Europe Needs to Follow Zelensky’s Lead in Challenging Washington’s Appeasement

The latest big news is of a possible trilateral meeting between Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin to conclude a potential Ukraine “peace” deal. Seemingly, according to a WSJ article, Putin offered Trump such a mini summit in their call on Oct. 9 - that’s the call at which a Russia-US diesel deal was thrashed out. The idea is that the three leaders meet on the sidelines of the scheduled APEC summit slated for 18-19 Nov. in the Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The Trump administration has yet to confirm whether Trump has agreed to take up Putin’s offer of a summit meeting. But the signs are ominous, as it’s on the back of a long list now of actions by Trump that smack of appeasement of Russia – from bringing Putin out of the Western freeze and inviting him to the Anchorage summit, the diesel deal as above, and this week also announcing a delay in the rollout of the Lindsay Graham sanctions bill. It also comes after the U.S. seems to have limited intelligence sharing with Ukraine that has hampered Ukraine’s defense and cost lives.

Trump has tried to explain all this away as not wanting to do anything that risked Putin pulling away from peace talks on Ukraine.

The harsh reality, though, is that Trump has now established a clear track record of pulling punches on President Putin – from his entire second term in office, and indeed before. And yet, this seems to have achieved very little, despite numerous rounds of peace talks, including those run by Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner.

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Remember here that Trump suggested that cutting a Ukraine peace plan would be easy, and he could get the two sides to agree within weeks of taking office for his second term, then by Easter 2025, then by year-end 2026, and here we now are close to the end of 2026, and Trump’s appeasement of Putin seems to have achieved absolutely nothing.

Worse than that, I think it has emboldened Putin to prolong the war, as he thinks that with Trump in office, the Western alliance in defense of Ukraine will inevitably collapse, offering him up the whole of Ukraine on a plate. And the latter has always been Putin’s ambition.

It gets more war, and unfortunately Ukraine has ended up paying the price in more blood and lives lost. Now Trump seems to just be repeating the prior mistakes of Schroeder, Hollande, Merkel, Macron et al.

And the latest gift to Putin is a wet dream for Putin, a great power summit, as he will see it, where Russia, China, and the US can do what great powers do – divide up the world into spheres of influence. This would be Putin’s Yalta II.

Trump is either ignorant of history or uncaring of the fate of Ukraine and Europe. For Trump, the win is just appearing on the same stage as Xi and Putin, and a place in summit history, albeit I would add ignominy, rather as was the case for Chamberlain in 1938 over Czechoslovakia.

The only problem for Trump with this Yalta 2 is that, with no Ukraine or Europe represented, I don’t see how it can deliver a meaningful peace in the war in Ukraine.

Trump might agree to Putin’s terms that Ukraine needs to deliver the rest of Donbas to Ukraine, but I cannot see Zelensky agreeing to that unless Trump is willing to offer, in exchange, cast-iron security guarantees that if Putin breaks any such agreement the US will then go to war with Russia to defend the rest of Ukraine.

Trump is never going to offer any such security assurance, and even if he did, I don’t think the Ukrainians would trust it, since they don’t trust Trump and don’t really trust such an assurance after being let down over the Budapest Memorandum in 1994.

The Ukrainians also don’t trust Putin, as they assume, quite rightly, that this war was never about Donbas, but Putin’s desires for the whole of Ukraine. So they assume that once they surrender their fortress defense in Donbas – defended valiantly over 12 years now – Putin would take them and just drive on further into Ukraine.

Politically, also, for Zelensky, surrendering Donbas, with no serious security guarantees – and likely not NATO or EU membership – would be political suicide at home. It would likely provoke a social and political revolution (remember the Orange Revolution and then Euromaidan, so Ukraine has formed here), or even a coup, destabilizing Ukraine to Russia’s advantage. And that is why Putin continues to demand something – the surrender of Donbas – which he knows that Zelensky cannot seriously agree to.

The onus will then be on Putin to secure delivery on that agreement. But there, I don’t think his military is in much of a position to then take what Trump has gifted him. If they have failed to take the Donbas in 12 years of bitter fighting, why would we assume anything different from a mere sharpie signature from Trump?

And the downside for Putin is that any constraint on Ukraine in this war will be removed. Ukraine will surely then have an interest in maximum escalation –  taking the war fully to Russia and hence launching all-out deep-strike drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. That is hardly likely to suit Trump or Xi, as it will have severe global market impact.

Unfortunately, the outlook for Ukraine in most likely scenarios now is grim – and I would argue because Trump has mismanaged the whole Ukraine peace process. It suggests a scenario either where Putin still thinks that he can take whatever Trump offers in China and demands more, plays the long war through to the French presidential election and the assumption European support for Ukraine caves after a Le Pen win, or Ukraine is left to reject any peace deal signed by Trump, Xi and Putin in Shenzhen but is then forced to battle on with no US support and likely strained European support.

Xi and Europe, to the rescue?

Trump and Putin likely want to exclude Europe from any such Ukraine peace talks. Xi may well too, albeit in the bigger scheme of things: does Xi want to risk signing up to a peace deal that neither Trump nor Putin can easily or quickly deliver on the ground, and that could see Ukrainian escalation to global markets, while also risking annoying European trade partners? Perhaps not.

Europe should remember here that it has agency and should impress this on both Trump and Xi. Whatever is agreed at Shenzhen, Europe has an interest in continuing to back Ukraine, given the existential threat from Russia and the US. under Trump AWOL in defending Europe; Ukraine now represents Europe’s best chance of buying time until it develops its own autonomous defense capability.

Indeed, I would have thought that Xi would not view any Trump-Putin deal over Ukraine that favorably if it opened the way then for a new special relationship between the US and Russia, a reverse Nixonian ultimately to screw over China. I would then have thought China and Europe have common interests in working together to forestall any Trump-Putin bromance consummated over Ukraine.

While playing China towards its interests over Ukraine, I think that Ukraine is such an existential interest for Europe that the latter needs to follow Zelensky in spelling out to Trump what his surrender of Ukraine to Putin would mean for the Transatlantic relationship.

They need to spell out that this would mean the end of NATO, and that Europe would be forced to fast-track efforts to develop a defense capability separate from the US. American companies would risk losing the milking-cow defense deals they have grown accustomed to.

It would also mean that Europe would not be a natural ally for the US in its ongoing hegemonic battle with China, and indeed, European defense companies would begin to compete more aggressively with their US counterparts. Net, net, this would mean a loss of US jobs and long-term damage to the US economy and ultimately its security.

Zelensky has confronted US appeasement; maybe Europe needs to do that too.

See the original in the author’s @tashecon blog here.