A recipe for an unfair stalemate, not a just peace

President Donald J. Trump welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Anchorage, Alaska, August 15, 2025. Photo: Benjamin Applebaum / Department of Defense / wikimedia.org

Earlier this week, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met for a redo of their disastrous February 2025 meeting that had set the entire western world on edge. That earlier encounter left the open question of where America’s allegiance might lie. In the months since, while that question lingered, Russia has made incremental gains on the front lines in eastern Ukraine.

Now, Russia appears tired of its grinding advance. Vladimir Putin wants a deal on the table: the entirety of the Donbas in exchange for some loose security agreement along the lines of the Minsk agreements. And Donald Trump seems to back this as a peace plan.

Over just a few days, Trump has met with both Putin and Zelenskyy. In Alaska, he gave Putin exactly what he wanted: images standing side by side with the American president at an air base designed to contain Russia’s nuclear power. Putin’s image was rehabilitated from shunned war criminal to peer of the most powerful man in the world.

Trump, for his part, was playing to his domestic audience rather than advancing any meaningful peace deal. With Congress in August recess, he has used the moment to step onto the international stage as a dealmaker—buying himself space from the Epstein scandal and from the politically toxic bills his party is pushing through.

For the last week, Trump has pursued shuttle diplomacy: speaking with Putin without revealing details, then sitting down with Zelenskyy. What seems clear is that Trump’s preferred plan mirrors Putin’s: Ukraine gives up 20 per cent of its territory in exchange for vague security guarantees that Russia has little reason to believe the West will enforce.

Trump risks becoming a modern-day Radcliffe or Durand—drawing borders on a map for political convenience, while millions live with the consequences.

Like those colonial partitions, this proposal would cut through existing communities, ignoring history and culture in favour of solving a problem quickly. By cleaving off a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, Trump’s plan would leave millions of Ukrainians under Russian occupation.

Every deal that trades Ukrainian land for empty promises teaches Putin the same lesson: invade again, and the West will blink.

Among Ukrainians, the prevailing view is that such a deal only plants the seeds of another invasion. Putin has learned the lesson that he can carve away Ukrainian land every few years without facing serious consequences. Russia’s economy has not collapsed under sanctions in the way the Biden administration had predicted. Western drip-feeding of defensive arms has prevented Ukraine’s collapse, but has not been enough to allow it to win the war.

The story began in 2014, when Ukrainians revolted against a Putin-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, who tried to turn their country eastward. Ukrainians wanted to look west, toward liberal democracy. They understood the cost of sliding back into authoritarianism even as much of the West still dismissed Putin’s ambitions. That year, Putin invaded Crimea. The conflict ended in the Minsk agreements, with Ukraine losing territory in exchange for vague western guarantees.

When Putin invaded again in 2022, he expected little resistance. Instead, he met Ukrainian resolve and surprising western unity. Yet now he seeks much the same deal: to keep the territory he has fed soldiers into a meat-grinder for, in exchange for the diplomatic equivalent of a stern warning.

This seems to be where the world is stalling. It is difficult to know if Trump’s personal diplomacy is making headway. As much as I oppose many of his aims, Trump’s style is unlike anything we have seen before in an American president—and that alone might open a pathway.

Zelenskyy and European leaders who stood beside him seem cautiously optimistic that Trump’s plan is not set in stone—that he may instead be offering an opening that puts American power back on the table. This moment matters. Putin does not recognize Zelenskyy as a legitimate leader, nor Ukraine as a legitimate country. Zelenskyy has already thrown down a gauntlet, offering to meet Putin face-to-face.

The West is giving Ukraine just enough to survive, but never enough to win. That is a recipe for stalemate, not peace.

Yet the likeliest outcome still seems an awkward stalemate. The Americans and Europeans will give Ukraine just enough to survive, but not enough to repel Russian aggression. Russia will hold at least de facto control over the Donbas, setting the stage for another generation of conflict. Ukrainians will be left yearning for freedoms denied to them by a West unwilling to meet the moment.

Some conflicts cannot be resolved with sanctions. Some invading armies can only be met with force. Trump, however, appears less interested in defending democracy in Europe than in securing a PR victory that ends a thorny conflict at any cost—even if it generates a deeper, more complicated problem down the line.

Trump may win the headline of a peace deal, but it would leave Ukraine bleeding and set the stage for the next war.

Cory Alpert is a researcher at the University of Melbourne and previously served for three years in the White House of US President Joe Biden.

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Donald Trump, peace talks, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, US-Russia relations, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, West-Russia relations