We Have Failed Ukraine and Ourselves

Appeasement could be the grim reality of the meeting between Trump and Putin

On August 15th, President Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska later this week to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Ahead of the meeting, President Trump has stated that a negotiated peace would involve swapping territory. Three years have passed since Putin started the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War, and it has been eleven years since Putin’s annexation of Crimea. The Western world has had more than a decade to right Russia’s wrongs, and we have failed. It is emblematic of a greater crisis in the West: a crisis of leadership.

President Kennedy, in an address from the Oval Office during a mounting crisis in Berlin, stated, “We cannot negotiate with those who say, ‘What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.’ But we are willing to consider any arrangement or treaty in Germany consistent with maintenance of peace and freedom, and with the legitimate security interest of all nations.” We have again found ourselves negotiating with Russians bent on territorial conquest. Putin has been uncompromising, but his war in Ukraine has stalled; he has failed to take Kyiv in three days, and a negotiated peace seems like the only realistic outcome.

Public opinion among Ukrainians regarding the war and Ukraine’s future has changed dramatically; 69% favor a negotiated end as soon as possible while fewer than a quarter of Ukrainians favor fighting until total victory. This is a complete reversal from 2022 when more than 70% of Ukrainians supported fighting until absolute victory. Approval of Washington has also cratered. A mere 16% of Ukrainians approve of Washington while 73% disapprove; this is a dramatic fall from 66% approval in 2022. Despite this lack of approval, 70% believe the U.S. should play a significant role in peace talks.

Russia currently controls about one-fifth of Ukraine; this includes all of Luhansk, much of Donetsk, large parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and small parts of Kharkiv and Sumy. Ukraine, on the other hand, seized 500 square miles of Russian territory in a surprise assault, but now only controls 4 square miles. The Luhansk region is a critical industrial region and southern Kherson was a key target for Russia that serves as a land bridge to Crimea, which has been under Russian occupation since February 2014. The Donetsk region has served as a defensive line against Russia, stalling Putin’s invasion and Zaporizhzhia is home to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.

Moscow claims to have annexed these territories and demands they be ceded to Russia in any agreement, along with a formal declaration that Crimea is part of Russia. Since 2014, it has been standing U.S. State Department policy that “[t]he U.S. government recognizes Crimea is part of Ukraine; it does not and will not recognize the purported annexation of Crimea.” Reversing this policy would be a deep betrayal. Zelenskyy has flatly refused any land concessions in a potential negotiated peace, citing the Ukrainian Constitution that makes such concessions illegal.

The peace talks that will take place in Alaska will no doubt leave all sides wanting – that is the nature of compromise. While Russia may very well gain territory — like the Luhansk and Donetsk — that it has long sought, Ukraine may hold on to other regions such as Kherson, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia as some sort of compromise. Of course, this is mere speculation and relies on American leadership recognizing that Putin is untrustworthy. It is most egregious that these talks in Alaska will not include President Zelenskyy or Ukrainian officials, a harrowing parallel to the 1945 trilateral talks in Yalta (coincidentally, a resort city in Crimea) in which the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union divided up a post-war Europe. These talks did not include the smaller nations whose fate was being decided, and the agreement in Yalta was a failure.

In 1938, U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler that ceded roughly 2,500 square miles of Czechoslovakia — the Sudetenland — to Germany. Upon his return to the U.K. he declared “peace for our time.” The following year, Europe was engulfed in war. The land that Putin is seeking is much greater than the land Hitler used as a stepping stone to invade all of Czechoslovakia and stall a greater war. The Donetsk region in the eastern part of Ukraine, if surrendered to Putin, would allow Russia to renew attacks on Ukraine at a later date on much better footing for the aggressor.

After a meeting with Vice President Vance, European leaders publicly stated that any agreement must include “robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity… The path to peace cannot be decided without Ukraine.” Discussions on a final agreement must include Ukraine at the table, and it is likely that this negotiated peace may have to come with land concessions that Zelenskyy currently refuses.

The grim reality is that a possible agreement that comes out of Alaska could be, if finalized, some sort of appeasement. In light of this, any negotiated peace must come with adequate and serious security guarantees, recognizing that the future of Ukraine does, in fact, matter for the U.S. and the Western world as a whole. In a just world, we would have seen Ukraine through to absolute victory with greater support. Eastern Europe did not languish behind the Iron Curtain for the better part of the 20th century for us to fail at this moment. Any lines drawn must be a red line in the near or distant future.

We would not be in this position were it not for the crisis in leadership from which the West currently suffers. The West got lazy, wrongly believing that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the end of the history, and America has failed to maintain a consistent foreign policy that looks decades into the future. Instead, we allowed bitter partisan politics to consume American foreign policy and, in doing so, veer closer to isolationism, choosing to abdicate more of our responsibility abroad. That is a vacuum our enemies are more than willing to fill.

Whether we are prepared to admit it or not, the West is in the midst of another Cold War against anti-Western forces that manifest themselves in many different forms across the globe. To borrow once more from President Kennedy, “I know that sometimes we get impatient, we wish for some immediate action that would end our perils. But I must tell you that there is no quick and easy solution… if we should falter, their success would be imminent.”