The Art of a Ukraine Deal

By Mike Froman

Monday will mark the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the face of heroic Ukrainian resistance and hundreds of billions of dollars in Western aid, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation,” initially envisioned as a fait accompli, has devolved into a grinding war of attrition.

U.S. President Donald Trump is determined to bring a swift end to the conflict, and earlier this week, his and Putin’s envoys met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for four and a half hours of negotiations. Ukrainian and European diplomats were notably excluded.

Trump has long believed that our European allies and Ukraine are freeloaders that have exploited the largess of his predecessors and entangled the United States in another ill-advised war of choice. He wants the Europeans to underwrite their own security, not to mention Ukraine’s. In order for Europe and Ukraine to earn seats at the table, he has suggested, they will have to pay up, with Europe agreeing to spend more on defense and Ukraine having to pay back the American aid it previously received. This sent shockwaves through the region last week.

On Tuesday, the atmosphere deteriorated further when Trump stated that Ukraine “should have never started” the war and “could have made a deal.” Given that it was Russia that launched the attack, the suggestion seems to be that Ukraine should have accepted Putin’s 2021 demand that it “demilitarize,” “de-Nazify,” and never join NATO. Then, on Wednesday, Trump went so far as to call Zelenskyy a “dictator”—a label he has declined to apply to Putin.

Trump’s disparate treatment of Zelenskyy and Putin is realpolitik in the raw. Ukraine is in the weakest position of all parties to the conflict, and it’s evident that Trump may exploit this asymmetry by negotiating against Zelenskyy as much as he negotiates against Putin. For Trump, a swift end to the war is more important than the terms of the peace. That ethos does not bode well for Kyiv.

Beyond a cessation of hostilities, Trump wants to recoup the United States’ investment in Ukraine. In his view, Zelenskyy “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion, to go into a War that couldn’t be won.” (This overstates total U.S. aid by over $100 billion.) Hence the Trump administration’s recent proposal to acquire half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, estimated by some analysts to be worth as much as $11.5 trillion, in return for support already promised by the Biden administration. Zelenskyy has rejected the mineral deal, for now, saying, “I cannot sell our state.”

In all his dealings, Trump seeks leverage. The negotiations in Riyadh are no exception. As CFR Distinguished Fellow Thomas Graham writes, “Because Kyiv faces deteriorating conditions, it should be easier to persuade it to negotiate seriously than it will be with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who believes he is making progress toward achieving his maximal war aims.”

In seeking the path of least resistance, Trump will lean hard on the Ukrainians to accede to some of Putin’s terms. Yet he will still need to secure concessions from the Russian side, because accepting Moscow’s maximalist war aims would deal a crippling blow to his reputation as a shrewd statesman. Nobel Peace Prizes are not awarded for capitulation. Acquiescence would also undermine Trump’s grand strategy to reduce the U.S. military presence in Europe: an emboldened Putin would be sure to stir trouble along NATO’s eastern flank and make it more difficult in practice for Trump to execute an “America first” withdrawal from Europe.

To extract meaningful concessions from the Russians, Trump will have to convince Putin that time is not on his side. He could do so by supplying Ukraine with more lethal military aid, tightening sanctions on Russia, pledging long-term support for a sovereign Ukraine along the current lines of control, and dangling the prospect of normalized U.S.-Russian relations. So far, however, Trump’s envoys have emphasized the fruits of potential U.S.-Russian amity. This approach is sure to please Moscow, but it is almost certainly not enough to induce the necessary concessions.

To secure peace through strength, it would be in Trump’s interest to work in tandem with our European partners, who will bear the burden of Ukraine’s financial and economic survival. It would be a mistake for a ceasefire deal to come at the cost of the transatlantic alliance. As CFR Fellow Liana Fix writes, in fact, a coordinated U.S.-European plan would increase the odds that any European peacekeeping mission succeeds, while giving the United States “greater freedom to operate in the Indo-Pacific by persuading its European allies to increase their defense spending.”

As for a ceasefire itself, allowing Russia to retain de facto control of seized Ukrainian territory has always been a part of the expected dealmaking. The bigger issue, which remains unresolved, is what sort of security guarantees Ukraine will get once the fighting stops.

Can Ukraine be part of NATO? That seems unlikely for now. If Ukraine can’t be in NATO, can NATO be in Ukraine? To this point, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said last week that a “durable peace” in Ukraine requires that “any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.” But he stipulated that these troops must be part of a non-NATO mission and cannot be covered by Article V, NATO’s collective defense agreement. He also ruled out any U.S. troop presence in Ukraine, although that comment was later walked back by Vice President JD Vance, who noted “everything is on the table.”

An alternative to NATO membership might be a multi-layered defense system following a ceasefire. This configuration—proposed by Paul Stares, a senior fellow at CFR and director of the Center for Preventive Action, and his co-author, Michael O’Hanlon—could include a secure outer defense perimeter, a rapid response force, and bolstered security around Ukraine’s population centers and critical infrastructure. Maintaining a multi-layered defense system to credibly deter another Russian invasion could require annual defense spending of some $20 billion to $40 billion a year, a level comparable to what Israel or South Korea spends—a lot, but not out of the question.

With near-term NATO membership effectively off the table, Ukraine's best bet is probably a security guarantee backed up by European boots on the ground. As Stares and O’Hanlon observed last week, there’s some precedent here: the “Berlin Plus” arrangement was established in 2003 to allow EU member states to borrow NATO assets for EU peacekeeping operations. Since 2018, the UK has also led a multinational Joint Expeditionary Force of around 10,000 troops, and the French have floated the creation of a similar 5,000-troop-strong rapid response force—both of which could conceivably be deployed to secure Ukraine. But Europe will need to muster at least 20,000 troops, coupled with crucial logistics and intelligence support from the United States, to establish a credible deterrent

In addition to security guarantees, Ukraine needs a great deal of foreign investment to rebuild its economy and achieve prosperity. Therein lies an opportunity for the United States. As Trump recognizes, Ukraine is rich in critical minerals and rare earth elements that America needs, although some of them are in or near the country’s Russian-occupied east. As my colleague Heidi Crebo-Rediker has argued, it is imperative that the United States have access to such resources—as well as deny China and Russia access to them. That should give the United States a stake in Ukraine’s ongoing security, viability, and prosperity.

Charlie Kupchan and I have written that if Trump accepts anything short of a deal that ensures a sovereign, secure Ukraine, the country risks turning into a failed state. There are already echoes of Trump’s approach to Afghanistan during his first term in his approach to Ukraine today. In the effort to end America’s longest war, the Trump administration negotiated an initial peace agreement with the Taliban in Doha, excluding Afghanistan’s government as a party to the talks. In the end, the deal prioritized a swift end to the war, with a near-term deadline for U.S. withdrawal. The Biden administration abided by the deal—only delaying the full withdrawal by four months—and the rest is history.

Trump shouldn’t let Ukraine become his Afghanistan. While he is right to try to end the war, a hastily negotiated deal at the expense of our allies and partners would be a grave error. It could embolden our adversaries, fracture the transatlantic alliance, make it more difficult to pivot to Asia, and demonstrate a terrific failure of U.S. diplomacy—not to mention undercut Trump’s desire to be seen as the ultimate peacemaker. If you thought the optics of the Taliban parading American Humvees through Kabul looked bad, imagine the Russians driving a convoy of Abrams tanks through Kharkiv.

For more on these issues, check out CFR’s special initiative on Securing Ukraine’s Future and recent media briefing on “Trump, Russia, and the Future of Ukraine.”

Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meet at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 27, 2024. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

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