President Donald Trump's desire to negotiate a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine is a moral one. Ukraine is likely to make painful concessions to secure peace as long as Russia knows any future attempt to invade Ukraine will mean conflict with American-supported European ground forces.
Still, Trump is very badly wrong to suggest that Ukraine started this war and bears responsibility for failing to resolve it peacefully before now. Trump did exactly that on Tuesday. First, the president criticized Ukraine over its lament that it was not invited to U.S. talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia. To be fair to Trump, those talks were designed to gain insight into Russian negotiating expectations and not facilitate direct talks between Ukraine and Russia. Those talks will come later.
But Trump then very oddly observed that "[Ukraine] should have ended [the war] three years [ago], [Ukraine] should have never started it, [Ukraine] could have made a deal." Trump continued, "I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down, but they chose not to do it that way."
True, President Volodymyr Zelensky is no Winston Churchill. While he is a courageous leader who deserves great credit for leading his country over three years of brutal war, Zelensky is also arrogant, deflective of responsibility, and inordinately ungrateful for Western aid. We don't know what Trump has heard from Zelensky behind the scenes, but it would not be surprising if Zelensky has unfairly aggravated him. Still, Trump's telling of how the Ukraine war began represents some very deluded history.
Undeniable reality is clear. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 because President Vladimir Putin wanted to subjugate Ukrainian sovereignty under his dream ambition of a greater Russian imperium — imperial dreams, it should be noted, that by Putin's own admission extend to NATO allies Estonia and Poland.
To avoid war, Ukraine wouldn't simply have had to give up on joining NATO, it would have had to abandon its sovereign foreign policy entirely. That would mean an end to plans for closer economic relations with the European Union and the United States and an end to aspirations for a more democratic and less corrupt government. Ukraine would have had to agree to do Putin's bidding on whatever malfeasant agenda he held at any one moment. This would have meant that any future Ukrainian government and president served only at Putin's pleasure. No sovereign democratic nation could be expected to make such a choice. This is something Trump and Americans more than any other people should understand.
Moreover, while Trump may be right in claiming that he could have negotiated a deal that saved most of Ukraine's territory, he would have only been able to do so by either sanctioning the Russian economy into an oblivion that threatened Putin's very grip on power or by threatening to defend Ukraine with U.S. military forces. It seems unlikely that Trump would have made these pledges.
Nor is it true as some commentators like to pretend that Zelensky could have negotiated an early peace with Russia shortly after the war broke out. The evidence for this claim flows from convoluted allegations stemming from Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in the spring of 2024. Crucially, however, two points from these negotiations are not in doubt.
First, that Russia insisted on Ukrainian submissions in relation to future international partnerships that would have destroyed its sovereign authority. Second, that other countries were unwilling at this point to provide Ukraine with assurances such as peacekeeping forces that ensured Russia kept its word. This is no small concern seeing as Putin's word, if unchecked from hardened verification measures, is about as safe to trust as it is safe to swim in blood-infested waters with a tiger shark that hasn't eaten for days. Indeed, this is not hypothetical. Putin promised in the 2014 Minsk II treaty not to reinvade Ukraine and insisted he had no plans to invade Ukraine right up until he did so on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump needs to realize that Russia maintains the maximalist ambition of conquering the entirety of Ukraine. As underlined by its opening war effort to seize Kyiv and assassinate Zelensky, Putin has never been interested simply in securing Ukraine's southeastern territory. He has been interested in taking Ukraine as a de facto province of Russia. Until Trump recognizes this truth and leverages pressure against Putin's optimism he can succeed, peace will not be possible. At a minimum, it won't be possible because Ukraine will be forced to keep on fighting absent Putin's reconciliation to a harder compromise.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Trump can and should work to secure the art of a peace deal in Ukraine, what would be the greatest deal of the 21st century — a deal deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize for the ages.
That said, until the president studies the history of how this war began, his efforts will bear him only to an embarrassing failure.