Peacemaking: yet again a dangerous time for European security

Just like we have long been taught by the Roman poet Virgil to “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, so European supporters of Ukraine have learned to be wary of Washington presenting peace plans to end the war in Ukraine. The latest example – a 28-point plan hatched by the US envoy Steve Witkoff in talks with two Russian diplomats, Kirill Dmitriev and Yuri Ushakov – is the third time that the Trump administration has gone over the heads of NATO allies and President Zelensky to present its vision of how to achieve a ceasefire. A ceasefire, it bears repeating, that Trump repeatedly asserted he could achieve in 24 hours. Again, speed and expediency (and allowing Trump to declare victory with the minimum effort or future commitment) have taken priority over achieving a just and lasting peace and taking care of Ukraine and Europe’s longer term security interests.  

A US peace plan made in Moscow 

The 28-point peace plan presented by the US clearly bore all the hallmarks of a ‘made in Moscow’ document. Most of the individual points reflected the shopping list of long-standing Russian demands. They included Ukraine giving up on joining NATO, sharply reducing the size of the Ukrainian army, insisting that Ukraine renounce long-range missiles and that no foreign (i.e. NATO country) forces be deployed on Ukrainian territory. This move is clearly designed to scupper the UK-France led international reassurance force, which is a core element of the post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Furthermore, the proposal called for elections to be held immediately following a cessation of hostilities (clearly a wheeze to remove Zelensky from power and to replace him and his government with a more compliant, Moscow-friendly government). 

Moscow also demanded that Ukraine hand over the 30% of territory in Donetsk that so far and, in nearly 4 years of fighting, its forces have failed to conquer. This would of course be difficult for Kyiv to accept given the enormous effort and loss of life that the Ukrainian army have consented to in order to defend this territory, which is a key part of Ukraine’s defensive fortified wall in the east. Before the United States floated its peace proposal, both Ukraine and the Europeans had been working on the assumption that Washington was committed to a ceasefire along the current military line of control, a position Trump had espoused after meeting Zelensky on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in late September. Moscow is now demanding international recognition of its captured Ukrainian territories, whereas beforehand it was insisting mainly on recognition of Crimea, occupied by Russian forces in March 2014. This was something that the Trump administration hinted it was prepared to grant.  

There were other long-standing demands of Moscow in the proposal designed to reshape the political map of Ukraine and tie it into the Russian orbit. For instance, establishing Russian as a second official language and restoring the Russian Orthodox Church to its former status in Ukraine as an official religion with the restoration of its properties by the state. Moscow was seeking too the decentralisation of Ukraine, which would give greater power to the provinces and allow the eastern provinces, with their large Russian speaking populations, to gain greater leverage over the central government and potentially block constitutional reforms or major political initiatives such as EU accession negotiations or NATO membership. So far, no real surprises for diplomats familiar with Russian geo-political ambitions.  

But for European governments or EU officials scrutinising the text, it was depressing to see the US repackaging a Russian draft with no attempt to renegotiate it to reflect Western values and principles or European security interests.  

The task to uphold international law and norms has once again been left to the Europeans, not consulted in advance about the proposal and needing once more to mount a rearguard action to limit the damage. This exclusion is all the more humiliating as the US 28-point plan contains several provisions where Europe is asked to pay for Ukraine’s postwar construction (currently estimated at well over $500bn while the US will gain access to many of Ukraine’s critical minerals and raw materials) and provide Kyiv with long-term security guarantees as well as all the economic benefits of EU membership. In sum, taxation without representation.  

It was as if the US has psychologically disengaged from NATO and sees itself as a neutral party or ‘honest broker’ between Kyiv/Brussels and Moscow, trying to bring warring parties fighting what it views as a nonsensical war to their senses and to the negotiating table.  

Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative, rightly pointed out that all the demands were on Ukraine and the US had not succeeded or probably not even tried in the first place to secure concessions from Moscow. For instance, the withdrawal of Russian forces and heavy weapons from Ukrainian occupied territories to reduce the possibility of a rapid return to fighting, although Moscow did agree to a return of prisoners of war and of Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia.  

The idea of land swaps for peace disappeared last spring when Kyiv lost control of the Kursk salient inside Russian territory. On the other hand, the dropping of all investigations and indictments for war crimes and the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia were jaw-dropping concessions from Washington, which bode ill for the future of international legality. In an unguarded moment, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, admitted to Senators that the draft was essentially a Russian text. Yet seasoned diplomats could already guess this from the hasty and inelegant translation of clunky Russian terminology and the inconsistencies in the Russian draft, which a true negotiation would have identified and ironed out. This included a clause saying that territories currently in Ukrainian hands would be demilitarised while Russian occupied territories would remain occupied by the Russian army.  

Perhaps the most depressing conclusion for Ukrainian and European diplomats was that this peace proposal marked the definitive end of an illusion. They had long hoped and expected that Trump would follow the usual pattern of the erstwhile optimist becoming a pessimist once mugged by reality. In other words, once he understood Putin’s war aims and the Russian leader’s unwillingness to make any meaningful compromises to secure a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine, he would accept the logic of putting more pressure on Putin and would swing fully behind Ukraine as the victim, both militarily and economically. For a while after the UN General Assembly, Trump seemed to have this epiphany. He imposed sanctions against the two Russian oil giants, Rosneft and Lukoil, put pressure on India and China to stop buying and refining Russian crude, supported Ukraine’s quest to ultimately liberate all its territory and lifted US restrictions on the sale to Kyiv of long-range US missiles such as Tomahawk cruise missiles. His frustration with Putin for continuing daily strikes against Ukraine’s cities, killing women and children on every occasion, while publicly talking peace, seemed genuine.   

But then the old pattern of zig-zagging between Kyiv and Moscow according to the daily news cycle quickly resumed. In reality, 90% of the time Trump has embraced the Kremlin’s position out of Realpolitik and a conviction that Putin has the stronger hand. Thus, the only quick win in ending the war (and ticking off another box in Trump’s campaign pledges) is to give the Russian leader essentially want he wants.  

Of course, supporters of Ukraine will argue (rightly) that Russia is strong precisely because the US has deliberately taken away Ukraine’s best cards, with the Biden administration being far too slow and cautious in giving Kyiv advanced US weaponry (such as long-range artillery, tanks and F16s) that it ended up supplying to Kyiv in any case. Trump has doubled down on this failure with his on again/off again provision of military assistance to Ukraine, his overconfidence that he could persuade Putin to follow his advice by using carrots alone and his refusal to follow through decisively on his repeated threats to put more sanctions on Russia.  

Faced with a strong Ukrainian and European pushback to the US peace plan, Washington again backtracked, claiming that the plan was merely a starting point for further refinement and an attempt to restart the Moscow-Kyiv negotiations that took place in Istanbul in the weeks immediately following the Russian invasion.  

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who hitherto had been frozen out of the Ukraine file, presumably because of his more hawkish stance vis-à-vis Russia), was dispatched to Geneva to conduct talks with senior Ukrainian and European diplomats. His involvement will certainly help to reassure the US Congress. During the weekend of talks the plan was substantially modified, made more precise and reduced to 19 points. Trump’s initial ultimatum that Kyiv to agree to the peace plan within a week and by Thanksgiving was quietly dropped.  

Rubio then tried to boost Europe’s damaged morale by participating in the video call of the Coalition of the Willing, co-hosted by the UK and France to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine. This suggested that if Rubio could get control of the Ukraine file moving forward there could be more alignment with the EU and NATO allies. But then he undid much of this good work by announcing that he was skipping the NATO December foreign ministers meeting where the Alliance’s assistance to Kyiv through its Prioritised Ukraine List of Requirements or PURL programme will be top of the agenda. The State Department spokesperson explained that Rubio’s presence at NATO was not necessary because the US had already “fixed” the alliance by getting allies to agree to a new defence spending target of 5% of GDP back in July at the NATO summit in The Hague. Thus, at a moment of true peril for Ukraine and the future of European security, US leadership is at best inconsistent and at worst absent.  

At the moment of writing, the destiny of the US peace plan, as amended by Ukraine and its European partners, is unknown. Ukrainian ministers led by Defence Minister Umerov have been in Florida to meet with Trump advisers, including Rubio and Witkoff. Steve Witkoff is due back in Moscow and the Secretary of the Army Dan Driskoll (a rising star of the Trump foreign policy team) is returning to Kyiv.  

NATO in the crosshairs

Putin claims that he has not seen the latest, reworked draft of the peace plan but has reiterated that he will not negotiate with Zelensky, a leader he has long considered as illegitimate as Ukraine has postponed elections during wartime. No doubt Putin will take advantage of the current stramash in which the weakened Ukrainian President finds himself after a major corruption scandal and the resignation of his longtime aide, Andriy Yermak, drawn into the corruption investigation. Naturally, the more the draft of the US proposal veers back towards the Ukrainian-European position, the more likely Putin will reject it.  

What we do know is that Washington has agreed to take out of the plan those elements that did not directly concern the ending of the war in Ukraine. Moscow was clearly seeking broader strategic goals, adding clauses on the normalisation of US-Russia trading relations and the resumption of US investment in Russia, particularly in the energy sector, and a commitment by NATO to halt its enlargement and to pull back its military forces from central and eastern Europe. This would essentially return NATO forces to where they were at the end of the Cold War in the middle of divided Germany.

Initially demanded at the NATO-Russia Council prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was part of a dialogue between the Alliance and Russia on confidence-building measures intended to stabilise the military balance between the two adversaries and help prevent dangerous escalation. NATO was ready to consider further transparency measures, for instance on deployments or exercises in border areas and on flight safety, but not steps that would have led to the withdrawal of forces from almost half of its member states, making it virtually impossible for the Alliance to defend them. The Russian demand was tantamount to giving Moscow a veto over the Alliance’s military planning as well to its Open Door policy of integrating countries that aspire to NATO membership and meet its conditions.  

Yet the US peace plan demonstrated that Russia was again linking the Ukraine war to its own efforts to upend the post-Cold War security order, divide NATO, reduce the US military presence in Europe and weaken the Alliance’s ability to implement its Article 5 defence guarantee. That is what Putin means when he says that a solution to the Ukraine war must address the “root causes” of the conflict. He essentially blames NATO for turning Ukraine into a hostile state through its promise of eventual NATO membership. In sum, Russia’s ‘legitimate security interests’ as a great power are best served by having no military counterweight to the West and no balance-of-power diplomacy.  

If NATO accepted Putin’s terms, the Alliance would be giving the least military protection to those allies that need it the most, relegating them to second class membership. This for all intents and purposes would signal the end of NATO as a viable military alliance. But Putin’s demands were at least a timely reminder to Europeans that in negotiating the future of Ukraine they are essentially negotiating their own future as well. A botched peace leaving Russia unconstrained and NATO allies bitterly divided will only make future wars in Europe more likely and potentially more deadly.

For this reason, the European allies of the United States must psychologically return to the beginning of the 1990s when they were negotiating the end of the Cold War, first with the Soviet Union in its final days and thereafter with Russia. At that time, they had a clear moral compass to guide their strategic choices and to ensure a degree of fairness and stability in all future European security arrangements. For instance that borders should not be changed by force, that peoples living in a constituted nation should have the right to determine their own future, that foreign armies should not be stationed in a country without the consent of that country, that countries had the right to join international organisations and alliances (or to remain neutral) and that East-West dialogue would reduce military forces and increase confidence and transparency.

These principles produced unprecedented cooperation in pan-European security affairs and ensured that for the first time the emerging states and democracies in central and eastern Europe had a seat at the diplomatic table and a voice in deciding their own destiny. The process was not always peaceful as the collapse of Yugoslavia after 1991 demonstrated. Due to the bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and outflow of refugees, NATO had to intervene twice and launch two post-conflict stabilisation operations. But as we mark the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement for Bosnia at the end of this month, nearly all the countries that emerged from the defunct Yugoslavia are now enjoying a degree of security, prosperity, independence and Euro-Atlantic integration that was undoubtedly a distant dream for their populations back in 1991.   

Russia also benefited from this new security order and formally agreed to the principles on which it is based. In the Balkans and Afghanistan, Moscow cooperated with NATO-led stabilisation forces and it saw NATO massively reduce its conventional and nuclear forces in Europe as tensions lowered and dialogue strengthened. NATO committed to keep its forces on the territory of new member states to a minimum while Russia remained cooperative. The Russian economy improved dramatically and its people enjoyed the benefits of greater freedom at home and travel, job opportunities and study abroad.  

All this was possible because the US and its European and Canadian allies stayed united, stuck to their principles and showed both nerve and political will at crucial moments. None of this success was preordained. At any moment the wrong road could have been taken, and Europe would have regressed to fragmented, shifting and opportunistic security pacts and protectionism that characterised the dark decade of the 1930s.   

It is this sense of a firm geo-strategic compass, transatlantic unity and the political will to be bold that we so urgently need in the face of Russia’s push to unravel the European integration project. For a start, Europeans need to come together behind a set of clear red lines and principles that will undergird any peace settlement in Ukraine and make clear to Moscow that they will continue to support Ukraine until a peace on this basis is achieved.

These red lines are: 

1. No recognition of Russian occupied territory.
2. No pressure on Ukraine to surrender territories controlled by Ukrainian military forces. 
3. A Ukrainian army of at least 800,000 backed by a considerable reserve force and with no limitations on its conventional weaponry. A navy and air force to be provided for as well. 
4. No limits on foreign forces to be deployed in Ukraine or to train and exercise there, subject to the government in Kyiv. 
5. Recognition of the right of Ukraine to choose to be a member of an alliance, acknowledging that when it comes to NATO membership the consent of all allies is required.  
6. A full exchange of prisoners of war and the return to Ukraine of forcibly displaced civilians including children. 
7. Reparations to be paid to Ukraine by Russia for physical, economic and environmental damages, particularly to critical transport, industrial and energy infrastructure. Russian frozen assets abroad will be used as collateral to secure these reparation payments. 
8. No limits on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes and launch criminal proceedings and indictments. 
9. Guarantees of the security of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. 
10. Freedom of navigation for commercial shipping in the Black Sea and cooperation in removing maritime mines. 
11. Elections in Ukraine to take place after a peace agreement but in line with the Ukrainian constitution. 
12. Sanctions in a number of key sectors (banking, energy, foreign investment, military equipment and technology) to be maintained vis-à-vis Russia for a minimum period of two years following a peace agreement (probation period). 
13. Withdrawal of specified Russian forces from front line positions and limitations on heavy weapons in border areas subject to international monitoring. 
14. Robust security guarantees to be part and parcel of the peace agreement and to include an international reassurance force to be deployed in Ukraine. Paper guarantees or non-aggression pacts have not been upheld by Russia and will not suffice. 
15. Russia to recognise and establish normal diplomatic relations with the Ukrainian government following elections. 

Achieving these red lines will not be easy in the face of Russian intransigence. But the stakes in a peace agreement are much higher for Europe than they are for Russia, which can restart the war against Ukraine at any time of its choosing and whatever piece of paper it signs. Europe requires a degree of certainty that Russia does not need or will want to consent to. Whereas Moscow has been clear in its demands, the NATO allies have wavered and repeated general principles such as assistance ‘as long as it takes’ or ‘a just and durable peace’ or ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ rather than uniting behind concrete peace conditions – point 14 in the agreement itself is essential.  

Trump has said (again) that the US will participate in these guarantees and there has even been talk of something equivalent to NATO’s Article 5, although how a NATO-style security guarantee is to be implemented without actual NATO membership and all the detailed joint planning, is an open question. The US position at least sounds positive, but we must be careful as the US President has said that he will not clarify the nature of US security guarantees until after a peace agreement is signed. This is illogical as the robustness and precision of security guarantees are a core element of any peace agreement and vital if Ukraine is to have the confidence to sign it. The vagueness of the US commitment is nonetheless of concern. In the past the administration has said that it will not put US military boots on the ground and that it will give over the horizon support to a European reassurance force in the form of intelligence or logistics. This has not been enough of a backstop to encourage many European allies to commit troops to the reassurance force. If the US is leaving the implementation and financing of its own peace plan to others, it has no right to impose a dictate. Europe has so far left the Moscow channel at both summit and diplomatic levels largely to the US. It is time for it to impose its own vision.  

Europe at the forefront of peace? 

Peacemaking in Europe has a long and chequered history, as befits a continent that has known more wars with more loss of life than any other. Most of those peace agreements proved to be short-lived affairs, adjusting borders and territory between rival states before the weaker eventually became the stronger and sought revenge and restitution. Historians have often blamed the imperfections of these various peace agreements for failing to bring about lasting settlements or lead to reconciliation.  

Perhaps the most famous example is the Treaty of Versailles concluded in June 1919 and that attempted to settle all the issues arising from the First World War. In his classic work, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, the British economist, John Maynard Keynes, established the dominant narrative of the Versailles Treaty claiming that it was too punitive vis-à-vis Germany and would inevitably lead to future conflict. This theme was enthusiastically taken up by nationalists (and Nazis) in Germany as it portrayed Germany as the victim of unfair demands put on it by the victorious allies. Later, elsewhere in Europe the same narrative justified policies of leniency towards German territorial aspirations.  

However, historians more recently have begun to take a different view. No peace treaty is ever perfect as it reflects the fears, security dilemmas, domestic political pressures and war aims of the belligerents at the time. In a more contemporary reading, the Versailles Treaty was not as unjust for Germany as it appeared to some observers at the time. Imperial Germany had after all started the war as a great power global conflict and inflicted catastrophic loss of life on its neighbours. At the end of the war, German-occupied northern France and Belgium had suffered much more devastation than Germany, which had experienced hunger but whose industry and infrastructure remained largely intact. Consequently, the war reparations demanded of Germany were not unreasonable and the defeated country was given many years to pay them.  

But German governments constantly reneged on this obligation (well before the advent of Hitler), negotiated them downward and finally stopped paying them altogether. Meanwhile, the US and UK withdrew from the continent, leaving France to face a rearming Germany alone, as Russia had already abandoned the wartime coalition when it collapsed into revolution in 1917. Hitler’s efforts to unilaterally overturn the Versailles settlement (through rearmament, leaving the League of Nations and the re-occupation of the Rhineland) was met with only a feeble and belated response. Thus the issue with the Versailles peace treaty was less the form of the treaty itself (inevitably a compromise among many conflicting interests) but the failure of the guarantor states to implement it. The task was left to others.  

Contrast this with the post-1945 situation when a much harsher peace was imposed on post-Nazi Germany with a 4-power military occupation, ultimately dividing the country. The Soviet Union had left the wartime coalition and the Cold War would shortly begin. Yet this time round the US and UK were fully committed to upholding security in Europe and to transforming Germany into a successful parliamentary democracy and market economy. The Concept of Europe emerging from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was also successful in preserving the peace in Europe for 40 years through the reintegration of France and the cooperation of the great powers to resist any challenges to the system. The success of peacemaking is less in the design of perfect treaties and agreements (which don’t exist) but in the robust and rigorous implementation of what is ultimately agreed. 

As the US, Europe and Ukraine lock horns with Russia on the shape of a peace plan, this is the most significant lesson from history that they must at all times keep in mind. Especially as once the guns stop firing, there will be no shortage of countries ready to quietly renege on their commitments, leave a devastated Ukraine to survive as best as it can and do discreet and cosy business deals with Russia. 

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.