🔒 Ukraine can survive with the ‘least worst’ peace deal: James Stavridis

Key topics:

Trump’s team met Russia in Saudi Arabia—Ukraine was absent.
US leans toward Putin’s demands, including NATO exclusion for Ukraine.
Ukraine seeks no more land loss, security guarantees, and military aid.

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By James Stavridis* ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

President Donald Trump didn’t end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours like he promised, but his team took a first step this week, meeting with Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia. Notably absent were the Ukrainian side and its European backers. We are told that this US-Russia conversation will eventually encompass not only Ukraine but also arms control, sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons, Moscow’s status in the G7, cyberattacks and other contentious issues.

Still, Ukraine is clearly the main issue, and unfortunately it looks like Trump’s idea of ending the war fast means doing very little for the people who were actually invaded. US officials seemed to lean toward accepting many of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s positions, e.g., no North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership for Ukraine and allowing Russia to control the 20% of Ukrainian territory it occupies. Trump even seems to blame Ukraine for the war.

But assuming Washington and Moscow negotiate in earnest, we need to think along the lines of what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said about Guantanamo Bay: What’s the “least worst” outcome Ukraine and its backers live with?

Start with the negotiators themselves. The US delegation in Riyadh included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, all of whom are largely inexperienced at international diplomacy. The Russians are led by their longtime minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, who was placed under US sanctions days after the 2022 invasion.

Let’s hope the Americans aren’t in over their heads. When I was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant more than two decades ago, I met Lavrov on several occasions in Russia and Europe. He is a tall and imposing figure, fluent in English and a very tough negotiator. “Smooth as glass,” Rumsfeld said once to me after a particularly difficult conversation in Munich. He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Back then, our conversations focused on some major disagreements — for example, US missile defenses in Europe that were directed against Iran but Moscow found destabilizing. Yet we also had good discussions about places we could cooperate — counternarcotics, counterterrorism, arms control and even Afghanistan.

I remember Lavrov at one point throwing up his hands when Rumsfeld was arguing that Russia had nothing to fear from our missile-defense network in Western Europe. “Your budget is more than 10 times ours,” he said, “and now you want to neutralize our only real hedge — nuclear rocket capability.”

How times have changed. With Russia now devoting some 7% of GDP to defense spending (the US is around 3.3% and much of NATO struggles to meet the 2% goal), Moscow has huge and increasingly experienced armed forces.

While US negotiators are in for a tough fight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy faces a seemingly impossible challenge. But Ukraine can’t be kept totally out of any negotiations. Zelenskiy has one small bargaining chip in the form of a relatively tiny chunk of Russian land he holds, and a larger one in his outmanned but fearsome fighting force. Plus, he still has strong European backing.

For Zelenskiy and his supporters, there will be three crucial elements in any “least worst” plan.

The first will be no further territorial concessions. While losing both Crimea and the four provinces of Donbas is bad enough, he must draw a line against any further concessions — for example, giving up Kharkiv, the nation’s second largest city, nestled on the Ukrainian-Russian border.

A second absolute is some credible security guarantee that prevents Putin from simply rearming and renewing his illegal invasion in a few years. Team Trump ruled out US boots on the ground before negotiations even started, and Putin would never go for direct NATO intervention. But European troops could be stationed in Ukraine, effectively acting as a tripwire. France, the UK, the Baltic states and possibly Poland have indicated potential willingness. Another, less likely, security guarantee might be that if Putin reinvaded, NATO would immediately admit Ukraine.

Finally, the Ukrainians need provision for continued military assistance from the US and Europe. The combined defense budget of the NATO nations is nearly $1.5 trillion. There is plenty of capacity to provide Ukraine with more fighter aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles, high-tech unmanned hardware and cyber and intelligence support.

It is of course terrible to ask the victims of the war to give up so much land. But if we can achieve this deal for Kyiv, things look somewhat better. Well over a million Russian men are dead, wounded or have fled the country to avoid the draft. Putin has a chunk of territory that has been a battlefield for three years, with tons of unexploded ordnance, destroyed infrastructure and a population that will demand reconstruction. And he’s driven Sweden and Finland into the transatlantic alliance, turning the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.

It’s hard to see that as much of a win for Putin, especially when you add the long-term impact on the Russian economy of turning so much of GDP over to warmaking and losing so many potential workers.

The “least worst” deal outlined above is far from perfect, but given the situations in Washington, Moscow and the battlefields of Ukraine, it may be the best possible outcome. The biggest question may not be whether Putin would accept it, but whether Trump and his advisers will work to achieve it.

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*James Stavridis is dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University . He is on the boards of Aon, Fortinet and Ankura Consulting Group, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.

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