President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday didn’t yield the ceasefire deal Trump was hoping for, but there was apparently enough progress made that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and top European leaders are meeting with Trump in Washington today to discuss the possibility of peace negotiations and a deal to end to the war for good.
What might such a deal look like? Simply put, it would consist of territorial concessions in exchange for security agreements. Ukraine would cede portions of Russian-occupied territory in Crimea and the eastern provinces in exchange for a security alliance with the United States and European powers. Trump himself has alluded to this, mentioning “land swaps” ahead of his meeting with Putin on Friday.
This formula — Ukrainian territorial concessions in exchange for security and political independence — was always how the Ukraine war was going to end. The corporate press is pretending to be shocked and scandalized by the mention of an adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, but the outrage is feigned. Given Russia’s strategic imperatives and Ukraine’s indefensible borders, the broad outlines of a peace settlement are exactly what they were in February 2022, before Russia launched its invasion.
Putin himself, in his remarks to the press on Friday, affirmed the need for Ukrainian security, indicating that the Russians have likely resigned themselves to the inevitability of European troops in Ukraine once the war is over. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed that during Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Putin agreed with Trump that the U.S. and its European allies could, as part of a peace deal, offer Ukraine NATO-like security guarantees. “We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee,” Witkoff told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, describing it as “game-changing.”
