Baked Alaska

Will Trump’s summit lead to Ukraine being sold out?

Trump and Putin meet at the G20 summit in Osaka in 2019

Donald Trump continues to pursue a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine despite the accumulating evidence that there is no deal to be had. He has acknowledged, after many fruitless phone calls, that Putin has been stringing him along, even accusing him of peddling ‘bullshit’. In an interview with the BBC, he acknowledged

‘We'll have a great conversation. I'll say: “That's good, I'll think we're close to getting it done,” and then he'll knock down a building in Kyiv.’

He observed of Putin that ‘I'm disappointed in him, but I'm not done with him.’

And so like Charlie Brown, shocked each time Lucy pulls the ball away as he is about to kick it, Trump allows wishful thinking to triumph over experience. He clings to the belief that a direct conversation with the Russian leader is the key to unlocking the whole process. As he insisted two months ago, ’Look, nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together.’

This more than suits Putin. On 15 August, he will travel to meet Trump as an equal to have his picture taken smiling and shaking hands. The setting is Alaska, a state the US bought for a pittance from Russia in 1867 to help the Tsar pay off his debts. This creates a symbolism that can work both ways, as many Russian nationalists believe that it should really be returned to the motherland. But for now Kremlin propagandists are happy to describe the setting appropriate for its shared Russian-American history. They are also gleefully proclaiming the summit as a major triumph for Putin and a defeat for Zelenskyy, a sign that Trump has at least realised that if he really wants to get peace in Ukraine then he must do so on Putin’s terms.

Many in Ukraine and Europe have come to the same conclusion. They fear an imminent sellout, which some assume has been Trump’s objective all along. This is all based on an apparent deal on the table, which would require Ukraine to abandon territory which has been defending vigorously with very little in return. The fear is that either the Ukrainians will be forced to sign up to unacceptable terms or that the act of rejecting them will mean that they get blamed for the failure of a peace initiativel,,,. This will lead to a reduction in the support given to Ukraine’s war effort and the end of any thoughts of harsher sanctions on Russia – a reversion to the position that the Trump administration appeared to be adopting at the end of February. Appalled by the prospect the Ukrainians and Europeans have been insisting that no deal can be agreed without Ukraine and scrambling around to develop counterproposals.

Trump’s actions, and the motives for them, demand our attention but they are only part of the story of this conflict and its potential resolution. It is important to keep them in perspective. In the rest of this post I will explain why I would be more than surprised if the summit produced a deal sufficiently robust to lead to demands that Ukraine must accept it, let alone one that Ukraine would be content to accept. The issue is whether this becomes apparent in the days leading up to the summit, as the White House and the Kremlin try to establish what if anything the two men can agree, or only at the summit itself.