Putin has tested the West’s resolve over Ukraine. Will Trump force its collapse?

Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

(CNN) — British wartime leader Winston Churchill once said he was an optimist, as there was no point being anything else. The year ahead in Ukraine has given rise to wild, perhaps wilful, positivity from Kyiv and – publicly at least – in parts of NATO that the incoming Trump White House can effect meaningful, diplomatic change.

They have little choice, as the extent of American backing will decide the outcome of this war, and Trump’s inner circle is far from persuaded, if not already reluctant, to continue the current, nearly-adequate level of support of the Biden administration. Yet Moscow’s track record of negotiation and peace over a decade of war in Ukraine should prove cause for great caution, if not cynicism.

Keith Kellogg, US President-elect Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy, has long floated the basic tenets of an optimist’s peace deal in a policy paper he wrote for a think-tank last April. They involve a ceasefire, Ukraine entering talks as a condition to further military aid, and a possible de-militarized zone, to ensure the current frontlines are frozen. The plan relies greatly on Moscow’s complicity in ending the war on terms devised by the United States, and does not resolve the main problem it assesses – that Ukraine needs more weapons than NATO can comfortably provide. Yet US allies are examining Kellogg’s proposals with some seriousness, to at least, it seems, be ready and able.

A European defense official told CNN there were “active discussions” about how NATO nations might deploy troops to assist with a de-militarized zone, if one became part of any peace deal, and they were requested. Western officials have often reiterated their view that Moscow remains reluctant to open a full-scale conflict with NATO itself.

Perhaps the presence of some NATO troops along Ukraine’s frontlines could restrain the Kremlin from trying to advance slowly – in spite of a ceasefire deal – as it has tried before. On Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he has discussed the deployment of “partner contingents” of troops to Ukraine with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. Paris has recently floated the idea of French troops in Ukraine to train, but Ukrainian media went further to speculate this might refer to the germ of a NATO peacekeeping force.

On Sunday, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, US Rep. Mike Waltz, commented to ABC News on the war in Ukraine: “Everybody knows that this has to end somehow diplomatically.” His comments were seized on by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday, who said it meant the Trump team was addressing “the reality on the ground,” Reuters reported.

Trump will inherit a NATO alliance of which he has expressed skepticism and where the unity of message in support of Ukraine is beginning to crumble. While Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz broke months of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic isolation with a phone call in November, NATO’s eastern-most members are acutely aware of the threat of a Kremlin emboldened by partially adhered-to ceasefires, and remain focused on Moscow’s enduring defeat as the best way to guarantee European security.

Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and now the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, told CNN from Rome she believed Ukraine could still win with the right aid.

“The stakes for European security are extraordinarily high,” she said. “The scale of hybrid attacks in Europe have already surged and Ukraine’s defeat would cost us far more than aid.

“Putin has shown a total disregard for international law and cannot be trusted. Without credible security guarantees, any ceasefire agreement is likely to fail. Russia will simply rearm and re-attack.” A bad peace deal “will only lead to more war, just as it did before,” she added. “We must learn from the past and ensure any future agreement is sustainable.”

Flawed process

Russia’s previous pledges of peace in Ukraine have been characterized by deception, suggesting a ceasefire may be in name only. In the initial invasion of 2014, Crimea was taken by a small force of “green men” who overwhelmed Ukrainian bases on the peninsula while denying they were Russian military. (Putin later admitted they were).

The mercenary-led “uprisings” that took parts of the Donbas region in the following months were also an unconvincing fig leaf for Moscow’s annexation. Russia often enthusiastically pursued its military goals while talking peace, and in February 2015 completed its advance into the strategic town of Debaltseve, right in the middle of peace talks in Minsk, finally taking the town during the first days of a ceasefire.

Those who were there, remember a flawed process. Alexander Hug, who ran the OSCE monitoring mission on the ground that oversaw the ceasefires of 2014-15, told CNN: “No ceasefire is perfect. Violations are bound to occur. The key question is what the agreement foresees in terms of sanctions and remedial action.” He said that if either side got away with it, “you have an open invitation for more of the same.”

He added, “The situations then and now are not the same” but that the “key lessons drawn 10 years ago remain valid today.”

Moscow’s narrative has also drastically changed over the past decade, as has its casualty rate. In 2014, Putin often pretended to have no control over the “separatist uprisings,” and the Russian military suffered relatively few losses for significant territorial gains. As the war edges into its fourth year, Western officials assess Russia’s incremental gains along the frontline add as many as 1,500 deaths and injuries a day, and the toll nears 700,000 casualties for the war, according to the UK defense ministry.

The Kremlin has also cast the war as an existential battle against all of NATO – perhaps to excuse its faltering performance. On the other hand, NATO has yet to commit troops to the conflict at all, only its less desirable equipment. This imbalance in how the conflict is perceived will warp the negotiating table. Russia simply has more at stake than NATO. And it may make it harder for Putin to accept minor concessions from Kyiv at talks, and rather seek larger gains.

Fast burn of lives

There are hopes Trump’s unpredictability, and apparent desire to avoid seeing on his watch a repeat embarrassment for the US comparable to the withdrawal from Kabul, could resolve him to see Putin fail. But that would require the president-elect to reverse two key constants in his demeanor: a desire to not publicly upset the Kremlin head, and to reduce the United States’ involvement in foreign conflicts.

Kyiv and other NATO members like to evoke the idea of “peace through strength.” But the larger risk of this year is a slow, even torturous, diplomatic process during which Putin’s imperfect adherence to a ceasefire, and likely continued minor territorial gains, leave Ukraine’s allies divided, and unable to decide what level of violation would merit the full involvement of NATO in retaliation.

As in 2014, do you go to war over Crimea, or Debaltseve? If NATO or European troops are deployed along a de-militarized zone, what level of violation, or casualties among them, would merit a NATO retaliation against another nuclear power? Would the Trump White House agree with its European allies?

And once NATO’s unity and intensity of support for Kyiv begin to lapse, and European governments begin to change, it may be hard to reignite. Putin knows this, and has played to it before. But only now does he have such an apparent sympathizer in the White House as Donald Trump.

Time may not entirely be on Putin’s side, given the fast burn of Russian lives, financial reserves, and an economy fiercely overheating from military sign-on bonuses and death payouts. But this year, the Kremlin head will see the one constant that caused the clock to tick loudest in Moscow – the unified backing of NATO for Ukraine – morph into the slow, generous diplomacy he exploited in 2014. That, combined with Russia’s brutal and slow-paced tenacity on the battlefield, may be enough to edge him towards the victory he needs.

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