The Terms of Ukraine’s Defeat, and Ours

If adopted, the proposed peace plan would yield a victory to Moscow greater than the one it set out to achieve on the battlefield.

D onald Trump has made it a personal ambition to end as many wars as possible. He did not, however, say that those wars had to end on terms favorable to the United States.

In Ukraine’s case, the president and his subordinates have shown too many indications to ignore that they want Russia’s war of conquest to end immediately, and the fastest way to do that is to appease the aggressor into temporarily backing away from its maximal expansionist objectives. It’s a devil’s pact, but it is one to which this administration is committed.

The contemptible document the Trump administration is currently muscling Kyiv into accepting is an outgrowth of that approach. It outlines the terms of Ukraine’s humiliating surrender, and, if adopted, would yield a victory to Moscow greater than the one it set out to achieve on the battlefield.

We don’t need to parse all 28 stages of the alleged peace agreement that Trump’s negotiators hammered out with the Russians, excluding Europe and Ukraine from providing input into their respective fates. But we should dwell on a few key features of the agreement, which goes right off the rails from the jump.

Following point one, establishing in the most nebulous terms possible that “Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed” (as though that were a condition subject to debate), the proposed deal affirms that a “non-aggression” agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe will be struck. “All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled,” the memorandum reads.

That is Russian language. Indeed, it probably reads better in the original Russian in which it was reportedly drafted. The only “ambiguities” in this conflict are those that Russia is theatrically befuddled by, like the permanence of Ukraine’s internationally recognized 1991 borders. This is Russian shorthand for what the Kremlin calls the “root causes of the war,” by which the regime in Moscow means the Soviet Union’s collapse and the West’s absorption of the former Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

“It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further,” it continues. Well, if it’s “expected”! In addition, there will be a “dialogue” between Russia and the NATO alliance in which the United States will serve as “mediator,” aimed at resolving all the grievances that Russia has with the consequences that flowed from the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

Maybe Trump’s negotiators conceive of the United States as a neutral party within the NATO alliance that can mediate its conflicts with its foreign adversaries, but that says a lot more about their own insecurities than it does about America’s prima inter paras status within the Atlantic Alliance.

We’re only at point four here, people.

The agreement supposedly allows Ukraine to seek membership in the European Union and assures Kyiv that it will have “reliable security guarantees,” but you should only believe it when you see it. It was Ukraine’s ambition to integrate economically with the EU, not NATO, that led Russia to invade in 2014 (when a Russian puppet president abnegated a Ukrainian parliament effort to facilitate that integration) and in 2022 (after Ukraine established in 2021 its intention to complete its EU ascension by 2024).

In addition, NATO’s security guarantees are reliable not because they’re written down on a piece of paper. They are rendered concrete by the integration of member states into a shared command-and-control architecture, and they are facilitated by the rotating presence of alliance troops and equipment in their respective territories. This deal would deny all of that to Ukraine.

Not only does this agreement give Russia a veto over NATO’s ability to “station” troops in Ukraine, but it would also cap Ukraine’s armed forces at 600,000 personnel (Ukraine currently has about 800,000 men at arms). It even concedes generously that Poland will be allowed to host NATO warplanes. Why does Russia get to decide where NATO moves its forces or what kind of military its “sovereign” neighbor gets to field?

That’s hardly the only dispensation Russia gets from this agreement. It would also functionally limit NATO membership by pledging to cease the alliance’s expansion irrespective of the desire of its constituent member states or aspiring members. Again, Russia is the beneficiary of a level of deference utterly divorced from the bargaining position it should have, given its tactical setbacks and material deficiencies.

The document ratifies the propagandist notion peddled by Moscow and its allies that Nazism is rampant in Ukraine by compelling it to forswear Nazism. It hands the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant over to the United Nations and grants Russia 50 percent of its power output. It compels the West to violate one of its first principles by recognizing the legitimacy of Moscow’s forceful acquisition of Ukrainian territory (the United States didn’t even recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet occupation of the Baltics!). Perhaps worst of all, it would force Ukraine to hand over the whole of the Donbas — a territory roughly the size of Delaware that is rugged and fortified, and which Russia could not take through force over the last eleven years of war. The Ukrainians understand that this is a launchpad from which Russia could and likely would embark on a third war for control of Ukraine’s major population centers — among them Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kherson, and Kyiv.

We’re so often told by advocates of the West’s capitulation in the face of Russian aggression that surrender is the hard-nosed realist proposition. There is nothing high-minded about this proposal. Indeed, it is detached from any strategic understanding of the broader geopolitical landscape. By cutting Europe out and presenting it with the imminent prospect of a rump and possibly failed Ukrainian state, it raises the stakes for the Continent and likely convinces its Trump skeptics that America is an untrustworthy ally. We should not want that.

Conservatives have long argued that America’s partners should take a larger role in their own defense, but only to be an active steward of American interests as defined by the American president. Republicans especially should understand that, if we merely “lead from behind,” Europe will not stand up to our shared adversaries.

And the Europeans are already fit to be tied over this proposal. They’re busily cobbling together something that more actively seeks to preserve the West’s strategic position in Europe. The nascent evidence of a transatlantic schism is something Moscow will welcome and cultivate. After all, Ukraine is small potatoes compared with the prospect of weakening the Continent’s relationship with Washington — perhaps foremost among Moscow’s geopolitical objectives since 1945.

But the Trump administration seems wedded to this course. The White House is presently strong-arming Kyiv with an ultimatum: Take this deal or see the United States cut off all weapons and intelligence-sharing. In other words, you can lose the war on our terms or yours.

It is nauseating that the United States is party to this effort, much less leading it. It isn’t just a violation of the American national character but an abdication of our duty to preserve the post–Cold War global order that Americans were blessed to inherit. If it proceeds, it will be a stain on the Trump administration’s legacy of which we will be regularly reminded. The consequences that flow from it will be profoundly regrettable, and the origins of America’s diminished strategic position not just in Europe but the world will be obvious to all.