🔗 Share this article

For a brief period, Donald Trump appeared to take a strong position regarding Ukraine. After making warnings of "severe consequences" during the summer if Putin carried on obstructing ceasefire talks, the former president ultimately introduced considerable restrictions on Russia's biggest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. This decision significantly affected Putin's capability to finance his aggression in Ukraine.

Yet, through his newly presented comprehensive peace proposal for the conflict, which was drafted by American and Russian representatives without Ukrainian or European input, Trump has clearly gone back to his favorable to Russia position.

Benefiting Invasion

This plan would in practice favor Putin for attacking Ukraine while placing the country's democracy in jeopardy. Although ringing statements that "Ukraine's sovereignty will be upheld", much of the proposal effectively weaken that same sovereignty. What represents a Kremlin dream would certainly be a catastrophe for the nation.

Showing his business background, the former president persists to view the war as a mere territorial dispute, as if giving Putin a portion of Ukrainian soil will please the leader. Yet, Putin's invasion is not only about occupying a destroyed swath of economically weakened area in eastern Ukraine. It is about Ukraine's political system – and the Russian leader's clear intention to eliminate it so it stops serves as an enticing example for the Russian people of the democratic government that Putin's deepening dictatorship prevents them.

Territorial Surrenders

Although maintaining in position the already divided Ukrainian provinces of these areas, the proposal would compel the nation to surrender the entire Donetsk province. Aside from benefiting the Russian Federation with territory that its troops have been unable to capture in exceeding a lengthy period of warfare, this giveaway would render Ukraine's defenses dangerously compromised.

The area is the site of the nation's well-known "fortress belt", the entrenched military defenses that represent a critical barrier to Russian advances. The proposal would have the Ukrainian military abandon these fortifications, leaving Putin a clear way to Kyiv in case he later decide to renew the war.

Defense Limitations

Furthermore, in a step that would enable future conflict simpler for the Russian military, Trump would force the nation to diminish the scale of its military from their present approximately 800,000 troops to a cap of 600,000. Significantly, Trump's plan sets no similar restrictions on Russia's military.

Apparently as a accommodation to Putin's efforts to portray the nation's legitimate government as Nazis, Trump's proposal declares: "All radical doctrine and actions must be opposed and forbidden." Seemingly to highlight this point, it insists that "The nation will hold political contests in 100 days" of a peace deal. At the same time, the proposal places no condition that the Russian leader endanger his dictatorship by conducting elections in Russia.

Protection Guarantees

Certainly, the initiative has the Russian Federation pledge not to "attack neighboring countries" and to "incorporate in regulation its stance of non-aggression towards European nations and the Ukrainian people". However considering that the Russian leadership has broken similar agreements in the history – such as the 1994 agreement, in which Russia pledged to honor the nation's borders in exchange for giving up its Soviet-era atomic arms, and the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements, in which Moscow committed to a ceasefire and a restoration of captured land in the Donbas to Kyiv – why should the international community believe this commitment on this occasion?

This explains the Ukrainian government has been so insistent on western security guarantees. Although the initiative warns of a "strong unified defense action" in case the Russian Federation restart its military campaign, and provides that "Ukraine will receive strong security guarantees", the particulars range from fuzzy to troubling. The proposal would not just prevent Ukraine alliance membership but also prevent Nato members from deploying forces on the nation's land, effectively preventing the security presence, presumptively commanded by the UK and France, on which the Ukrainian government had been relying to deter Russia from rebuilding his diminished troops, restocking, and reinvading.

International Response

A separate side agreement according to sources would grant the nation with a similar to NATO security guarantee, in which any subsequent "significant, planned, and sustained aggression" by the Russian Federation on the country "would be considered as an act of war jeopardizing the peace and security of the transatlantic community." That suggests a defense action. But unlike a capable Ukraine's armed forces – Ukraine's primary defense against renewed invasion – the credibility of the supplementary deal would hinge on the commitment of Western powers, such as the US administration, to respond militarily to Putin's hostilities, a response they have {not