Trump has suspended all military aid to Ukraine in an apparent attempt to bring the country to the negotiating table. But does Russia need to negotiate?

Last week’s calamitous meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky made clear the disdain Trump has for Zelensky, and Trump’s determination to end the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Vladimir Putin. Afterward, Zelensky rushed back across the Atlantic, where he met with European leaders in the hopes of shoring up their support. Most European countries have publicly reaffirmed their commitment to Zelensky and promised increased aid—with Britain and France suggesting that they could send peacekeeping troops to enforce a potential deal—but it remains uncertain whether Ukraine will have sufficient leverage without American backing. On Monday, the White House announced the suspension of all military aid to Ukraine until Trump determines that Zelensky is “ready for peace.” What should Ukraine and its allies be trying to accomplish now, and what realistically can keep the country secure going forward?

I recently spoke by phone with Angela Stent, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations who has served on the policy-planning staff in the State Department. She is also a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution whose most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Putin may not even want a relatively favorable peace deal, whether the Biden Administration should have leaned harder on Zelensky before Trump’s return, and whether European security guarantees matter without American support.

What do you think the Ukrainians should be trying to get right now from their allies? What is the most important thing that they need?

What they need is, first of all, an agreement that if they do have to make at least temporary territorial concessions, there will be robust security guarantees to back up any ceasefire. If there are to be negotiations, there has to be credible deterrence. Otherwise, there is absolutely no indication that Russia won’t wait and regroup and pursue the same goals later on—in other words, subjugating Ukraine, carrying out regime change, and making sure that Ukraine remains essentially in the Russian sphere of influence.

Britain and France said that they would potentially send peacekeeping troops. Even if those countries have nothing like the military of the United States, they still have nuclear weapons. Is that a sufficient deterrent?

I think it would be very difficult for that to work if you didn’t at least have the backing of American airpower and explicit American support. We also have to remember that Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, said again recently that Russia will not accept any European peacekeeping troops, meaning any country that’s a member of NATO, in Ukraine. Now, is that negotiable? Who knows? But, yes, let’s say the British and the French were there. Without really robust U.S. backing, I’m not sure how much that would deter Russia, particularly if we’re in a situation where NATO’s Article 5 is maybe not credible anymore. [Article 5 states that NATO countries will defend fellow-members who are attacked.]

Why is U.S. backing necessary? Is it because American military power would be required to successfully fend off Russian incursions or just because the knowledge of American backing would be enough to deter Russia from acting in the first place?

Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, said, essentially, We do have our own power. But I think the military backup is really tied to deterrence. In other words, the knowledge that the United States is willing to back up the Europeans would be a deterrent to the Russians.

The other crucial issue is whether Ukraine can get back territory that was taken from it by Russia. Is that a lost cause at this point?

I think everyone acknowledges, and I think privately Ukrainians understand, that at the moment, given the military situation, it’s very hard to see Ukraine taking back the territory that Russia has occupied since February, 2022. That doesn’t mean that they would be willing to acknowledge that this territory is gone forever. But I think even at the end of the Biden Administration, and even if Kamala Harris had won, there was an understanding that any kind of deal would have to involve at least the temporary recognition of the loss of some of these territories. Now, the Russians, of course, are saying that Ukraine would have to accept the loss of four regions—which Russia formally annexed in September of 2022—entirely. But Russia doesn’t control any of those four annexed regions entirely. So one of the sticking points could be that Ukraine would still want to claim as its territory areas in these four regions that Russia doesn’t control. But Ukrainians and their allies will have to recognize that they’re not going to regain the territory they had in February, 2022, let alone what they had in 1992, after Ukraine became independent, because that included Crimea, which they lost in 2014 along with parts of the Donbas. I think they recognize that probably that would be the solution at the moment. But, again, it only works if you have something to deter the Russians from going further.

Is your reading of the current military situation that Ukraine in fact should want some sort of peace deal sooner rather than later because of the concern, especially without American backing, that its battlefield prospects are only going to get worse?

Yeah. The Russians have been very slowly taking more territory back. They’ve been doing it incrementally, and they’ve incurred huge losses, but they are still taking territory. Both countries have a mobilization problem, but the Ukrainian mobilization is more difficult because they don’t have North Korean soldiers coming and fighting for them. [North Korea has reportedly sent more than ten thousand troops to aid Russia in the conflict.] So, you know, they are having trouble mobilizing people. Their military future looks very challenging—particularly if U.S. military aid dries up, and we don’t know now how much intelligence sharing there’s going to be between U.S. agencies and Ukrainians, either. We don’t know whether Elon Musk will continue to allow the Ukrainians to use Starlink. So there are all kinds of uncertainties there that I think would point to Ukraine understanding that it probably does have to come to some agreement, which Zelensky has said it would, but under the right circumstances.

I read an interview with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national-security adviser, a couple of months ago, and he was asked whether the United States should have pushed Ukraine toward a peace deal earlier in the war. And his answer was that Ukraine is a sovereign, democratic country, and the United States had no business pushing them to agree to a deal that would require them to give up their sovereign territory. I have a lot of sympathy for that perspective as a kind of moral outlook on how the United States should go about its business in the world. Let’s put aside the question of whether it’s normally so generous with other countries and respectful of their sovereignty. If you start from the premise that there was a fifty-per-cent chance that Donald Trump was going to come into office again, and something like what we are seeing now was going to play out, do you think the Biden Administration erred?

If you go back to the first peace agreements that were discussed shortly after the war broke out, in March and April of 2022, there are a number of reasons why they fell apart, and a major one was the discovery of all of these Russian atrocities outside Kyiv, in Bucha and in other places. I think the aftertaste of all that maybe was one reason that inhibited Biden from pushing harder. But even in those negotiations, the Ukrainians felt that the Russians were not being serious and hadn’t sent high-level people.

I guess the question is, if the Biden Administration had tried to push the Ukrainians toward peace earlier, were the Russians really interested in this? The other thing is that in 2022, and at least for part of 2023, it did look like the Ukrainians were really doing much better militarily and that they were really pushing the Russians back. After that, the Biden Administration’s policy, obviously, as stated, was, you know, “It’s up to them. We’ll support them.” But the issue was that we never supplied them with enough weapons quickly enough to have enabled them to have done better militarily.

Still, I’m just skeptical about what kind of peace deal could have been worked out two years ago, let’s say, or even a year ago.

Skeptical because you don’t think the Russians would have wanted to agree to one?

Right. And I don’t think the Russians want a peace deal now, but maybe we’ll come back to that. I think Putin has determined from the beginning of this war that Russia must win it. He described it as existential. What he was waiting for was Western resolve to weaken, for the Ukrainian public to turn against the war, and then ultimately, obviously, for Donald Trump to become President.

Right, by the time the war started to look not so good for Ukraine, we were closer to 2024. Putin could look at the calendar and say, “There’s a coin-flip chance that Donald Trump is going to be here in early 2025. Why would I agree to a peace deal now?”

Yeah, and Putin probably believes that with Trump in power, Russia may get most of what it wants. And you can say, at least hypothetically, that the Biden Administration wouldn’t have been willing to give the Russians everything they wanted. But this is all hypothetical because apart from [the then C.I.A. director] Bill Burns’s contacts with his Russian counterparts and then occasionally Jake Sullivan’s, there just wasn’t much high-level discussion happening. Same goes for [the then Secretary of State] Tony Blinken.

I was surprised by the Sullivan interview. To say that Russia would never make a deal is a little different than saying we had no right to push Ukraine toward a deal, especially with the possibility of Trump looming.

Right, and it’s not as if Donald Trump hadn’t signalled his intentions during and even before the campaign. When he said things like I’m going to end this in twenty-four hours, that was so incredible that maybe people didn’t think through the next step and speculate about what he might do. Maybe people just lacked imagination, or they were so convinced that any American leader would still want to maintain the transatlantic alliance.

Why don’t you think Putin wants a peace deal?

What they’re thrilled about in the Kremlin is that there is a U.S. President who wants to restore and normalize relations with Russia, reopen the Embassies, get rid of the sanctions, readmit Russia to the G-7, as President Trump said, and sort of treat Russia as a great power and give it back its seat at the global board of directors and cease isolating it. And that is very important for Putin.

Now, having said that, until six weeks ago the United States was still designated in the minds of all the Kremlin officials as the main enemy, as an adversary of Russia. And I’m sure that many of the people surrounding Putin still share that view. But, obviously, having a restored relationship with the United States increases their prestige. That may give them more business opportunities. That’s what Putin wants. I don’t believe he wants a ceasefire at the moment or to end the war, because he believes Russia is winning. He’s looking around him now. He’s seen this transatlantic split, the weakening of the transatlantic alliance, in a way he couldn’t have dreamed would happen so quickly. He’s seen populist parties in Europe rise. The AfD did very well in the German elections, and the French and British far right are looming. He’s seen all those movements in Europe—which, of course, Russian disinformation has aided and abetted—that don’t want to support Ukraine and want to improve relations with Russia. And he recognizes that the Ukrainians clearly are having problems on the battlefield. So, from his point of view, why settle now? I thought it was interesting, again, that Lavrov recently said, essentially, “We are not willing to accept a ceasefire along the current lines of contact.” In other words, they won’t accept something until they believe that they can control all of those four annexed regions.

Trump clearly wants to normalize relations with Putin. He wants to have big summits with him. He admires him in some way. Are you saying that Putin could potentially get what he wants even without making a peace deal? It makes Trump seem like a bit of a terrible negotiator, but if he doesn’t care about Ukraine anyway, which I don’t think he does, why would Putin have to agree to anything?

Yeah, but Trump does want a ceasefire. He wants to be able to say, “I ended the war.” We know that he’s angling for a Nobel Peace Prize. So the Russians will clearly come to the negotiating table. That’s fine—they’ll negotiate. That doesn’t mean that they actually want to conclude anything. They’re famous for doing that. The question I have is whether there’s a point at which they still haven’t reached an agreement, when Trump realizes that, in fact, this deal isn’t going to work out, and then says we can impose more sanctions, etc., to get the deal done. Or are the Russians only going to agree to a deal in which Ukraine cedes all of those four territories? By the way, what the Russians are insisting on is that Ukraine forswears nato membership forever. If Ukraine refuses to sign an agreement like that, the Trump Administration could blame Ukraine for the deal falling apart.

What you said reminds me a little bit of the way that I think Trump has dealt with Israel. Trump doesn’t care about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, but he likes the idea of there being some sort of deal that he presided over. And so you have foreign leaders that he’s more sympathetic to, in this case Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu, trying to balance their desire to keep the fighting going with a President who doesn’t care about the fighting per se but who does want to be seen as a bit of a dealmaker.

Yeah, this is so-so dealmaking. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, even before U.S. officials met in Riyadh with the Russians, said that the Ukrainians have to give up the territory that the Russians occupy, that they can never join nato, and that we won’t support them with any security assistance once the war has ended. That’s already ceding most of the Russian talking points before you begin negotiations.

The irony of everything you’ve said today is that Trump, by essentially conceding to all the Russian demands, by making clear that he wants to do business with Putin, by leaving Ukraine out to dry, has created a situation where Ukraine, which didn’t want to be forced to give up lots of territory and be forced into a peace deal, now actually may need one, except that the Russians have no reason to agree to it because they may get so much of what they want from Trump even without one.

I think so. I’m assuming that we will see more U.S.-Russia negotiations. You will see a Trump-Putin summit. Maybe you’ll see President Trump at the May 9th [Second World War] Victory Day celebrations in Russia. So that’s all going to go ahead anyway, while these other negotiations on actually having a ceasefire are going on, presumably in parallel. But that’s going to take much longer than restoring or normalizing relations, if the pace is as fast as it seems to be now. You could have the restoration of the U.S.-Russian relationship despite no ceasefire. It’s just not clear to me that achieving a ceasefire is anywhere near as important to the Trump Administration as saying, We have a new relationship with Russia. ♦