January 9, 2025
Ever since Donald Trump’s November 2024 election victory, speculation has been mounting over a potential peace deal to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With Russian forces currently enjoying the battlefield initiative and amid doubts over continued US support for Kyiv, many observers believe Ukraine may have little choice but to accept highly unfavorable peace terms dictated by the Kremlin. Russia’s conditions would likely include the loss of territory along with wholesale disarmament and the imposition of permanent neutral status.
The implications of such a shameful peace for Ukrainian statehood would be catastrophic. Nor would the damage be contained within Ukraine’s violated borders. On the contrary, the consequences of abandoning Ukraine would reverberate around the world for many years to come, undermining the foundations of international security.
If it happens, the fall of Ukraine may not be immediately apparent. Indeed, it could even be temporarily disguised by face-saving talk of pragmatism and compromise. However, a demilitarized, partitioned, and internationally isolated postwar Ukraine without credible security guarantees would have little chance of surviving for long. Behind the diplomatic platitudes, it would be painfully obvious that Ukraine was now completely at Putin’s mercy. In such circumstances, a new Russian invasion would be merely a matter of time.
Today’s international security crisis did not arise overnight. The security climate has been steadily deteriorating since 2014, when Russia first seized the Crimean peninsula and invaded eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. The inadequate international response to these watershed acts of Russian aggression was interpreted in Moscow as a green light to go further, creating the conditions for the full-scale invasion of 2022 and setting the stage for what has become the largest European war since World War II.
If Western leaders now choose to sacrifice Ukraine in a misguided bid to placate Putin, the shift from a rules-based international order to the law of the geopolitical jungle will be complete. This transition will be extremely expensive, with countries around the world forced to dramatically increase defense budgets to levels that dwarf the current cost of military support for Ukraine.
None of this is inevitable, of course. It is still entirely possible to secure a just peace for Ukraine that would deter the Russia-led axis of autocrats and revive faith in a rules-based system of international relations. However, this would require a degree of resolve and political will that few Western leaders have been prepared to demonstrate since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. For almost three years, the Western response has been marked by excessive caution and a crippling fear of escalation that have only served to embolden the Kremlin.
Putin is clearly counting on continued Western weakness as he looks to break Ukrainian resistance in a grinding war of attrition. He is now more confident than ever of victory and has little interest in negotiating anything other than the terms of Ukraine’s surrender. This is the unfavorable reality that will confront Donald Trump when he returns to the White House later this month. Unless he and other Western leaders insist on pursuing peace through strength, Ukraine will have little chance of survival and the wider world will face a Hobbesian future of instability and aggression.
Victor Liakh is the CEO of the East Europe Foundation.
“It is still entirely possible to secure a just peace for Ukraine that would deter the Russia-led axis of autocrats and revive faith in a rules-based system of international relations. However, this would require a degree of resolve and political will that few Western leaders have been prepared to demonstrate since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.”
And in whose hands is this responsibility entrusted with? Why, a convicted criminal who has packed his team with some of the most abysmal 5th columnist putinoid scum ever to be found in a US administration: Ivan Muskovy, VanZkov, Trumpkov Jr, Gabbardova, Brainworm, Captain Cornflake, Bannonov etc ad nauseam.
Europe must step in, if it doesn’t want to be between the two grindstones, Trump’s US and putler’s mafia land. Will they? Not under their current leaders. Maybe only if Trump drops Ukraine, and get shocked back into reality.