Ukraine Negotiations

Audrey reports that President Trump’s envoys on the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine — i.e., the president’s business associate Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner — claim, yet again, that a peace deal is close at hand. This is principally because the Trump administration is purportedly in a position to deliver, and Russia is willing to accept, “Article 5–like” security guarantees for Ukraine.

Count me a persistent skeptic.

To state what ought to be the obvious, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As I’ve pointed out before, “Article 5” refers to the key provision in the NATO treaty: the collective defense provision that NATO countries must consider an attack on one member state to be an attack on all. Article 5 is of concern to Russia, as it was always of concern to the Soviet Union, because it is a pledge backed by ratified law. It’s not just an empty executive agreement. The binding treaty is the basis for all of NATO’s joint defense arrangements.

If Ukraine doesn’t have treaty guarantees, it doesn’t have anything.

Remember, Ukraine has already had executive-agreement-level security guarantees from the United States, Britain, and Russia itself — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which Moscow, along with Washington and London, “Reaffirme[ed its] commitment” to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” and to refrain from both the use of force and economic coercion against Kiev’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” The agreement was never ratified as a treaty, and it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on when Russia took Crimea in 2014 — after which Vladimir Putin’s regime launched the border war with Ukraine that has never really ceased, and in 2022 commenced the ongoing war by its unprovoked invasion.

And think about it: The actual, treaty-based NATO security guarantee is supposed to deter Russia from invading a member state and seizing its territory. Yet, we are somehow to accept that the cost of the phantom “Article 5–like” security guarantee being pushed by Witkoff and Kushner is that Ukraine will have to surrender to Russia territory that Russia has been unable to capture in four years of fighting. How can an arrangement that starts with rewarding Russia for invading by giving it territory — so it doesn’t need to invade again to seize it — conceivably be described as “Article 5–like”?

Under the Constitution’s treaty clause, an international agreement is not binding unless the Senate approves it by a two-thirds supermajority. Is there such a majority in the Senate willing to bind the United States to NATO’s security guarantee for Ukraine? I doubt it. And that’s not just because much of the president’s base would oppose such a commitment for Ukraine; a more basic problem is that Ukraine doesn’t qualify. As things now stand, Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO because it is embroiled in a territorial dispute that is not only likely to lead to the use of force but that has already resulted in a forcible conflict, ongoing for eleven years. (See, e.g., NATO Study on Enlargement (Sept. 3, 1995) (“States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] principles.”)

I don’t believe Russia is going to give up its claim on Ukraine as a whole, but it is certainly not going to stop claiming Russian sovereignty over Ukraine’s eastern border areas. And I’d be surprised if Ukraine agreed to concede, based on Russia’s 2014 aggression, that Crimea is permanently Russia’s territory. Hence, why would two-thirds of the Senate (or the full Congress if Trump tried to achieve an “Article 5–like” arrangement by implementing legislation) ratify something “like” NATO’s key collective defense term for Ukraine’s benefit when (a) Ukraine doesn’t qualify for NATO by NATO’s own standards, and (b) it doesn’t qualify precisely because it is in a territorial dispute that is likely to lead to more Russian aggression and, therefore, trigger a U.S. obligation to make good on its security guarantee by confronting, and potentially going to war against, Russia?

I believe the president would like to be the object of international adulation for ending wars. But these ballyhooed “peace deals” that don’t produce peace have to be scrutinized with an eye toward whether they could produce peace as structured (or at least as spun).

I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’ve never thought the 21-Point Plan negotiated for Trump by Witkoff and Kushner had a prayer of ending the post-October 7 Gaza War. I salute them for getting the 20 remaining living hostages back, but (a) the remains of the final hostage were never delivered (and Hamas fraudulently delivered remains of other dead people); (b) Hamas was never going to disarm; (c) Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner do not seem to grasp sharia supremacism; if they did, they would know that jihadist Hamas could not agree to disarm and still exist as Hamas, and that Palestinians have supported Hamas over the years (including voting Hamas into power) because they reject Israel’s existence; (d) some of the countries Trump touted as parties to the 21-Point Plan — e.g., Turkey and Qatar — remain Hamas supporters and would be patrons of any sharia supremacist jihadist organization that replaced Hamas; (e) the cease-fire agreement required Israel to release 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including terrorists, which is helping Hamas reload; (f) not surprisingly, the fighting has never stopped: Hamas has attacked Israeli security forces and is stockpiling weapons even as Trump officials claim it will disarm, while over the weekend, Israel killed Hamas commander Raed Saad, one of the October 7 masterminds; and (g) no country is going to take on the thankless task of supplying troops for an international peacekeeping force, especially when there is no peace.

Similarly, I’m not buying a Ukraine peace deal that is based on flimflam — as it must be if it proceeds on the pretexts that Putin can be trusted, Ukraine is responsible for a war in which it was invaded by a recidivist aggressor, and the United States is just a neutral broker between an aspiring pro-Western European democracy and a murderous, incorrigibly anti-American thug state.