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Following Russia’s unjustified and barbaric war against Ukraine and what seems to be the Administration’s chaotic and disruptive approach to the war, Ukraine, European allies, and perhaps the vital national security interests of the United States are quite the challenge.
Below you will find two items. The first is David Ignatius’ piece from today The Washington Post reporting on what he witnessed at the Munich Security Conference, and the second is Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the current state of play.
Both are worthwhile but certainly do not provide any sense of comfort.
Certainly, I do not know what is going to happen, but among other things, I do not believe any genuine long-term peace can be achieved without a Russian defeat and the trial of war criminals. Without such trials, Russia could and would spin history to suit its purposes. Russia and Russians need to be confronted with the truth – the reality of what Russia has done, the crimes they have committed, and the genocide they have perpetrated on Ukrainian families.
Germany and Japan had to face this at the end of World War II and it was critical to moving forward with the post-war period.
The Washington Post
At Munich, Trump’s chaotic approach has allies rattled
Trump has raised fears he might be preparing to sell out Kyiv to placate Moscow.
David Ignatius | February 16, 2025 at 4:40 p.m
MUNICH — The Trump administration began its first week of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine with a dizzying array of mixed signals that confused and worried America’s European allies and seemed to reward chiefly Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Even by President Donald Trump’s disruptive standards, the opening bargaining process verged on anarchy. The message and the messengers changed almost daily; concessions to Putin were offered and then withdrawn. The administration seemed to be excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then wooing him, then fending him off again.
The diplomatic road show centered on this weekend’s Munich Security Conference — the annual celebration of the transatlantic alliance. Vice President JD Vance bizarrely used the gathering to harangue Europe and insult his German hosts. His remarks offended even some of his fellow Republicans, and Germany Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was heard saying during the speech, “This is unacceptable.”
Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), the most senior Democrat on the Senate delegation here, summed up the reaction to Vance’s speech this way: “It’s fair to say he bombed.” Of the disarray in the Trump entourage, Whitehouse told me and several other journalists: “Trump’s managerial style is to let his subordinates … say very discordant things.”
The challenge was separating the signal from the noise in the Trump team’s messaging. Probably that clarity doesn’t exist yet in Trump’s own mind. In negotiations, he likes to conduct “reconnaissance through fire,” as Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski put it to the Munich gathering, using a Russian military expression. As the shells explode, he redirects fire.
Trump began bracketing the target with his Wednesday phone call to Putin, which was accompanied by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s concessions that day of two key negotiating points: that Ukraine couldn’t keep all its territory and that NATO membership was a nonstarter. That amplified fears among Ukraine’s American and European supporters that Trump was preparing to sell out Kyiv to placate Moscow.
“I’m not the world’s most important and famous dealmaker,” Pistorius sarcasticallytold the Munich audience. “But if I were, I would know that I don’t take any essential point of negotiations off the table before the negotiations begin.” Trump’s call to Putin, accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, might have been the biggest concession of all. “Champagne corks are popping all over Moscow,” Whitehouse told us.
Trump’s team also tried to shake down Zelensky before the Ukrainian leader left for Munich. Zelensky told an astonished group of senators here that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had visited him in Kyiv and pressured him to sign over rights to half of Ukraine’s critical minerals, as the price of American support in negotiations. “For me, this is very strange,” Zelensky said several times in describing the scene for the Senate group. Despite the hard sell, Zelensky refused.
But by the time Zelensky arrived in Germany, the Trump administration seemed to have softened its terms. Hegseth walked back some of his initial comments and said Trump would make final decisions about NATO. Trump himself said Kyiv would be part of any negotiations, and Vance said Trump’s goal was a “durable” peace that would presumably require security guarantees for Ukraine.
As the weekend progressed, Zelensky and his supporters seemed to be warming to the idea of trading mineral wealth for American support. “We’re still talking,” he said of the Bessant proposal. “A properly negotiated mineral deal between the U.S. and Ukraine could be extremely beneficial for both sides,” said Whitehouse, a strong Ukraine supporter.
The origin of the mineral-deal proposal is a fascinating journey through Trumpworld. It seems to have begun when his golf buddy Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) described Ukraine’s abundant reserves of rare-earth minerals that are needed in computers and batteries and other essential products of the 21st century. That fired Trump’s transactional passion, Graham told me.
“The critical-mineral deal is Putin’s nightmare. It turns Ukraine into a business deal,” explained Graham, who led the Senate delegation here. Graham told me he had advised Trump repeatedly, “If you do Ukraine poorly, it will be Afghanistan on steroids.”
As for future security guarantees, Graham urges Trump to declare that if Putin attacks Ukraine again — after a Trump-brokered peace deal — it will mean automatic NATO membership for Kyiv. That may be a way of finessing the issue of security guarantees and NATO membership. The key would be that “Trump owns it,” Graham said.
“If Putin doesn’t take what Trump thinks is a good deal, Trump will crush him,” Graham told me. “It will make Trump look weak.” Even Zelensky seems to think Putin is scared of Trump, saying onstage here that in his call Wednesday with Trump, he offered that “Putin is afraid.”
This talk of the fear factor ignores the reality that Putin has waged a bloody war of aggression for three years, and there’s no sign yet that he’s ready to concede his basic goal of making Ukraine a neutral buffer zone, as opposed to a quasi-member of NATO. Putin still thinks he’s winning, despite more than 700,000 casualties. Effectively confirming that, Zelensky conceded that in recent fighting, Ukraine had lost more than 4,000 square kilometers.
Zelensky hopes Trump will hang tough, but he offered a painful reality check in his speech to the conference: “Let’s be honest, now we can’t rule out that America might say no.” In that case, he argued, Europe would stand alone against Putin, with Ukraine as its backbone — and they would together form an “army of Europe.”
After watching the first turn of this diplomatic dance, I’m left wondering which version of Trump will prevail. Is it the pragmatic dealmaker whom Graham describes? Or is it the hard-right ideologue we saw in the Vance speech, pledging to “take our shared civilization in a new direction”?
In any case, the audience reaction to the speech was mostly stunned silence. The only time I can remember a similar attack on core transatlantic values was Putin’s 2007 speech in effect declaring war on the West.
“At some point, the erosion of trust is going to affect the alliance,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) told a gathering of journalists here. “The constant undermining of the alliance is long-term very dangerous.” Of the Trump team’s performance last week, he observed: “It appears to me that this is diplomacy on an ad hoc basis.”
The negotiation train will accelerate this week as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss preliminaries. At this writing, it appears that no senior Ukrainian representative will be present. That’s a very bad sign. Zelensky insisted in his Munich speech that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement.”
What betrayals may lie ahead, if Trump defaults on his promise of “peace through strength”? Zelensky foresees a May “Victory Day” visit to Moscow by Trump, who will be invited by Putin as a “prop.” Trump supporters might forgive him for that, but history wouldn’t.
Peace or Partition?
Russians and Americans speak about Ukraine, without Ukrainians
Timothy Snyder | 2/17/25
Tomorrow in Ukraine, Russian soldiers will attack Ukrainians. Russian drones and bombs and rockets will target Ukrainian homes. A criminal war of aggression will continue.
Tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, Russian officials will discuss the future of Ukraine with a handful of Americans, delegated by a president who sympathizes with the Russian view of the war. The Russians will have the luxury of talking about Ukraine without the presence of Ukrainians.
The headlines are about “peace negotiations.” But what is really going on? How should we think about this unusual encounter in Saudi Arabia?
Here are ten suggestions, drawn from years on working on relations among the three countries, and from some recent personal observations at the Munich Security Conference.
1. Be critical of the words on offer. Question the word “peace.” The term used in the media is “peace negotiations.” The United States and Russia are not at war. Russia is at war with Ukraine, but Ukraine is not invited to these talks. Russian authorities, for their part, do not generally speak of peace. They present the talks with the United States as a geopolitical coup, which is not the same thing. The highest Russian officials have repeatedly stated that their war aims in Ukraine are maximalist, including the destruction of the country. Informed observers generally take for granted that Russia would use a ceasefire to distract the United States and Europe, demobilize Ukraine, and attack again. This is not a plan that the Russians are working very hard to disguise. It is a simple point, but always worth making: there could indeed be peace tomorrow in Ukraine, if Russia simply removed its invasion force.
2. Consider the horrid negotiating tactics of the United States. They are so disastrously bad that they call into question whether these talks can even really be considered negotiations. Trump and everyone around him keeps emphasizing that the United States is in a hurry. But no negotiator would say this. Admitting urgency grants to the other side the easy move of dragging their feet to get concessions. And these are already on offer! Members of the Trump administration and Trump himself keep conceding essential points to Russia in advance of any actual talks and in public (territory, NATO membership, timing of elections, even the existence of Ukraine) — issues that are not only essential to Ukraine but elemental to Ukrainian sovereignty. The only way such American behavior makes sense is if we consider that the Americans are negotiating as Russians. But if everyone in Saudi Arabia is on the same side, these are not negotiations. “Talks” is safer.
3. Don’t forget that law and ethics are part of reality. The United States has chosen to negotiate with the aggressors (the president of the Russian Federation has been indicted for war crimes) rather than support the victims. By reaching out to Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has ended the Russian leader’s international isolation. By speaking of Putin as someone who supposedly wants peace rather than as the aggressor in the bloodiest war since 1945, or as someone who has been indicted for war crimes, Trump is seeking to cleanse the moral stain from the person who broke the most fundamental of international laws by invading another country. Even if the talks have no other consequences, Trump’s rehabilitation of Putin is a meaningful one for Russia.
4. Emphasize the absence of Ukraine. It is a truism of international history, as well as simple common sense, that if you are not at the table then you are on the menu. Discussions with Russia about Ukraine without Ukraine create a structural situation in which the basic interests of Ukraine and Ukrainians cannot be represented. No historical analogy is perfect, of course; but precedents for such treatment in Europe include the Munich accords of 1938 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. A longer record can be found in the history of colonialism.
5. Remember that Ukraine is a sovereign state and the victim of the war. The combination of pageantry and mystery around such talks elevates their participants to the central actors of the story. If summitry storytelling is done carelessly, it can create the impression that Russia and the United States somehow have the authority to decide the future of Ukraine. It is very possible that they will try to force Ukraine to do things, using coercion or blackmail, and it should be made clear that is implied in any agreement about Ukraine without Ukraine. No agreement between Russia and the United States has legal application to Ukraine. It is certainly worth knowing and mentioning that Ukraine has patiently built consensus around its own peace formula. It is worth reviewing, if only for background knowledge of the basic issues.
6. Consider what we know about power. In war, there are winners and losers. Aggressors make peace when it appears to them that their aggression is no longer in their interest. Talking is incidental to this. It is rather surprising to hear Trump people, who talk so much about strength, repeatedly making the left-wing summer-camp point that all we really need for peace is to get together and talk. If the Trump administration were serious about getting to peace in a hurry, they would apply pressure to Russia and accelerate support for Ukraine. Since they are doing neither of these things, they either misunderstand power or they are not aiming for peace.
7. Resist Russian propaganda. For Russia these talks are an occasion to spread their line. Russian propagandists will have things to say about the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, the patterns of Ukrainian history, the people who govern Ukraine, and so on. The talks will be their occasion to try to get international reporters to repeat those claims.
8. Be critical of American propaganda as well. The Russians have liked to spread stories about supposed waste in Ukraine. The Trump people have their own use for this. It fits their sense of grievance, which is how they approach every subject. Trump’s people focus on the idea of “recouping the costs” of U.S. aid to Ukraine. This is unserious and misleading. The main US budgetary problem is that the wealthy do not pay their share of taxes. All talk by this billionaire-dominated administration ofrecouping costs is dubious for that reason alone. [Snyder is brilliant, but that last two lines were not necessary but for the total distain for Trump Professor Snyder has manifested for years. Drop the sentence and his real point is made without unnecessary distraction. RAM] Most of the American military contribution to Ukraine stays in the United States, keeping factories running and paying American workers. In general, the weapons the US has sent to Ukraine were obsolescent and would have been destroyed, at cost to the US taxpayer, without ever being used. The U.S. has contributed less to Ukraine than has Europe. As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. lags far, far behind the countries that the Trump people relentless criticize. The effective cost to Europeans has in fact been far higher, since sanctions on Russia mattered far more to European economies than to the U.S. economy. The essential costs of the war in Ukraine have been paid by Ukrainians, not only in huge economic losses, but in millions of forced migrations, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and tens of thousands of lost lives [and many thousands of abducted children, barbaric assaults on civilians, and more RAM]. In resisting Russia, Ukraine has also provided tremendous economic and security benefits to the United States. What the United States has learned from Ukrainians about modern warfare — and that is just one of many benefits — easily justifies the costs, even in the most narrow security terms.
9. Weigh Trump’s vulnerabilities. For decades now, Trump has tended to repeat what Soviet and then Russian leaders say. He speaks to Putin regularly and has expresses his fascination. He repeats Russian talking points on the war. The notion that the war is costly to the United States is a point where Putinist and Trumpist propaganda overlaps, and seems targeted to one of Trump’s obsession that he is being ripped off. Ukraine, of course, is the party that has suffered the economic costs. But redefining the war as an opportunity for the United States to make money seems designed to manipulate Trump.
10. Reflect on colonialism. Russia’s war against Ukraine has been obviously colonial, in every sense of the word. Moscow denies that Ukraine is a state, that Ukrainians are a people, that their elected leaders are legitimate. A war cloaked in such colonial ideology enables the exploitation of stolen Ukrainian resources, right down to and including stolen children. In recent weeks, the Americans have begun to speak with great interest of Ukraine’s mineral resources. At the Munich Security Conference, Americans asked the Ukrainian president to concede half of his country’s mineral wealth forever in exchange for a pat on the head today. It could well be that the United States intends to use the threat of Russian violence in order to seize Ukrainian wealth— “we could stop the war, but we need your resources first.” A protection racket, in other words.
So: in repeating the notion of “peace negotiations” might we not be contributing to a charade? From the facts noted above, three possible framings of the Russian-American talks emerge. First, the Americans sincerely want peace but are just stunningly incompetent. Second, the incompetence is by design; the game is rigged to generate an agreement between Russia and the U.S. that is unacceptable to Ukraine. Third, Putin and Trump have already worked out common plans for the colonial domination of Ukraine, and the talks just provide cover.
ROBERT MCCONNELL
Co-Founder, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation
Director of External Affairs, Friends of Ukraine Network
The introduction and parenthetical comments are Mr. McConnell’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation or those of the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).