After imposing peace on Hamas and Israel, “real estate-ism” — historian Niall Ferguson’s term for Donald Trump’s transactional worldview — has now arrived in Ukraine. As part of Trump’s reported 28-point peace plan, Ukraine would cede Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia. The Ukrainian-held areas of Donetsk would be re-designated as a “neutral, demilitarized buffer zone”, internationally recognized as Russian territory — a zone that Russian forces would, in turn, agree not to enter.

Ukraine, naturally, is reluctant. Yet an instructive precedent lies in another country bordering Russia which, after five years of devastating war, negotiated its freedom and preserved its sovereignty in the shadow of its powerful neighbor: Finland. In 1944 it accepted the loss of Soviet-occupied Karelia. Its cosmopolitan, multilingual capital, Viborg — once celebrated as “Alexandria on the Baltic” — was surrendered rather than fought over inch by inch in an unwinnable war against a superior enemy. Finland, like Ukraine, had initially performed with remarkable success on the battlefield, yet ultimately chose to endure the territorial amputation to secure a durable coexistence between a sovereign Finland and Soviet Russia.

As the Swedish author Staffan Skott once observed, “Finland would deal with this loss in an exemplary Finnish way; the country took care of 400,000 refugees… no revanchism; high military officers who still today say, ‘We can’t accept Karelia if it were served to us on a silver platter.’”

Over time, Karelia’s memory faded into Finnish and Swedish national mythology, where it remains ever-present but no longer politically determinative. Finland moved on, becoming a quiet northern powerhouse in technology and other fields, its independence guaranteed by a strong military and by de facto alliances rooted in cultural and regional affinities. A similar path remains a plausible future for Ukraine.

In fact, a post-war Ukraine would begin from a better position than Forties Finland. Instead of being bound to Moscow in a pact of “friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance” with its former belligerent, Ukraine under Trump’s plan would be invited to join the EU and receive preferential access to the European market. EU membership — combined with “reliable security guarantees” from the US — would offset the proposed cap of 600,000 Ukrainian troops.

The severance of Karelia, while traumatic, ultimately cemented the Finnish-Soviet border. Trump’s plan — if agreed to by all parties — would inject similar structure into the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, a frontier that has remained unresolved since the dissolution of the USSR. Indeed, Cold War I ended without a clear settlement on where the West ended and Russia began, and that ambiguity has shadowed Europe’s security order ever since.

Cold War II has been fought largely because of that void. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s proposal, it confronts this question directly. If a deal is reached, it would mark the first time since 1945 that Europe’s eastern border is formally defined.

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Johan Wennström is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University and author of the forthcoming “The Stay Behinds: The Untold History of Neutral Sweden’s Cold War Guardians” (2026).

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