Max Hastings: Trump’s Ukraine peace push signals weakness to Putin

Key topics:Ukraine faces exhaustion as Russia pushes deeper into its territoryTrump pursues peace deal for personal glory, seen as aiding PutinWestern allies divided on strategy, struggle to pressure Moscow.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Max Hastings.In Ukraine, summer is ending amid even more sorrow than earlier seasons have yielded since February 2022. The Russians are battering their way deeper into its territory, and Ukrainians are weary. More than 6 million have quit for a new life abroad, including some of the brightest and best educated, and the young desperate to escape conscription. Russian President Vladimir Putin can claim a substantial achievement. His assaults have worn down the will, the magnificent defiance, of the Ukrainian people. Almost all now recognise, as they did not a year ago, that they will be obliged to cede the east of their country to win any hope of peace.This is monstrously unjust because Putin has no rightful claim upon a yard of Ukraine. But it is where we are. Everything now hinges on finding levers sufficiently powerful to oblige the Russians to make terms to which they will adhere for longer than it takes to procure the lifting of Western economic sanctions. This is not easy. After August’s Anchorage summit, Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, hailed the Putin meeting as a breakthrough. He said that Russia had agreed to pass a law decreeing that it would not take more land from Ukraine after a deal “or go after any other European country.” Witkoff declared this “epic progress.” Everybody else regarded the US aide’s remarks as evidence of his unfitness for his role. .Read more:.Ukraine pounds Russia with drones, says it is advancing deeper.Few Ukrainians swallow the enthusiastic talk in the West about security zones and US guarantees. They see that Trump is obsessed with securing a Nobel Peace Prize this year, rather than with stopping Putin for good. They know that he has little love for their country, and that he is not a man whose word can be relied upon. The constant in the Ukraine tragedy is the implacable will of Putin, untroubled by climbing over a mountain of corpses to fulfil his vision of a greater Russia. Speculation since 2022 that its economy was close to collapse leaves him similarly unbothered.It is true that the Kremlin planned for a 2025 budget deficit of just 0.5% of gross domestic product, while the real figure is likely to exceed 2%. But Putin exercises an iron grip over his people, whose living standards have been allowed to suffer little from the war. They share their president’s visceral resentment of the West, a constant in Russian life for centuries.Two weeks on from the Washington gathering at which the US president met European leaders, we are still far from peace, despite public professions of optimism by some Western allies. They see themselves as having achieved a significant success by keeping Trump in play. He has not thrown the toys out of the pram, as had been widely feared. He did not capitulate to Putin, even if he unconditionally conceded far more than responsible diplomacy would have permitted.European leaders sustain a pretence that we are all singing off the same song sheet. In reality, the allies are divided from the US by the fact that Trump still wishes to believe what Putin says. Few others share his faith. They regard it as essential to inflict far more pain on Russia, such as only America can make possible, to bring it to reasonable terms.Trump has already expressed his readiness to see all eastern Ukraine — including territory not currently occupied by the Russians — ceded to Moscow. He claimed that Putin was ready to see Western troops on the ground to provide long-term security for the rest of the country. The Russians, however, have since restated their rejection of anything of the sort.The US president and his associates appear to understand little about the principles of diplomacy — and less about autocrats. They are corporate dealers who refuse to allow experienced and informed US officials to spearhead their trafficking with foreign powers.They seek to reach settlements within days, to suit US news schedules, whereas serious negotiations to end wars take months or even years, during which diplomats haggle before leaders meet.Putin, like China’s President Xi Jinping and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seldom if ever cuts deals. Such leaders determine positions, and are thereafter difficult to move from them. In Trump’s tariff war, he has successfully bullied allies without retaliation. China, however, has not moved on fundamentals, and shows no sign of intending to do so. Putin might agree to a Ukraine deal to secure sanctions relief, but he continues to demand terms that no responsible US president would countenance. The Russian leader is confident he is winning, and thus has no need to make significant concessions. Trump has himself ruled out Ukrainian NATO membership, but Putin also views its joining the European Union as a red line, and likewise any armed Western security presence in Ukraine.The worst aspect of the post-Anchorage situation is that Trump seems willing to continue pressuring Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, while refusing to squeeze Putin. Trump’s people dispute this latter point, citing the 50% tariffs on India as a penalty for buying Russian oil. But US arms deliveries to Ukraine have slowed dramatically. America has stopped paying the bills, handing that responsibility to the Europeans. Seeing all this, Putin judges America’s will to be weak, just as Europe’s military means are meager. Trump wants only an outcome that stops the shooting for a time, and enables him — the man who empowers Israel’s merciless hammering of the Palestinians — to fulfil his Nobel Peace Prize fantasy, to which he apparently referred repeatedly in conversations with the allied leaders in Washington.After decades in which the foremost problem for Cold War NATO members was to manage a dangerous Soviet Union, the challenge today is to manage an unstable US. The Europeans aspire to flatter Trump into moderating his lunges and to enable Zelenskiy’s nation to sustain its resistance. .Read more:.Russia’s battlefield stalemate: Western arms boost Ukraine as Putin faces mounting challenges.The US ought to be persuadable — at a minimum — to blacklist the Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, as hitherto it has not done. Washington should also resume deliveries to Ukraine of long-range missiles, which have been suspended as part of White House efforts to woo the Kremlin. Moreover, Ukraine should be given the $300 billion of Russian central bank assets currently frozen in the West. Instead, I fear that the likeliest outcome of this war is that Trump will lose interest, and simply drift away. As Ukraine falters on the battlefield, the Russians will secure something Putin can call victory. An American pundit suggested back in 2022 that, even if Russia cannot conquer all Ukraine, it can keep it in a condition in which it remains an unlovely place to live in, and a poor prospect for investors. If or when it eventually becomes a failed state, Putin can rake in the wreckage. The fundamental problem is that Russia is next door to Ukraine, and our nations are far away. Though Trump remains stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge it, the Russians are our enemies, who wish ill to us all — including the United States. They will stay that way, however often the president glad-hands the mass murderer occupying the Kremlin. .© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Max Hastings: Trump’s Ukraine peace push signals weakness to Putin

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