It is not the President’s venality that drives him to surrender Ukraine. It is his sincere but naive attempt to save lives

Charles Moore

Nov 28, 2025

By November 1917, what we now call the First World War had gone on for well over three years. A former Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Lansdowne, who had earlier lost a son in combat, wrote to this newspaper. We published his letter 108 years ago on Saturday.

Lansdowne called for a negotiated peace with Germany, because “We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world.” He sought an agreement on security and reparations which would readmit Germany into the comity of nations.

His intervention was widely condemned as naïve, even defeatist. Most historians agree that Germany would not have responded in good faith, even if the British Government had taken up his proposal. But Lord Lansdowne’s anguish at the war itself was justified. In an earlier note to ministerial colleagues, he had protested that “We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands,” which was true.

President Trump may not have heard of the Lansdowne Letter, but he too says he minds about the death of hundreds of thousands in war, and therefore seeks peace.

The Russo-Ukrainian war was started by Russia when it occupied Crimea in 2014. The catastrophe came with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in between the two Trump presidencies (and therefore, in Trump’s view, all Joe Biden’s fault). By June next year, this catastrophic phase will have lasted as long as the First World War.

Actual war has not (yet) engulfed all Europe, and so the casualties are lower than in 1914-18 or 1939-45. Nevertheless, they are the next worst thing in living European memory – perhaps over a million. In the past five months, Russia, though widely alleged to be winning on the battlefield, is thought to have lost 25,000-28,000 men dead or wounded – roughly the same number as arrived at the front in the same period. The Ukrainian casualty toll is smaller, but still shocking – and there were far fewer Ukrainians in the first place.

President Trump rightly observes that the killing is “horrible”. Because he is such an aggressive man people tend to assume his concern is affected. He certainly has additional motives in wanting peace. He seeks lucrative deals for his country and himself, and – still more important to a man who sees his life as one extended Oscars ceremony – the Nobel Peace Prize.

But it may help to accept the sincerity of Trump’s longing for peace because it may help explain his mistakes. He is a critic of the belligerence of America’s imperial presidency: it gets in the way of prosperity and spoils the American dream. His vision of Gaza, for example, as a new tourist Riviera, reveals him as the capitalist version of a peacenik.

That is the problem. The trouble with peaceniks is not their sincerity but their naivete. They do not understand why anyone would want to fight, and do not bother to try. As they sang in 1969, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance,” The Plastic Ono Band then and Donald Trump (23 at the time) still. He may be more of a hippy than he looks. “Give peace a chance” cannot be all that a true peacemaker says. The true peacemaker talks to both sides to find out where, if anywhere, that chance for peace might lie.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Trump’s approach to Ukraine is his profound lack of interest in the issues involved, especially as they affect Ukraine. Neither he, nor his isolationist vice-president J.D.Vance, nor the President’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has ever been to Ukraine. All, in effect, deny Ukraine’s right to decide its own future.

None shows any interest in the way European peace was internationally constructed after victory in the Second World War. None appears to understand why the doctrine that the borders of Europe must never been changed by force is the key to – or rather, the lock on – lasting peace. None seems to have studied how that doctrine was reinforced after the end of the Cold War.

Trumpians hate wokery and love strong men who claim (however impiously) to be good Christians, so they are instinctively drawn to Vladimir Putin. Even if they have no corrupt connections with Putin, they think Russia is the big deal. Do that big deal with him, they imagine, and then America can divide the spoils, end the deaths and stop running up the bills.

Putin sees this coming and rejoices. His utterly unreasonable claims on Ukraine are adamantine. He perfectly understands the key weakness of Trump’s position – that he is desperate for a deal. It follows that Putin can, in effect, draft most of it. He knows the White House does not interrogate the Russian version of history and scarcely understands the meaning of what it seeks to concede.

The 28-point plan, fanfared last week, accepted almost all Russia’s contentious points and prior assumptions – that it can keep what it has conquered and tell Nato what to do, that Ukraine can never join Nato, that Nato troops can never invigilate any settlement and that the number of Ukraine’s troops (but not Russia’s) will be capped. No Lansdowne-style security guarantees and reparations here. The 28 points infringe Ukraine’s rights as a sovereign nation.

The plan also accepts a longstanding Russian libel against Ukraine by declaring that “All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited”, and it repeats the Russian trope that Ukraine is not a democracy by demanding elections within 100 days.

No Ukrainian government could accept the plan – or anything like it – and survive. That is part of the plan’s fell purpose. It now seems likely, as revealed in our news pages today, that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will unilaterally offer US recognition of Russian sovereignty over occupied Ukraine when they visit the Kremlin next week. If that happens, then Trump the naïve peacenik will have scorned allies, broken all previous agreements and betrayed Ukraine.

All Ukraine can do, which it managed quite skilfully at Geneva this week, is to keep on trying to be constructive, winkle out, with allied help, the worst of the 28 points and avoid being the victim who gets blamed or accused, in Trump language, of “zero gratitude”.

The recent publication of a taped private conversation between Witkoff and his Russian interlocutor, Yuri Ushakov, shows just how desperate the White House is. Steve advises his “friend” Yuri to tell Putin, when talking to Trump, to show “respect that he is man of peace”. Trump will then give Steve “a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal”, boasts Steve. President Zelensky is coming to the White House soon, says Steve. “I know that,” the tape records Yuri chuckling. “Your boss must call before then,” Steve advises.

Russia stands to gain whether the Trump plan goes ahead or fails. Putin can go on saying it is not enough, knowing that this will induce Trump to give him yet more. He can be confident that Zelensky, now destabilised by the resignation of his right hand man Andriy Yermak, cannot accept it. Therefore Zelensky, not Putin, will be excoriated by the US government for blocking peace. Besides, he has never recognised the Ukrainian government’s right to be part of negotiations.

It feels as if Donald Trump, in the name of peace, is about to try legitimise Europe’s biggest waging of aggressive war for over 80 years. Is Sir Keir Starmer practising his roar of defiance in front of the mirror?