The spectacle of the verbal spat between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was stark evidence of a tectonic shift in longstanding US foreign policy on Ukraine, Russia, Europe and Nato.
“Come gather ‘round people…
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
And if your breath to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’” — Bob Dylan
MOSCOW RED SQUARE, MAY 9, 2025
Like every year, Russia has wrapped itself in nationalistic pageantry, celebrating Germany’s surrender. But this year is not just about the defeat of Nazi forces 80 years ago. Today, Russia is also celebrating the “success” of its “special military operation” against Ukraine.
Arrayed before the podium are 10,000 troops in their regimental tunics, including 2,000 veterans of the Russo-Ukraine war and a regiment of female and youth cadets. The massed military bands play the anthem and the marching tune. On the podium stand Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and, yes, Donald Trump, President of the United States of America.
As battalions march by and military hardware rumbles over the cobblestones, Putin leans closer to Trump and guides him on the traditions of the marching regiments and hardware, including Russia’s multi-warhead inter-continental missiles. Overhead, Sukhoi fighter jets flyby, trailing white, red and blue smoke denoting the Russian flag.
Earlier, Trump had listened carefully to Putin’s speech. Putin had spoken about Russia rising from its ashes and driving Nazi forces all the way back to Germany’s ruined capital, Berlin, where the Soviet Union raised its hammer and sickle flag. “The Volgograd Tractor Plant in Stalingrad was the symbol of the spirit of the Russian people. We cannot be defeated,” Putin said. Trump thought to himself: “I did the right thing to get Zelensky to fall in line.”
This is, of course, fiction. Trump won’t be on the podium with Putin this year. But the policy track Trump is pursuing could, ceteris paribus, see him on that podium in 2026. For now that possibility is more a metaphor for what’s happening and might happen than any physical reality.
The spectacle of the verbal spat between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was stark evidence of a tectonic shift in longstanding US foreign policy on Ukraine, Russia, Europe and Nato. What is the likely future of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and what does it mean for the world?
So what is Trump’s policy? And what is he thinking? These questions are significant, especially in view of the dumpster fire at the Oval Office, where Trump and his Vice-President J.D. Vance ambushed and humiliated Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
IS THERE A POLICY HERE?
There’s no easy answer to this question. Going by the US’ traditional policy framework, Trump has (a) upended decades of evolved approaches to Russia, (b) strained transatlantic relations to near-breaking point and (c) by doing so is leading the US into uncharted waters. To put it another way, the US under Trump is making a ship-wreck.
Trump doesn’t agree and asks a simple question: if not peace then what?
We know he is a rapacious practitioner of backroom deals who told the reader in his The Art of the Deal to “protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself.”
His approach has put America’s European allies and Ukraine in a black mood but, in a manner of speaking, he is also being pragmatic. “I am a businessman,” he told Zelensky. “You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you have the cards. Make a deal or we are out.”
But more than this, there was another important moment that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed. Trump said to Zelensky, “You are gambling with World War III.” He repeated the sentence.
That should give some idea of Trump’s thinking: If Ukraine is not winning and can’t take back lost territory, the US is throwing good money after bad and risking getting dragged into a war with Russia which is not winnable, given the nuclear arsenals on both sides.
Corollary: let’s make a deal. Give Putin what he has got and get him to agree to not ask for more. But to do that, Kyiv has to first agree that it is prepared to negotiate. This was the essence of the bust-up at the Oval Office.
To be precise, at this stage, Trump by his own admission says he doesn’t know the minutiae of such a deal. But he wanted (and wants) Zelensky to agree to the imperative of a cessation of hostilities without upfront preconditions.
The impression is that Trump’s deal with Ukraine is not about the Russo-Ukraine War; it’s about how Ukraine can pay back what it “owes” to the United States. In other words, Trump is looking for a deal with Russia and that deal is separate from the war against Ukraine. There’s a war, for sure. But that war is between Russia and Ukraine, not Russia and the US.
The impression is that Trump’s deal with Ukraine is not about the Russo-Ukraine War; it’s about how Ukraine can pay back what it “owes” to the United States. In other words, Trump is looking for a deal with Russia and that deal is separate from the war against Ukraine. There’s a war, for sure. But that war is between Russia and Ukraine, not Russia and the US. For Trump, the presence of the US in the middle of that war is a policy blunder by Joe Biden, an “incompetent” president who was played by Zelensky.
For Trump, the presence of the US in the middle of that war is a policy blunder by Joe Biden, an “incompetent” president who was played by Zelensky.
He would continue talking to Russia and bring Putin back into the room. The US has already voted against the Ukrainian and European resolutions at the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council, marking a dramatic shift from the past US policy. With talks proceeding with Russia, easing of US sanctions, exchange of ambassadors etc, the trajectory is mostly clear.
Meanwhile, Trump’s broader plan for Ukraine is working. Even as European states scurry around holding emergency meetings and finding the money for Europe’s defence to try to fill the gap left by Trump’s volte-face, Zelensky knows that, without the US, Ukraine doesn’t stand much of a chance. At the State of the Union address, Trump informed the US Congress that Zelensky had written him a letter and he wanted to mend the rupture. Earlier, posting on social media, Zelenskyy had written that their clash was “regrettable” and that he wanted “to make things right.”
Zelensky’s recent peace proposal, as posted on X, envisages, as first steps, “the release of prisoners and truce in the sky — ban on missiles, long-range drones, [bombing of] energy and other civilian infrastructure — and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same.”
That fell short of what Trump expected Zelensky to do and he ramped up the pressure by ordering that intelligence cooperation with Ukraine be halted, in addition to military aid. He knows that Ukraine’s war effort requires intelligence input for locating Russian troop movement and force and logistics concentrations for targeting.
Last Tuesday’s Jeddah meeting between the US-Ukraine official teams to mend fences and start the process gives a peek into what Trump wants to do — an immediate, 30-day ceasefire and talks to extend it. The joint statement mentions that this ceasefire “is subject to acceptance and concurrent implementation by the Russian Federation. The United States will communicate to Russia that Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace” [emphasis added].
The US, per the statement, “will [also] immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume security assistance to Ukraine.”
Russia had not responded to Zelensky’s proposal and, until the time of writing this, we did not have Russia’s response to the monthlong ceasefire, which could be extended. As Mikhail Alexseev, a professor of political science at San Diego State University, said, Zelensky’s proposal “is specific and a great way to see if Russia seriously wants a negotiated settlement that may last and allow Ukraine to exist as an independent state.”
Russia has aggressed against Ukraine. That is a fact. But Ukraine is not winning since Russia is not losing and Zelensky knows that. He also knows, now more than before, that external help is not interminable. He is amenable to talking peace, but insists on security guarantees.
Does it? The US approach is more about little probes, to see where it goes.
A day before the Jeddah meeting, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things, to end this conflict or at last pause it in some way.”
In a way it is a three-body problem which, to use a term from mathematics, has no closed form solution. The US wants hostilities to end so it can improve relations with Russia and get Ukraine’s mineral deal; Ukraine wants security guarantees; Russia has its own set of conditions, some of which are maximalist.
Then there’s history influencing current events and the motives and motivations of Russia and Ukraine.
HISTORY STEPS IN
Some seven months before Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Putin penned an article, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, to inform his readers of how a “wall… has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space…” According to Putin’s nostalgic reasoning, this “great common misfortune and tragedy [is] the consequence of our own mistakes made at different periods of time.”
In the 6,908-word article, Putin also informs the reader that, “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”, not with “Western authors of the anti-Russia project, [which has] set up the Ukrainian political system in such a way that presidents, members of parliament and ministers would change but the attitude of separation from and enmity with Russia would remain.”
While Putin briefly touches upon Kyiv’s closer ties with NATO in one paragraph, the article is basically history as Putin sees it. And that history has three aspects: Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as descendants of Ancient Rus; mistakes that have led to the rupture; external forces that in recent times have, step by step, dragged Kyiv “into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia.”
But then there’s a different version of history — Ukraine’s. Serhii Plokhy, professor of history at Harvard, tells the reader of how it began with the Polish uprising of 1830-31. That fissure needed healing and Count Sergei Uvarov, deputy minister of education, proposed to Tsar Nicholas I in 1832 a tripartite formula that could serve as the keystone of a new Russian identity to be forged by the educational system: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.
But while the “history textbooks written under Uvorov’s supervision legitimised the creation of one Russian nation”, there was a slight problem. In the 1840s, Kyivan intellectuals such as Mykola Kostomarov and Taras Shevchenko “formed a clandestine organisation that claimed the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nation.” The focus on Ukrainian language, lore and culture became the taproot of national identity and birthed the “modern Ukrainian national project.”
Since Ukraine’s declaration of independence, Kyiv has embarked on a process of de-Russification of Ukraine. This, incidentally, is a very sore point with Putin and Russia. For instance, Zelensky’s first language is Russian. But as he told Lex Fridman on the latter’s podcast in January this year, he preferred to speak Ukrainian because “we have lost all respect for Russian” since Moscow’s aggression.
That may be so, but the downgrading of the Russian language and the politico-linguistic polarisation surrounding the language goes back to the country’s 1996 constitution. That document, while guaranteeing the “free development, use and protection of Russian, and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine,” nonetheless declared Ukrainian as the sole state language even as 34.1 percent of the population speaks Russian as its first language.
Critics have described laws meant to Ukrainise the country as an attempt to suppress ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainians and to move the country away from Russification.
This is where history mixes up with current events. Many analysts have spoken about Nato expansion as the main driver of events in this conflict. Yes and no. It is a driver but the situation is not monocausal. Russia is no innocent actor but its actions must be looked at from the perspective of responding to a threat. Some analysts such as historian Sumantra Maitra argue that Russia uses military force when it perceives a threat but returns to status quo when the threat is neutralised or it subsides. In that sense, Maitra avers that Russia is a security, not a power maximiser.
This argument skates on thin ice since Russia has used ethnonationalist fault-lines in Transnistria (Moldova), Georgia (August 2008) and Ukraine (2014/2022) to actively aggress outside its borders and occupy sovereign, foreign territory. That, strictly speaking, is about power maximisation, not just increasing security for itself.
For instance, it is instructive to remember that, much before the Nato expansion idea was mooted and while Ukraine was negotiating relinquishing its nuclear arsenal, the Russian parliament passed a resolution in July 1993 and declared Russia’s sovereignty over the Ukrainian strategic port city of Sevastopol.
Going by Putin’s own statements and actions over the years, it’s clear that he resents Russia’s steady loss of power since the break-up of the Soviet Union. His sense of insecurity increased with Nato’s eastward expansion and Ukraine’s pivot to the EU and Nato. It does not take much intelligence to realise that Putin’s Russia would do whatever it can to reverse the perceived decline, or at least increase the cost for its adversaries of encircling it and shrinking its near-abroad.
Belarus is Russia’s buffer; Ukraine decided to move west and shun Russia. That’s when Putin decided to strike, beginning with Crimea and fomenting trouble in the Donbas. In that sense, the present links up with Russia’s national consciousness and Nato expansion becomes one of the factors, certainly not the primary one.
Depending on which side of the conflict one stands on and how one interprets historical developments, analysts have made a case for Russia’s invasion; equally, if not more, a strong case can be made for Ukraine’s fight back and resistance. International law and its foundational principles back Kyiv as a sovereign entity with agency. But the issue has gone beyond jus ad bellum [right to war], to how the war has gone for the warring sides. That’s the practical side of this unfortunate tale grounded in history and geography.
THE WAR
Russia’s military has come a long way since its failed main operation in the opening days of the war, the two-axes advance on Kyiv from Belarus. Military analysts agree that, despite losses of men and materiel, the Russian force is now considerably larger, more experienced and better equipped.
Historically, Russia begins badly but learns on the job. This time too, Russia decided to play on its strength: artillery. Not as a supporting arm but as the primary arm of lethality, striking targets both in the deep and close battles. Other arms position themselves in order for artillery to use its destructive firepower.
As one assessment puts it, “Russian forces manoeuvre to fire, Western forces fire to manoeuvre.” Without going into technical details of Russia’s operational doctrine, it’s important to note that barring Ukraine no European force (as also US forces) at this point possesses more battlefield experience than Russia’s.
Ukraine has also learnt. And it innovates, just like Russians do. The problem, however, is simple: in a positional war of attrition, quantity provides quality. Put another way, numbers matter — artillery pieces, tanks, APCs, drones, fighter jets and, of course, manpower. This brings in the issue of sustainment. Sustainment requires numbers and replenishment.
To quote from a 1942 US Naval College report titled Sound Military Decision: “Success is won, not by personnel and materiel in prime condition, but by the debris of an organisation worn by the strain of campaign and shaken by the shock of battle. The objective is attained, in war, under conditions which often impose extreme disadvantages” [emphasis added].
That’s where Russia has the advantage. Without external support — US/Nato — Ukraine could not have sustained the war. That was also Trump’s message to Zelensky at the now-infamous Oval Office meeting.
Recap: Russia has aggressed against Ukraine. That is a fact. But Ukraine is not winning since Russia is not losing and Zelensky knows that. He also knows, now more than before, that external help is not interminable. He is amenable to talking peace, but insists on security guarantees — ie that Russia will not invade Ukraine again. Question is, what’s the quid for the quo?
Let’s circle back to Trump.
WHAT NEXT?
Speaking virtually at the World Economic Forum at Davos on May 23, 2022 the late Dr Henry Kissinger made two important points about the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war: it is time to think of a diplomatic solution to end the war, and such solution will likely involve territorial concessions to Russia, even though “ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante.” He added: “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”
He was roundly condemned then. But for all his faults, Kissinger understood realpolitik. Trump is no Kissinger. But as a real estate businessman looking for sweet deals, he understands that wars don’t work for him.
There’s also another difference between Kissinger and Trump. Kissinger wouldn’t have reached out to Russia without the US’ traditional allies. Trump believes they are an impediment. He has now chalked a course which seems to lead him in the opposite direction from traditional US policy and alliances. How that world might shape up is largely unknown, though some of its contours have begun to emerge.
Whether Europe can support Ukraine sans the US at the backend is beyond the scope of this article. But one thing is clear: currently, it can’t without stretching and stressing its inventories.
What are the scenarios?
The ideal is for Russia to agree, in the first phase, to a ceasefire along the current frontlines and stop further attacks against Ukraine; agree to a demilitarised zone (DMZ) possibly manned by a UN-mandated force; and agree to a “binding” non-aggression pact that contains both negative and positive security guarantees for Ukraine.
The last is crucial from Kyiv’s point of view, given Russia’s subsequent claim that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was not an agreement but merely constituted unilateral commitments of the UK, USA and Russia. As quid for this quo, Ukraine would stay out of Nato and membership of the European Union.
But this ideal scenario is very unlikely to come about, especially the part about a binding non-aggression pact and security guarantees. From Russia’s perspective, the best outcome would be to get to keep what it has conquered and annexed and to agree to an armistice that allows it to keep any future options open.
The irony is that, just like in 1992 when the US prioritised cooperation with Russia and needed a joint front with Moscow to get Kyiv to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, this time too the US under Trump appears more concerned about normalising with Russia and getting a ceasefire than a comprehensive peace agreement that takes care of Ukraine’s Russia threat through security guarantees.
It is unlikely that Trump knows the complex process that led to the Budapest Memorandum or the deliberate ambiguities built into that “agreement” to get a compromise. He wants the war to end. It is unclear how. Equally, Trump wants a minerals deal and believes that the presence of US prospecting companies would be enough guarantee against further Russian aggression.
That may be so in the immediate future but it doesn’t solve Ukraine’s problem in the longer run, even as a ceasefire would certainly bring immediate reprieve for Kyiv. Nor does the cessation of hostilities take care of the ‘war’ itself which, given the history and current animosities, is likely to erupt again in the future.
However, at this point, Ukraine has all but come to accept that there’s no immediate going back to pre-2022 or 2014 status quo ante. From my own discussions with Ukrainian policy experts, it is clear that Kyiv would be content with the ceasefire status quo if the Russian occupation of its territory remains non-recognised and legally-determined to be occupied territory.
But it wants security guarantees — much more solid than what the Budapest Memorandum had provided. This is the sticking. The problem is that such security guarantees, to be credible enough, must include Russia. That is unlikely. Russia, unless Trump were really interested in backing Ukraine, would refuse to be boxed in by signing off on such an agreement. Trump clearly is not interested in pursuing that track. Nor does he want to tie the US in with Ukraine’s security through positive guarantees that could pit the US against Russia in the future. That leaves Europe to back Ukraine.
Whether Europe can step up the plate is of course a big ‘if’, not only because it’s not a unitary actor but also because of a number of other complicating factors that are beyond the scope of this article. Briefly, however, as political scientist Samuel Charap at Rand has noted, Europe has to “first decide if in fact [it is] willing to commit to go to war with Russia if it invades again. Deploying a tripwire force before deciding what the ‘wire’ would ‘trip’ makes little sense.”
Even so, if Europe does gather a “coalition of the willing” and shows resolve, it still faces the capabilities problem, including manpower.
Nato was configured deliberately so the US could stay in the lead. The European component of Nato forces rely, for the most part, on US strategic capabilities like strategic airlift, air-to-air refuelling, intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance through national technical means and also the ‘Five Eyes’ network. Europe could work on developing those capabilities but doing so needs time and synergies. Time is a luxury Ukraine does not have.
Corollary: the only immediate option Kyiv has, short of the war continuing and Ukraine losing more territory, is to work with Trump and see where it goes. Zelensky is in a bind. Chess has a term for it: zugzwang. He has to make a move, but making that move could worsen his situation.
The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider
Published in Dawn, EOS, March 16th, 2025
