Former US ambassador urges Trump to avoid bad Ukraine deal ‘for the sake of signing something’
A former US ambassador has urged Donald Trump to learn the lessons of history and not force through a bad Ukraine peace deal for the sake of it.
The US president is trying to get both Kyiv and Moscow to agree an end to the war and presented Ukraine with a 28-point plan after discussing it with Russia. Subsequent talks in Geneva have resulted in an alternate 19-point framework that Ukraine largely supports – but it remains to be seen whether the Kremlin is still on board.
Ukraine’s allies in Europe have expressed concern that Trump could force Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a bad peace deal in his rush to get any kind of agreement signed. Trump had initially given Ukraine until Thanksgiving to back his plan, before rowing back from the strict deadline.
Speaking at a briefing hosted by the US think-tank the Atlantic Council, experts monitoring the negotiations cautioned that a bad deal for Ukraine was also “a strategic defeat for the free world”.
While very different circumstances, some have drawn comparisons between Trump’s eagerness to end US involvement in the Ukraine conflict with the rush to withdraw Nato forces from Afghanistan.
In February 2020, Trump signed a deal following protracted negotiations with the Taliban in Doha that he said would “bring peace” to that country under a democratic government.
Instead, after the subsequent Biden administration followed through with the deal and Nato forces were pulled out, the Taliban’s jihadist forces stormed the country and the former Nato-backed government collapsed in a matter of weeks.
The international community still does not recognise the legitimacy of the Taliban regime now installed in Kabul.
Daniel Fried, the former US ambassador to Poland who helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine after 2014’s illegal annexation of Crimea, said the conflict in Europe and the Afghanistan war are “not alike” – but lessons can and should be learned.
“A bad framework, such as the happily-overtaken 28 points, could presage a strategic defeat for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the free world generally,” he told The Independent. “We seem to be past that point, perhaps because some within the administration recognised that failure in Ukraine could indeed become Trump’s Big Defeat.
“The lesson to be learned? Don’t sign on to bad deals for the sake of signing something,” he said.
Trump has been criticised for trying to push Ukraine into giving up territory to Russian aggression, but the fact is that any deal to end the war will likely require difficult compromises, says Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
He says that with Russia occupying around 20 per cent of all Ukrainian territory, the ship of a just peace in the war has long since sailed.
Even in the “bad 28-point plan” that Russia appeared to back, Mr Kroenig says, there were elements that the negotiating teams can work with.
