On Friday, after a grim-faced Volodymyr Zelensky departed the White House, President Trump wrote on social media that the Ukrainian leader could “come back when he is ready for Peace.”
Peace is a powerful word, but to grasp its true meaning one has to look at the context in which it is uttered. On the same day that Mr. Trump spoke of the importance of peace and sent Mr. Zelensky home to think about it, Russia launched more than 150 attack drones on Ukrainian cities. While Mr. Trump emphasizes that he is making great progress with President Vladimir Putin of Russia toward peace, the latter has only increased his strikes since the inauguration.
On Sunday, European leaders, Secretary General Mark Rutte of NATO and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada gathered in London at the invitation of Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, and pledged to bolster support for Ukraine and develop a plan to end the war that could win the support of Mr. Trump.
Europeans understand, as the Trump administration appears not to, that Ukraine wants a peace deal — it just doesn’t want to end up destroyed by the peace terms. The obsession of Mr. Putin is all of Ukraine, nothing less. It is neither NATO nor a strip of Ukrainian land. If Ukraine is still independent and armed by the end of negotiations, Mr. Putin will not see that as the end. He will settle for a piece of Ukraine today only to come for the whole tomorrow.
If it were about NATO, then Mr. Putin would not have so meekly accepted Sweden and Finland’s accession in 2023. Today, NATO’s frontier is closer to St. Petersburg than Ukraine’s border is to Moscow.
Nor is the point to retain the roughly 20 percent of territory that Russia has managed to wrest from Ukraine so far in this war. Mr. Putin cannot tolerate an independent Ukraine because for the last 300 years almost none of his predecessors could. And because if Ukraine is successful as a Western democracy, it will pose a direct threat to the Russian people’s acceptance of Mr. Putin’s autocratic model.
Mr. Trump has made a cease-fire in Ukraine too central to his foreign policy to not succeed. He cannot fail to make a deal and he certainly cannot allow Ukraine to become what Afghanistan was to President Joe Biden, a foreign policy disaster that defined the rest of his presidency. Trapped by his own ambition, Mr. Trump craves fast success — hence last week’s attack on Mr. Zelensky, whose insistence on terms Ukraine can live with seems to stand in the way of it. Mr. Putin understands this. He therefore may concede to a cease-fire to take the maximum benefits offered by Mr. Trump, but he will not abandon his strategic goal of destroying Ukraine. Without security guarantees the war will, at some point, start again.
Friday’s events were the formalization of a new reality that has been becoming apparent for several weeks: America may still seek to lead the world, but it’s a different world. And if there was any silver lining to the scene of Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berating Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, it was the shock waves it sent across Europe. European leaders who had heard Mr. Vance’s words of admonishment at Munich in February already grasped that they could not simply wait out Mr. Trump as they did during his first term. Any who still doubted that were surely convinced by Friday’s performance.
Europe has already taken important steps and it’s promising to do more: Summits, telephone calls, draft decisions on a surge in defense spending and announcements of assistance to Ukraine are now happening at a blistering pace. As welcome as these developments are, they fail to answer the most fundamental question about the future of Ukraine and the rest of Europe: When? When will these ideas become decisions that are carried out?
Mr. Trump’s leverage over Ukraine is weapons and money, both of which Ukraine needs to sustain its fight for survival and maintain economic stability. Europe could wrest the cards from the president’s hands in two moves: offer an alternative agreement on Ukraine’s minerals and confiscate Russian frozen assets to use them to finance the production and purchase of arms — including from the United States, if they wish. The European Union, Britain and Norway could not entirely replace the United States as Ukraine’s supporters, but these pragmatic steps would instantly elevate Europe’s role and give Ukraine the breathing room it needs.
In 1918, Bolshevik Russia entered into a treaty with Germany, undertaking to recognize Ukraine’s independence, withdraw its forces and cease propaganda on Ukrainian territory. At the same time, Kyiv signed an agreement with Germany to exchange vast natural resources — primarily grain and meat — in return for German boots on the ground to protect its independence. Within a year the deal collapsed. Germany moved out, Russia’s Red Army moved in and the state of Ukraine ceased to exist. It took 104 years between then and the Russian invasion in 2022 for Europe to finally recognize that Ukraine belongs to it by putting it on the track of the E.U. accession process.
Moscow never really changes, but Europe still might.
