🔗 Share this article

At first, Donald Trump seemed to embrace a strong stance concerning the Ukrainian conflict. After delivering threats of "severe ramifications" in August should Russia's president continued blocking ceasefire negotiations, the former president ultimately enacted substantial sanctions on the Russian primary petroleum corporations, Lukoil and Rosneft. This decision substantially impacted the Russian leader's ability to finance his war effort in the region.

But, via his newly presented comprehensive peace plan for Ukraine, which was created by US and Russian representatives excluding Ukrainian or EU input, Trump has apparently gone back to his pro-Putin stance.

Rewarding Invasion

This initiative would in practice favor the Russian leader for attacking a sovereign nation while placing the country's democratic system in peril. Despite bold statements that "The nation's independence will be upheld", much of the initiative effectively weaken that same sovereignty. This constitutes a Moscow's wish would probably be a disaster for Ukraine.

Showing his real-estate background, the former president continues to treat the situation in Ukraine as a basic territorial dispute, as if handing Putin a part of Ukrainian territory will please the president. However, Putin's military campaign is not merely about dominating a destroyed swath of economically weakened land in the Donbas region. Instead, it's about the nation's democratic governance – and the Russian leader's apparent intention to destroy it so it ceases to functions as an enticing model for the Russian citizens of the responsible government that his deepening authoritarian rule denies them.

Border Giveaways

Although maintaining in position the currently separated Ukrainian provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the initiative would force Ukraine to abandon the entire Donetsk region. In addition to benefiting the Russian Federation with territory that its military have been unsuccessful to seize in more than a ten years of conflict, this surrender would render Ukraine's defenses dangerously weakened.

The area is the site of the nation's well-known "fortress belt", the entrenched defensive positions that constitute a key obstacle to Russian advances. The proposal would have Ukraine abandon these fortifications, giving Putin a clear route to the capital in case he eventually choose to restart the conflict.

Military Limitations

Additionally, in a action that would make future fighting easier for Russia, the plan would require Ukraine to reduce the numbers of its troops from their existing large number soldiers to a maximum of this lower number. Significantly, the plan sets no similar restrictions on the invading army.

Seemingly as a gesture to Putin's attempts to depict the nation's democratically elected government as radicals, Trump's proposal states: "Every extremist ideology and activities must be condemned and forbidden." Apparently to underscore this aspect, it requires that "Ukraine will hold elections in this period" of a truce. Meanwhile, Trump imposes no condition that the Russian leader endanger his dictatorship by holding votes in Russia.

Security Assurances

Certainly, the plan makes Russia promise not to "attack other states" and to "enshrine in regulation its stance of non-violence towards European nations and Ukraine". But given that Putin has violated comparable accords in the history – for example the 1994 agreement, in which the Russian government pledged to recognize Ukraine's borders in return for giving up its historical atomic arms, and the Minsk accords, in which Moscow promised to a truce and a handback of captured territory in the region to Kyiv – for what reason should anyone believe Putin now?

For this reason Ukraine has been so insistent on external defense commitments. Although the plan threatens a "decisive unified military response" should the Russian Federation resume its invasion, and includes that "Ukraine will receive strong defense commitments", the specifics vary from vague to alarming. The initiative would not only deny Ukraine alliance membership but also prohibit Nato members from positioning troops on the nation's land, thereby preventing the reassurance force, likely led by European powers, on which the Ukrainian government had been relying to deter Russia from restoring his diminished military, rearming, and resuming aggression.

International Reaction

A separate supplementary accord according to sources would provide Ukraine with a similar to NATO security guarantee, in which any future "significant, intentional, and sustained armed attack" by Russia on the country "will be treated as an act of war jeopardizing the peace and security of the transatlantic community." This implies a defense action. But unlike a capable Ukraine's armed forces – the nation's primary protection against future Russian aggression – the credibility of the supplementary deal would depend on the commitment of alliance members, such as the US administration, to respond militarily to Russia's aggression, a response they have {not