January 6, 2025 - 10:00am
Donald Trump’s latest peace plan landed with a bang, leaving Europe in shock. The version leaked last week suggested US recognition of Crimea; the de facto recognition of Russian-occupied territories; no NATO membership for Ukraine; a lifting of sanctions; and economic cooperation between the US and Russia. European media called it capitulation and insisted it be resisted. Note the passive tense. But the sorry truth is, we Europeans have no alternative.
Inevitably, Trump’s most recent plan will not be the final one. We’ve seen diplomacy playing out in the days since, most visibly in St Peter’s Basilica, where Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for an impromptu encounter. But also online, where Trump threatened to take action against Vladimir Putin unless he stopped the nightly bombings of residential areas in Ukraine. Given the President’s unpredictability, none of us knows what the final version will look like.
But objectively, this deal is an unfair one. Russia’s leader is a dictator who invades foreign countries, who has killed opposition politicians at home, and who has thought nothing of deploying chemical weapons abroad to assassinate former spies. His annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violate international law. Europe has every right to be outraged at a peace deal that would appear to vindicate Moscow’s actions.
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