February 14, 2025

A View From Ukraine

As US President Donald Trump appears poised to begin negotiating over Ukraine’s future, a new Foreign Affairs essay by Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk details deep concerns.

Some context: Trump caused a stir this week by holding a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the Russia–Ukraine war—before calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (with whom Trump spoke afterward) or European allies. (Such sequencing is typically a sensitive matter. In this case, Ukraine and Europe already were worried that Trump could cut a Ukraine-war deal with Putin over their heads. Trump said he and Putin may soon meet in Saudi Arabia to negotiate.) Some observers speculate that the Trump administration is eyeing a ceasefire along the current line of control, perhaps with European troops stationed in Ukraine as peacekeepers.

In the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, Gumenyuk highlights what she says is a problem under-appreciated by the West: how Russia could use seized Ukrainian territory to control the country and launch further attacks, if allowed to keep the land it has captured.

“[W]hat observers in the West have characterized as brutal excesses in occupied areas—human rights abuses, political repression, and war crimes—are in fact a central part of Russia’s war strategy,” Gumenyuk writes. “The issue is not merely what happens to those under Russian rule but how Moscow has used its control of significant numbers of Ukrainians to undermine the stability of the whole country, even without taking more territory. Nor is this a hypothetical threat: as Ukrainians know too well, the Kremlin, while pretending to negotiate, used the eight years of so-called frozen conflict with Ukraine after 2014 to create a launch pad for the larger invasion. Put simply, Russian control over any part of Ukraine subverts and corrodes Ukrainian sovereignty everywhere. … [W]hether or not a deal is reached, the assumption that a cease-fire will end Russia’s primary threat to Ukrainians misunderstands the nature of the conflict.”

This analysis revisits a concern raised by other close observers of Russia’s war. In a January 2023 essay for The Economist, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (ret.)—who formerly commanded US Army Europe—warned that if Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine will be left “more vulnerable to future attacks than before Russia seized it” and will struggle to rebuild its economy if Russia retains a coastal location that could help it interfere with Ukrainian exports shipped via the Black Sea.

A ‘New Playbook’?

Before winning back the presidency, Trump claimed he could end the Russia–Ukraine war in a single day. That has not happened.

Broadly speaking, Trump may find it difficult to reach a speedy resolution. As Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, larger Russian demands concerning NATO are bound up in this war. In December 2021, as Putin massed troops for a potential full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he presented NATO members with a list of demands that included halting any further NATO expansion and rolling NATO troops and weapons back to their positions before May 1997.

Still, Trump’s wheeling-and-dealing style, aimed at securing big diplomatic agreements via quick transactions, could be a “new playbook” for the rest of his second presidency, David S. Cloud, Alexander Ward and James T. Areddy write for The Wall Street Journal.

Trump’s approaches to Ukraine and Gaza—where Trump has sought an end to Israel–Hamas war and “take over” the territory—both “stem from his belief in his powers of persuasion, a stated yearning to be seen as a deal-cutting peacemaker of historic significance, and a penchant for imposing decisions on weaker countries, including allies,” the Journal authors hear from analysts. “A question is whether Trump might now try his game plan elsewhere, such as in Taiwan, where fears are growing that the president’s desire for a quick trade deal with Beijing might inspire him to use the democratic island as a bargaining chip.”

How Europe Should Handle Trump

On last Sunday’s GPS Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German media company Axel Springer, told Fareed that the US and EU should unite and use their joint leverage to counter autocratic powers.

Music History: Trump, the Panama Canal and Bad Bunny

The Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunny has topped charts and achieved mega-stardom in recent years. What does that have to do with Trump’s goal of retaking the Panama Canal? In a short video posted to X, Alex Kliment of GZero Media explained that reggaeton exists partly because of cultural and musical syncretism that began in the Canal Zone during original US control from 1903–1979.