The Counter-Offer

Some thoughts… These two deals aren’t all that far apart. The biggest difference is making the security guarantee clearer and more explicit in this formulation. Ukraine’s right of self-defense is more explicit. Financial compensation, kidnapped children, and POWs are all mentioned here after being left implicit in the US draft. The bear in the room, so to speak, is that Russia is not yet part of this deal. The initial offer and this counter are internal to the Western coalition. As of yet we have no real idea if the Russians are willing to give up their core demands. One might hope that Trump and Witkoff have some notion of Russian intentions from the weeks of sporadic negotiations, but we don’t really know.

I do want to clear up some misconceptions from the previous thread. Narrow territorial adjustments aside, Russia and Ukraine are fighting about three things right now: the nature and existence of a Western security guarantee, the domestic latitude of a future Ukrainian government, and the ability of Ukraine to re-arm. Russia wants to eliminate the first, narrow the second, and place hard restrictions on the third. Ukraine is resisting these three demands by force of arms. Isolation is aimed at undercutting any long-term support for Kyiv. Denazification is aimed at turning Ukraine into something on the spectrum between Cold War Finland and modern Belarus. Disarmament is aimed at turning Ukraine into Weimar Germany. Contra some of the claims made in the previous thread, political control and disarmament aren’t jokes. Russia shot itself in the foot in 2014 by cleaving off the most pro-Russian parts of Ukraine and angering the rest, turning a manageable diplomatic and intelligence issue into an insoluble difficulty. 2022 was expected to resolve that by creating an autocratic regime in Kyiv that would be beholden to Moscow, but that effort failed. Russia now faces an irreconcilably hostile state with a territorial grudge on its western border, potentially backed by the most important powers in Europe. From Russia’s point of view (and this is not to sympathize or even empathize with Russia, just to try to understand Putin’s perspective) control over the existing territory is nice but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem, which is why Russia has been relatively cold to even Trump’s proposal.

Moreover, Moscow’s problems are tied together. Russia is an immensely large and powerful country, but Russian political history is punctuated by period of abject military and political weakness. During such periods (four of which happened in the 20th century; 1905, 1918, 1938, and 1991) adversaries have consistently tried to take advantage of Russian weakness. A Ukraine that is strong enough to deter Russian attack and angry enough to seek revenge is a Ukraine that could threaten Russia security in the event of another military/political collapse. This is not lost on Putin; he lived through one of these periods and is familiar with the other three.

This does not mean that Russia gets everything it wants. Russia missed out on solving its strategic problem in March 2022, and thus far it does not seem that the Trump administration is willing to help out; I cannot reinforce enough that however bad the offer Rubio et al put in front of Ukraine, it absolutely does not fulfill Russian war demands and does not solve Russia’s problems. Russia may feel compelled to accept something near the terms in these deals out of either desperation or a hope that the question can be profitably revisited a few years down the line, but this is definitely not the deal that Moscow wants.

On a related point… some other folks asked “how do we trust Russia?” and “how do we trust Trump?” but both of those miss the point. The whole purpose of combining a security guarantee with a Ukrainian right to self-defense is that Russia is inherently untrustworthy; the purpose of placing the heaviest load on the Europeans for the security guarantee is to hedge against US untrustworthiness. In other words, distrust of both Moscow and Washington is baked into the cake by this point. Neither Western formulation of the agreement thus far expects peace to survive based on Moscow’s good will or good word; peace will hold because of the threat posed by the force of Ukrainian arms combined with some as yet undetermined promise of Western support.

Finally… There are parts of this deal that are simply not Ukraine’s to decide. It cannot force any Western country to offer a security guarantee and cannot mandate the nature of that guarantee. It cannot force the Trump administration to maintain sanctions (more on that later) or maintain Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Discussion of Kyiv’s choices should focus on what Ukraine can do with the military and diplomatic tools it has, not on whether Russia or the United States have behaved in an appropriate fashion. Also, while it’s wrong to embrace the strong Realist contention that might makes right and that Ukraine should endure what it must (this isn’t even realistic in the sense of describing the actual observed behavior of states in the international system), it’s important to observe the weak realist contention that ends must be aligned with means. What cannot be accomplished through Ukrainian arms probably cannot be accomplished at the negotiation table, either.