United States President Donald Trump did not stop the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration, as he promised during the election campaign last year. But three weeks into his presidency, things got moving in that direction at a breakneck speed.
On February 12, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin and then posted on Truth Social that they agreed to work together in order to stop “millions of deaths taking place” in the Ukraine-Russia war. This was followed by the announcement of a possible summit between the two in Saudi Arabia.
On February 13, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out some of the specifics of the US proposal to end the war during a speech at the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
In an abrupt departure from the key talking points of the previous US administration, he said Ukraine cannot hope to restore sovereignty over its entire territory and that its NATO membership should be off the table to get the talks going.
With these statements, the Trump administration effectively struck down the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership which laid out mutual commitment to territorial integrity and inviolability of borders and identified Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions (NATO and the European Union) as a priority policy goal.
Some Western media outlets were quick to declare “Ukraine’s betrayal” following the statements of Trump and Hegseth. Washington is indeed abandoning Kyiv, but this is not a surprise development. The abandonment has always been a likely outcome of the US approach to relations with Ukraine.
And Trump is not to blame for setting it up. Kyiv was betrayed by those who promised it NATO and EU membership so it fights Russia and rejects any compromise in a war it cannot win.
In the past three years, the West reached the upper limit of what it could feasibly do in terms of supplying weapons and imposing economic sanctions without triggering World War III or badly damaging the world economy. Continuing this costly backing longer would not have changed the reality that Russia is bigger and richer than Ukraine and is able to sustain an army that has adapted to modern warfare and cannot be defeated by large quantities of state-of-the-art Western military technology. Above all, Russia would always have the final word in any regional war as a major nuclear power – a factor that restricts Western involvement in the conflict.
Sooner or later a US administration was going to cut support for Ukraine because it was unsustainable. It just so happened that the decision was made by a Republican administration. The Democrats are lucky that they did not have to do it and now get to use it in their domestic battle against the GOP.
Meanwhile, despite a few angry escapades in recent days, Ukraine’s European partners may begin to fall in line with the US on Ukrainian membership. On February 14, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said there was never a guarantee that Ukraine would join the alliance as part of a peace deal with Russia.
This statement contradicted some of his earlier pledges. In December 2024, the newly appointed Rutte said at a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine’s “path to membership is irreversible” and that it was “closer to NATO than ever”.
While NATO membership now seems completely off the table for Ukraine, the Trump administration does not appear to be completely ignoring Ukraine. In a nod to Ukrainian demands for Western security guarantees, Hegseth mentioned the possibility of deploying European and non-European peacekeepers to observe and enforce a ceasefire. He did rule out the deployment of American troops and said peacekeepers from NATO countries should not be covered by NATO’s Article 5 which allows for a joint response against an attack on any alliance member.
This proposition will hardly reassure Ukrainians. Zelenskyy has repeatedly said that Western security guarantees are of little value without US involvement. At the same time, the Kremlin will likely see any NATO troops on Ukrainian territory as a Trojan horse, so the idea is unlikely to take off when the talks begin in earnest.
Non-NATO European troops should not be an issue for Moscow, but non-NATO European states like Austria and Serbia can likely supply just a few thousand troops. The main contingents will, therefore, have to come from the Global South.
That said, the whole peacekeeper issue is overblown. The only way to guarantee stable peace is to establish Ukraine’s genuine non-alignment and advance rapprochement between Russia and the West.
Does this mean a win for the Kremlin? Yes, it does, but this has been the only realistic outcome since Ukraine got thrown under Putin’s bulldozer by Western hawks.
Contrary to various Western predictions that the Russian economy will collapse and the regime will crumble under war pressure, Russia has managed to fare relatively well throughout this conflict. Its economy has been booming thanks to lavish defence spending and – unlike Ukrainians – the Russian population has been effectively shielded from the war becoming a major factor in their lives.
Putin clearly cannot be defeated on the battlefield. He can only be brought down if the Russian people are on board. But the West and Ukraine have done everything to alienate even the most staunchly pro-Ukrainian anti-Putin Russians through xenophobic rhetoric and discriminative policies. It seemed that the hawkish crowd always wanted war, not a better Ukraine and Russia.
The choices Ukraine is left with are all grim. This was apparent in Zelenskyy’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was meant to show defiance but smacked of desperation.
He turned to the EU proposing that the Ukrainian army become the core of a new European military force. This is also unlikely to work because it brings the EU into direct confrontation with Russia. The Ukrainian president also tried to interest Trump in Ukraine’s mineral riches only to receive an ultimatum from his administration tantamount to an imperialist confiscation of Ukrainian resources.
But all of this is intended for his domestic audience. Zelenskyy needs to show that he has tried every avenue, even the most improbable ones, and that the West still betrayed him. With that, he can then succumb to the inevitable.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
