The diplomatic structure surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war changed dramatically this week. On 12 February, Donald Trump spoke directly with Vladimir Putin and announced that negotiations to end the war should begin, before speaking separately with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump’s administration has made clear that it wants a negotiated settlement rather than an indefinite continuation of the conflict, while US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told European allies that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was an “unrealistic objective” and that Ukrainian NATO membership was not a realistic outcome of a settlement. European governments have reacted nervously, particularly because negotiations appear to be developing initially between Washington and Moscow while Europe and Ukraine fear decisions about their security could be made without them. The desire to end a war that has killed and wounded enormous numbers of people is entirely reasonable. The difficult question is what “ending” actually means. A ceasefire can stop today’s fighting while creating incentives for tomorrow’s war if the settlement convinces one side that military aggression ultimately produces territorial rewards.
This is the central distinction between negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace means the absence of active fighting. Positive peace means an underlying political equilibrium stable enough that actors do not expect renewed violence to improve their position. A ceasefire can achieve the first quickly. The second requires addressing why each side might want to break the ceasefire later. Russia needs to believe another offensive will not produce sufficiently valuable gains. Ukraine needs to believe Russia will not use the pause simply to rearm and attack again. Any settlement therefore needs to change future incentives rather than merely freezing today’s battlefield.
Trump’s argument begins from a genuine strategic problem. Ukraine is unlikely to recover every piece of territory occupied by Russia through military force in the near future without dramatically greater Western intervention. Russia occupies roughly a fifth of internationally recognised Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Moscow possesses a much larger population and industrial base, while Ukraine remains heavily dependent on Western weapons, ammunition and financing. Treating complete military restoration of the 1991 borders as the only acceptable condition for negotiations therefore risks creating a war objective whose cost could become extraordinarily high relative to its probability of achievement.
But acknowledging battlefield constraints is different from recognising Russian sovereignty over occupied territory. This distinction matters enormously. A ceasefire line can reflect de facto control without creating de jure legitimacy. Governments can stop fighting while continuing to regard territory as legally occupied. The world contains several unresolved territorial disputes where this distinction has lasted decades. A settlement therefore does not necessarily need Ukraine to formally surrender its legal claims to every occupied region.
This may be the most plausible area for compromise. Russia retains some territory physically. Ukraine refuses legal recognition of annexation. Final territorial status is postponed. The war stops.
The harder question is security guarantees.
Ukraine already has historical reasons to distrust vague assurances. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons left on its territory after the Soviet collapse in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain concerning its sovereignty and borders. Those assurances did not prevent Russia from annexing Crimea in 2014 or launching the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The lesson Ukrainians draw is straightforward:
a promise without an enforcement mechanism is not a guarantee.
This creates a serious problem with excluding NATO membership while simultaneously asking Ukraine to accept territorial compromise. If Ukraine cannot recover territory militarily and cannot enter NATO, what prevents Russia from rebuilding its forces and attacking again after several years?
One answer is a heavily armed Ukraine supported by long-term Western military assistance. Instead of NATO’s Article 5, deterrence would come through Ukraine possessing enough domestic capability that another invasion becomes prohibitively expensive.
This is deterrence by denial rather than deterrence through alliance commitment.
Air defence.
Drones.
Artillery.
Fortifications.
Long-range strike capability.
A large trained reserve.
Domestic weapons manufacturing.
The objective would be making Ukraine difficult enough to conquer that Russia gains little from another attempt.
European countries would need to finance much of this if Washington intends to reduce America’s burden.
That brings Europe to the centre of the problem. Trump has argued for years that European NATO members rely excessively on American defence spending. Whatever one thinks of his rhetoric, the underlying imbalance is real: Europe possesses an economy comparable in scale to America’s but has depended heavily on US military capabilities for deterrence.
Ukraine now makes that dependency strategically visible.
If European governments believe the settlement emerging from Washington is too favourable to Moscow, they have two options.
Complain.
Or acquire enough military and financial capability to change the bargaining position.
This is strategic autonomy becoming a budget constraint.
European sovereignty in security policy requires European defence expenditure.
A continent that depends on another country for intelligence, airlift, missile defence and much of its deterrent capability cannot possess complete autonomy over war termination.
Power determines who gets invited to negotiations because actors with resources can change outcomes.
This explains why Trump’s bilateral conversation with Putin has created such anxiety. Europeans fear a nineteenth-century style great-power settlement in which stronger states determine the security arrangements of smaller ones.
That concern is legitimate.
But it also exposes the consequence of Europe’s own strategic dependence.
If Europe wants a larger seat at the table, it needs more capability on the table.
Ukraine itself must be included for an even more fundamental reason. A peace agreement imposed on Kyiv without Ukrainian consent may exist diplomatically while failing operationally. Ukraine controls its own armed forces and population. Washington can condition military aid, giving it enormous leverage, but it cannot manufacture durable Ukrainian acceptance of a settlement regarded domestically as surrender.
This is the ownership problem of peace agreements.
External powers can pressure combatants into signing.
They cannot guarantee the political legitimacy required to sustain implementation afterwards.
A Ukrainian government accepting territorial losses without credible security guarantees could face severe domestic backlash. Soldiers who spent years fighting may reject the settlement. Political opponents could promise reversal. Future governments could treat the agreement as temporary.
The settlement therefore needs enough Ukrainian consent that peace becomes politically survivable.
The same applies to Russia, although Putin’s authoritarian political system gives him much greater control over domestic narrative. Moscow needs to present any settlement as achieving enough of the objectives used to justify the invasion. Putin can claim territorial gains, blocked Ukrainian NATO membership and recognition of Russia as a major power whose security demands could not simply be ignored.
This is where face-saving becomes strategically important.
Peace negotiations are not morality plays.
Governments need narratives allowing them to stop fighting without appearing to admit that enormous sacrifices achieved nothing.
A settlement humiliating one side may feel satisfying to the other.
It can make implementation less stable.
The challenge is therefore constructing a bargain where each government can claim enough success while neither gains enough from aggression to make repetition attractive.
That last condition is especially important.
If Russia invades Ukraine, occupies territory and eventually receives international recognition or sanctions relief without meaningful long-term costs, other states may infer that territorial conquest can succeed.
This is the precedent problem.
International rules work partly through expected consequences.
A potential aggressor does not need to care morally about sovereignty.
It needs to believe violating sovereignty is unlikely to produce net benefit.
Ukraine therefore matters beyond Ukraine because the settlement changes beliefs about the profitability of force.
But precedent should not be exaggerated into the claim that every territorial compromise automatically causes wars elsewhere. States evaluate local military balances, alliances and geography. China will not decide whether to attack Taiwan solely according to the Donbas settlement. Yet observed outcomes become one input in broader strategic calculations.
If conquest appears costly and uncertain, deterrence strengthens.
If conquest appears eventually negotiable into permanent gains, deterrence can weaken.
The optimal settlement therefore needs to impose enough enduring cost on aggression without making peace impossible.
Sanctions provide one mechanism.
Rather than lifting all restrictions immediately, Western governments could create phased sanctions relief tied to compliance.
Ceasefire holds.
Some sanctions ease.
Russia withdraws from agreed areas.
More restrictions disappear.
Violations trigger automatic reimposition.
This turns sanctions into a continuing incentive rather than simply punishment for past behaviour.
The problem is credibility.
Russia needs to believe sanctions genuinely will be lifted after compliance.
The West needs to believe sanctions can be restored quickly after violations.
Both sides have reasons to distrust the other.
Again, sequencing solves part of the commitment problem.
Small reciprocal steps reduce the amount of trust required at each stage.
Frozen Russian assets could become another bargaining instrument. Western governments hold hundreds of billions of dollars in immobilised Russian central-bank reserves, while future profits from those assets are already supporting Ukrainian financing. Russia wants access restored. Ukraine needs reconstruction funding.
That creates a potential negotiating asset.
Some frozen funds could remain tied to reconstruction or reparations while others become available following Russian compliance.
This would be politically controversial but economically logical.
Assets create leverage only while their future disposition remains conditional.
Spend or confiscate everything immediately and that bargaining option disappears.
Energy relationships will also matter. Europe dramatically reduced dependence on Russian pipeline gas after 2022, imposing enormous adjustment costs while weakening one of Moscow’s principal sources of leverage.
A settlement could reopen some economic relationships.
But Europe should be cautious about rebuilding the same dependence that created vulnerability previously.
Peace does not make geopolitical risk disappear.
This is the difference between trade and strategic dependence.
Buying some Russian energy may be economically rational.
Constructing an energy system incapable of functioning without Russian supply recreates leverage.
Diversification should survive peace.
The Trump administration’s broader argument appears to be that America should prioritise China and reduce the resources devoted indefinitely to European security. From a narrow American grand-strategy perspective, this has logic. China possesses an economy and technological base capable of challenging US power much more substantially than Russia does. American military resources are finite. Europe is wealthy enough to contribute more to its own defence.
The danger lies in executing the pivot so abruptly that reducing one commitment weakens American credibility everywhere.
Allies in Asia watch how Washington treats Ukraine and Europe.
Again, situations differ.
Japan and South Korea have formal defence treaties.
Ukraine does not.
But alliance credibility contains a reputational component.
Partners ask whether American commitments remain durable when domestic administrations change.
Trump’s transactional approach may produce higher allied defence spending precisely because partners trust America less.
Paradoxically, that could strengthen burden-sharing while weakening alliance confidence.
This is the abandonment-autonomy trade-off.
Greater fear of American abandonment pushes allies towards self-reliance.
Some American strategists may consider that desirable.
Too much fear can push allies towards nuclear weapons, neutrality or accommodation with regional adversaries instead.
The optimal level of uncertainty is therefore not infinite.
Ukraine’s own nuclear history makes this especially relevant. Countries observing the Budapest Memorandum may conclude that surrendering nuclear weapons in exchange for political assurances was strategically foolish.
That is damaging for global non-proliferation.
A state considering whether to abandon a future nuclear programme will ask:
what protects us afterwards?
If the answer is paper guarantees that disappear when geopolitics changes, nuclear deterrence becomes more attractive.
A strong post-war security architecture for Ukraine therefore supports non-proliferation credibility beyond Europe.
The irony is that a war fought without nuclear weapons can strengthen incentives for other countries to acquire them.
That is another second-order consequence negotiations need to consider.
None of this means Trump is wrong to seek negotiations.
Wars ultimately end through victory, collapse or bargaining.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia appears close to complete military victory.
Continuing indefinitely therefore means additional deaths and destruction while hoping battlefield conditions eventually produce a better deal.
That may be rational if the expected improvement exceeds the cost.
It may not.
The correct comparison is not peace versus justice in the abstract.
It is the settlement available now versus the expected settlement available after another year of fighting, adjusted for the human, economic and strategic cost of reaching it.
That is an extraordinarily difficult calculation.
Ukraine may believe continued Western support improves its position.
Russia may believe time favours its larger resource base.
Trump believes continued war produces diminishing returns.
Europe fears premature negotiation locks in Russian gains.
Each position follows from different assumptions about the counterfactual future.
No one knows that future with certainty.
This is why diplomacy should test the bargaining space rather than assume it does or does not exist.
Talk to Russia.
Talk to Ukraine.
Include Europe.
Identify actual red lines.
Determine what security architecture could make a ceasefire durable.
Negotiation itself is not appeasement.
The content of the agreement determines whether it is appeasement.
The historical analogy to Munich 1938 is therefore useful only to a point. Territorial concession can encourage aggression when the aggressor interprets compromise as evidence of weakness and retains both the desire and capability to continue expanding.
Other wars have ended through territorial compromise without producing immediate wider conquest.
History provides examples for almost every argument.
The relevant task is analysing Russia’s actual incentives and the enforcement structure of the settlement.
A bad peace can create another war.
An endless war can destroy the country the peace is supposed to protect.
Both risks are real.
Trump’s intervention has changed the diplomatic equilibrium because Washington possesses enough leverage to force every actor to reconsider its assumptions.
That can be useful.
It becomes dangerous if leverage is used primarily to produce a quick agreement whose durability is treated as somebody else’s problem.
The success metric should therefore not be whether Trump can announce that the war ended.
It should be whether Ukraine remains sovereign, Russia expects another invasion to be unprofitable, Europe can sustain the security architecture and the ceasefire survives after American political attention moves elsewhere.
Those are harder outcomes to produce.
They are also the only ones that matter historically.
Stopping the shooting is an achievement.
Making sure the shooting does not simply restart after Russia and Ukraine rearm is strategy.
The first can potentially be negotiated in months.
The second requires designing the incentives that govern the next decade.
Trump has begun the negotiation.
Now comes the part that determines whether it produces peace or merely an intermission.
