took place between Putin and president-elect Trump.
