Kyiv, Ukraine – With unprecedented backing from European leaders, Ukraine seems – in theory – to have secured “very good protection” from the United States.
“We will give them very good protection, very good security,” US President Donald Trump said on Monday, sitting next to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven helmsmen from Europe.
The meeting followed the Trump-hosted summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which yielded no ceasefire.
Many questions loom about how the collective Western aegis will help Kyiv navigate a peace deal with Moscow and shield it from the resumption of hostilities.
A Ukrainian military analyst is sceptical about the real outcome of Monday’s gathering.
“No decision has been made from the viewpoint of security guarantees, the supply of arms and [the deployment of Western] troops,” Lt Gen Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.
No ‘direct conflict’ with Russia
The security guarantees are vague, undefined and will most likely be “relative”, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.
A mutual assistance deal with Washington and Brussels guaranteeing their rapid military intervention if Russia attacks Ukraine “is hardly possible”, he told Al Jazeera.
“Because we’re talking about Russia with nuclear weapons, and Americans along with Europeans will avoid the risk of a direct military conflict with Russia,” he said.
What may secure the guarantees is a Trump-backed deal that removes the fiscal burden of protecting Ukraine from US taxpayers, provides US arms manufacturers with hefty profits and makes Europe foot the bill.
Zelenskyy said he agreed to the future supply of US-made weapons worth $100bn that Europe will pay for and will take years to manufacture and deliver.
The new mechanism has been dubbed PURL – the Prioritised Ukraine’s Requirements List – and Berlin has already agreed to contribute $500bn for military equipment and munitions.
‘Unacceptable deployment’
A “symbolic guarantee” could be the deployment of a European peacekeeping contingent to Ukraine that could become a containment factor, Fesenko said.
“But Russia is categorically against it, and that would be a problem at further talks,” he added.
Moscow bristled at the prospect, calling it the “reanimation of an obviously unviable idea” that is “categorically unacceptable” in any format, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday.
Another possible guarantee could be Kyiv’s strategic partnership deal with Washington, modelled after similar accords with Egypt or South Korea, Fesenko said.
Unlike the February debacle at the White House, when Trump and his Vice President JD Vance insulted Zelenskyy for being “ungrateful” and briefly halted US military aid, this time Trump seems to have warmed up to the Ukrainian leader.
“The White House didn’t want a scandal, it wanted an accord, constructive decisions,” Fesenko said.
Zelenskyy also changed his ways around Trump; instead of his trademark military fatigues, on Monday he wore official attire – a black suit – and showered the host with “thank yous”.
He also held his ground – literally and metaphorically – by not agreeing to cede the eastern Donbas region that Putin demands as a precondition for freezing the front line in other regions.
Zelenskyy “managed to find an ideal balance between the principled defence of his main points, including the matter of ceding territories to Russia”, Fesenko said.
Controlling the exports
Some analysts suggest that while providing Ukraine with funds, arms and diplomatic support, the European Union failed to curb crucial military exports to Russia.
“It didn’t do the only thing that seriously threatened Russia’s military machine from Europe, namely, it didn’t take any real steps to limit the export of equipment, materials and tools for military industries to Russia,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.
The war revealed Russia’s technological disadvantage: A lack of machine tools and electronics for its advanced weaponry, observers have said.
Moscow has ramped up the purchase of such tools and chips, mostly through former Soviet republics such as Kyrgyzstan.
The EU could have easily facilitated a system of checking the final destination of these exports and imposing colossal fines on the manufacturers and exporters who allowed them to reach Russia, Mitrokhin said.
“Russia could have hardly found an adequate replacement in China or other nations, especially during the war’s first stage,” he said.
Focusing on China
Trump’s seemingly abrupt about-face regarding a peace settlement in Ukraine could actually be rooted in Washington’s bigger geopolitical strategy.
The Russian-Ukrainian war has cost the White House hundreds of billions of dollars and rocked its relationship with the Kremlin.
But Washington’s main geopolitical rival is Beijing, not Moscow, and Trump is reluctant to spend hundreds of billions more to deter Russia, analysts said.
“That’s the money that can be invested in the re-industrialisation of the United States that is of paramount importance in the context of countering China,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.
The White House does not want to bet its entire geopolitical potential on a nuclear escalation with Russia the way it did during the Cold War.
China reaped enormous geopolitical gains from the Cold War escalation after US former President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit to Beijing and Washington’s subsequent push to invest in China’s industrialisation.
“China always wins in case of a confrontation between the US and Russia,” Kushch said.
Therefore, Trump needs the Russian-Ukrainian war to be over so that Washington can focus on containing China, he added.
Putin’s ‘hoodlum mindset’
The peace settlement and security guarantees are complicated by the fundamental difference between the way the West and Russia see the war, a Ukrainian war veteran said.
While Western politicians see any conflict as beneficial or detrimental to their nations’ interests, Putin has the mindset of a hoodlum who always wants to look tough, said Yuri Bohdanchenko, who lost his right leg after stepping on a Russian landmine in the southern region of Kherson in 2023.
“Putin thought that conquering us would be easy, but when he faced so much resistance, he didn’t stop because he didn’t want the world to consider him weak,” he told Al Jazeera.
Putin snubs the skyrocketing death toll and Russia’s deepening economic degradation – and understands that the war’s end threatens his grip on power, Bohdanchenko said.
“Fighting is cheap, considering the [high] oil prices and the propaganda effect at home, when he can use the war as an excuse to purge anyone who dares say a word against him, his people and the corruption they breed,” he said.
