Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have met in Budapest only weeks after the July framework that halted most large-scale fighting in Ukraine, with the negotiations now shifting from stopping the war towards deciding what the post-war European order will actually look like. The ceasefire has largely held, but the most difficult questions were deliberately postponed: the final status of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, sanctions relief, security guarantees for Kyiv and the extent to which Russia will accept a permanently armed Ukraine integrated economically with Europe. Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European governments have insisted that no final territorial settlement can be imposed without Ukrainian consent, while Moscow continues to seek recognition of at least some territorial changes produced by the war. The danger is therefore no longer simply that fighting resumes tomorrow. It is that an agreement designed to stop one war quietly establishes principles that make the next war more attractive. The central question is philosophical as much as strategic: can peace be considered just if it accepts some consequences of aggression in order to prevent more violence, or does accepting those consequences ultimately weaken the rules that made the aggression wrong in the first place?
The answer depends partly on distinguishing compromise from legitimisation. Ukraine can accept that Russian forces remain temporarily in control of territory without accepting that Russia acquired a legitimate sovereign right to that territory through conquest. This is why the July framework’s distinction between de facto control and de jure sovereignty matters. Political settlements often recognise realities they do not morally endorse. A ceasefire line tells soldiers where they must stop; it does not necessarily tell historians or international lawyers who was entitled to the land. Conflating those questions makes peace much harder because governments become afraid that acknowledging any reality created by force means morally approving the force that created it.
Yet Russia also needs something from the settlement beyond simply being told that fighting has stopped. If every major sanction remains indefinitely, occupied territory receives no eventual political settlement and Ukraine becomes substantially more militarised, Moscow may conclude that the ceasefire has merely frozen an unfavourable strategic environment. That does not justify renewed aggression, but stable agreements depend upon understanding the incentives of actors whose behaviour they are designed to constrain. Deterrence requires making violation costly; durable peace additionally requires making compliance worth something. This is why phased sanctions relief can be more useful than either immediate normalisation or permanent punishment. Russia receives economic benefits gradually if it respects the agreement, while renewed aggression automatically restores the restrictions.
This creates a difficult moral reaction because sanctions relief can appear to reward a state responsible for invading its neighbour. But punishment and peace operate according to different logics. Punishment looks backwards and asks what consequences wrongdoing deserves. Peacebuilding looks forwards and asks what incentives reduce the probability of repetition. Those objectives can conflict. A perfectly punitive settlement may satisfy retrospective justice while giving the punished state fewer reasons to preserve the resulting order. Conversely, excessive forgiveness can weaken deterrence by making aggression appear inexpensive. Statecraft often consists of finding the point where enough punishment survives to deter repetition while enough benefit exists to make restraint rational.
Ukraine’s security guarantee is what allows that compromise to become more defensible. Kyiv does not need Russia to become benevolent if another invasion is unlikely to succeed. A heavily armed Ukraine, supported by European air defence, intelligence and long-term weapons production, changes Moscow’s expected return from future aggression. This is more reliable than a settlement resting principally on personal trust between Trump and Putin because leaders leave office. Capabilities and institutions survive them. The most durable guarantee therefore is not a promise that future Western leaders will always feel morally committed to Ukraine; it is a balance of power in which defending Ukraine remains feasible enough that the promise is credible.
Europe consequently needs a central role in the Budapest process. It will provide much of Ukraine’s future military support, absorb the economic consequences of sanctions policy and live beside whatever security architecture emerges. A settlement negotiated principally between Washington and Moscow would reproduce an older model of great-power diplomacy in which smaller states become objects of negotiation rather than participants in it. That may occasionally produce stability, but it creates a legitimacy problem. Political orders are more durable when the people expected to live under them possess some authorship over their rules.
This is where the comparison with the Congress of Vienna is useful but limited. Great powers have historically created stable systems by recognising one another’s core interests and restraining competition. There is wisdom in that tradition: international order cannot survive if major powers believe every vital interest is ignored. But nineteenth-century diplomacy often treated smaller nations as variables inside larger strategic calculations. The post-1945 principle of sovereign equality was intended partly to constrain exactly that behaviour. Modern diplomacy therefore needs both insights: great powers cannot be ignored, but their security cannot automatically become a right to determine the political orientation of neighbours.
Russia’s demand for a recognised sphere of influence illustrates the tension. Moscow can reasonably care about military deployments close to Russian territory. The United States cares about equivalent developments near its own borders. But a security interest is not identical to a political entitlement. If Russia’s discomfort gives it a veto over Ukraine’s alliances, Ukrainian sovereignty becomes conditional on Russian approval. The stronger principle is reciprocal restraint: Ukraine and NATO can accept limits on particular deployments or weapons if those arrangements genuinely improve mutual security, while Ukraine retains the fundamental authority to determine its political and economic institutions.
This is why neutrality is not automatically a fair compromise. A neutral Ukraine could reduce Russian fears of NATO expansion, but neutrality imposed because Russia invaded would also demonstrate that military force can determine another country’s alliances. A better arrangement may involve Ukraine remaining outside formal NATO membership while possessing substantial bilateral and European guarantees. The distinction is subtle but important: Ukraine refrains from joining an alliance as part of a reciprocal security settlement rather than because Russia possesses a permanent sovereign right to forbid it.
Trump’s transactional style may actually be useful at this stage because the dispute now contains many assets that can be exchanged: sanctions, frozen Russian reserves, reconstruction finance, prisoner exchanges, monitoring arrangements and restrictions on military deployments. Transactional diplomacy becomes strongest where agreements can be divided into reciprocal stages. It becomes dangerous only when political goods such as sovereignty are treated as though they are simply another tradable asset.
The frozen Russian assets are a good example. Europe still controls enormous quantities of immobilised Russian sovereign reserves. Some can potentially support Ukrainian reconstruction while the remainder provides bargaining leverage over Russian compliance. Spending everything immediately would maximise short-term resources but eliminate future leverage. Returning everything immediately would abandon a potential mechanism for ensuring reparations. A staged arrangement tied to compliance could make the assets part of the institutional architecture of peace rather than merely the financial spoils of war.
The Budapest summit should therefore be judged less by whether Trump announces another dramatic breakthrough and more by whether the agreement becomes increasingly self-enforcing. Does Russia gain enough from compliance that violating the ceasefire becomes economically expensive? Does Ukraine become sufficiently secure that it no longer needs permanent wartime mobilisation? Do Europeans possess enough capability that the settlement survives changes in American politics? Are territorial disputes managed without requiring immediate legal recognition of conquest?
These questions are less satisfying than declaring a winner, but that is precisely the point. Peace rarely settles every moral argument generated by war. It creates rules preventing unresolved arguments from continuing to kill people.
Ukraine should not be asked to forget that its territory was invaded. Russia cannot realistically be expected to behave as though its security preferences no longer matter simply because its invasion was unlawful. Europe cannot outsource indefinitely the enforcement of its own security order. America cannot assume its diplomatic leverage gives it ownership over the settlement.
The mature objective is therefore an imperfect equilibrium rather than a perfect verdict. International politics cannot always produce the justice each side believes history owes it. It can sometimes construct institutions strong enough that neither side believes reopening the dispute through violence will improve its position.
If Budapest advances that outcome, it will matter far more than another declaration that the war is over. The success of peace is not that former enemies finally agree about the past; it is that disagreement about the past stops determining whether they fight in the future.
