Russia-Ukraine war: How Ukraine’s war ends, Trump’s plan for what comes next

It is the ending no one in Ukraine wanted, and few believe can last. Kyiv will surrender 20% of its land to Russia as it is partitioned along an 1300km, heavily militarised border.

The peace will be secured by Vladimir Putin’s word as a gentleman, and a multinational force with no American involvement. Neither America nor Nato at large will be obliged to defend Ukraine should Russia attack again.

The obvious risks of such a settlement are one thing. But what has shocked European governments is that Donald Trump and Putin appear to have hammered it out without talking to anyone else. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy only met Vice-President JD Vance as an afterthought, on Friday. But it was clear the real action had taken place between the two presidents – Trump and Putin – elsewhere. “Bastards” one British defence official said of the Americans on hearing of the purported plan.

Nonetheless, it need not be a disaster for Ukraine.

There are both risks and opportunities, says Pavlo Klimkin, who was the Ukrainian Foreign Minister when the Minsk accords ending Russia’s first invasion in 2014 and 2015 were negotiated.

But “Minsk was just about buying time,” he notes. “This has even more risks than Minsk.

“As I understand, for [Trump’s] team engaging with Putin is not just about this negotiation process. It’s also about trying to decouple the Russians from China, to engage with them on strategic stability and many, many other issues. So there is a risk of multi-layer trade-offs.”

What peace looks like

An end to the war, as laid out by Pete Hegseth, the new US Defence Secretary, looks something like this: a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders would be “unrealistic”, and Russia need not give up anything it has captured. So the implication is a freeze of the front line where it stands.

Or more accurately, where it stands when any armistice is eventually signed. So both sides now have an urgent incentive to fight as hard as possible for the next days and weeks and grab what land they can.

Assuming neither side achieves a major new breakthrough, the new line of contact would stretch from the mouth of the Dnipro river in the Black Sea, north-eastwards to the border between Ukraine and Russia at Kharkiv.

There will be haggling over the details. For instance, Ukraine holds some land in Russia itself, in the Kursk region, and may be able to trade this for, say, the sliver of Kharkiv region Russia occupies around Kupiansk. But Moscow will still end up with about 20% of Ukraine’s territory.

On top of this, Hegseth made clear, Ukraine would not join Nato or be provided with Nato’s “one for all and all for one” guarantee of collective defence in the event it was attacked again.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 61st Munich Security Conference on February 15. Photo / AFP

That is in line with Russian demands and assuages American, German, and Hungarian reluctance to expand the alliance.

Instead, any guarantee against a Russian reinvasion must come from a “non-Nato” force made up of European and non-European troops, but strictly no Americans.

All of which horrifies Ukrainians (and officials in other Nato countries) who believe Nato membership is the only security guarantee remotely capable of deterring Russia from coming back for more land in future – and the only thing the Ukrainian public would accept in exchange for signing away 20% of the country.

This means Putin now knows that if he has to kill peacekeepers to re-invade Ukraine, the world’s most powerful military alliance will not respond. Then again, suggest some in Kyiv, maybe Trump is not so much changing the conversation as being refreshingly honest about it.

“Trump did not significantly shift from what was the de facto the position of the previous administration,” notes Oleksandr V Danyluk, a former advisor to Ukraine’s defence and intelligence chiefs and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

“Biden did not see Ukraine in Nato either, and he was absolutely clear about that.”

Instead, Danyluk suggests, Hegseth’s bald statement of US unwillingness to commit forces may serve as a useful prod to European nations. “Now, in fact, we have some positive news about America’s view of European troops being involved in security guarantees for Ukraine,” he argues.

Securing the ceasefire

This deal cannot be a “Minsk 3.0”, Hegseth says, referring to the 2014 and 2015 ceasefire deals that Klimkin helped negotiate, and which both collapsed when Russia decided it didn’t like them and restarted the war.

Nonetheless, the Minsk deals do give some idea of what any new peace might require of the combatants.

For a start, the front line will be frozen along the line of contact, with both sides obliged to withdraw heavy weapons out of range.

Theoretically the last deals were refereed by an observer mission from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a regional security association founded in the 1970s to stop the Cold War turning hot. Its members drove around the contact line in white Land Cruisers, diligently counting the explosions they heard, the weapon systems they saw, and the diameter and incoming-angle of the new craters they measured.

They were unarmed, and had neither the authority nor the means to enforce the ceasefire.

So the observers and the opposing armies played a darkly comic game of cat and mouse that damaged the credibility of the international community.

One Ukrainian artillery officer who showed me how he hid his howitzers inside the zone was unapologetic: if the Russians shelled his infantry colleagues (which they frequently did) he had a duty to answer. The OSCE could go hang.

In a couple of places – specifically the village of Shirokine east of Mariupol, and the industrial estate on the southern outskirts of Avdiivka – the war never stopped. By 2021, Ukrainian troops reported that the Russians were dropping grenades from quadcopters (they would not admit to doing it themselves).

The lesson is unambiguous: without a security guarantee with teeth, any new deal will be unenforceable.

And yet a European security guarantee with teeth seems impossible: former Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has estimated the number of troops required to police the ceasefire line would be “between 50,000 and 100,000 troops”. Former head of the British army, Lord Dannatt, has put the requirement at the upper end of that estimate, with Britain required to provide a significant number. “I mean,” he told the BBC, “if we were to deploy 10,000 troops, each rotation for six months, that would effectively tie up 30,000 or 40,000 troops and we just haven’t got that number available. So there are some big issues here that today’s politicians won’t really have considered.”

The last time British troops were deployed in Europe to prevent Russian troops sweeping westwards came in the post-war British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). At their height numbers deployed reached 80,000 – but that was in the 1950s when there were more than 350,000 regular British soldiers and almost half a million in total.

MoD figures show that there are just 74,000 regular soldiers. About 900 are deployed in Estonia as part of “enhanced forward presence”. No wonder then, that writing in the Telegraph, Britain’s Foreign and Defence Secretaries, David Lammy and John Healey, have insisted that a lasting peace requires “Europe doubling down to do more on our own continent’s security”.

Yet the second Minsk accord, which lasted eight years, did achieve a glimpse – or perhaps just a mirage – of long-term stability.

Life in the heavily militarised and long-depressed Donbas rust-belt never returned to “normal”, but mines and factories, even some on the very frontline, resumed operations.

On the Russian-occupied side, a show of investment combined with a ruthless secret police and legal vacuum more brutal than anything in Russia itself kept the population in line.

On the Ukrainian side, Mariupol, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk began to benefit from an influx of money from central Government and international organisations.

At the village of Granitnoye, schoolchildren from the Russian-occupied side of the river Kalmius trooped daily across no-man’s land to school on the Ukrainian-held bank.

Eventually, the Ukrainians rebuilt the bridge and set up a proper checkpoint at Stanitsa Luhanska, allowing locals to cross back and forth across the contact line.

And, of course, a little-talked-about black economy grew up, with smugglers bringing goods and cash back and forth across the line.

By the time Putin launched the full-scale invasion in 2022, something resembling a thoroughly imperfect but more or less stable frontier was beginning to emerge.

Shelling had dropped off, and the people of Donbas could see a future with something not entirely unlike peace.

That did not suit Putin however.

A new Korea?

The American vision seems to be that this time a Korean-style demilitarised frontier will really take hold, behind which Ukraine can prosper.

“I would love to hope it could stay this way,” said Pavlo Klimkin, who was Ukraine’s Foreign Minister at the time of the Minsk accords.

“But my educated guess it won’t, because for Putin, the very fact of our existence runs counter to his new concept of Russia as a state civilisation, something similar to China or India or Iran. So I don’t think it’s going to hold, unless credible deterrence is part of the conversation.”

Putin has always made clear he is not interested merely in a ceasefire, but a permanent settlement that would involve subjugation of Ukraine and a rewritten European security order.

In other words, says Klimkin, there are two parts to peace: the bit of paper will be signed regardless of whether Ukraine trusts Putin to keep his word; and the conditions of deterrence to make sure he does. Korea’s peace is of course underwritten by a massive American military presence.

“Everyone has to be a part of this conversation,” says Klimkin, when asked if Ukraine’s peace would depend on Europe and not the United States. “The problem is that the Europeans are not only crazy scared, but they’re not sure what to do with their fear.” Whether, in other words, to arm up or appease.

There’s another snag, points out Danylyuk: In 2022, Putin passed a law formally annexing Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions – including the bits he did not then, and still does not now, control. The Russian constitution expressly forbids surrendering Russian territory once it is acquired.

“The fundamental problem is the Russians are trapped by their previous decisions. For them and their crazy law it is Ukraine occupying 40% of Donetsk region, plus Zaporizhia and Kherson, and it is a crime to stop fighting,” said Danylyuk.

“Yes, Putin’s government is creative at circumventing the Russian constitution, but I don’t see how they get out of that one. I don’t see how they can escape the war.”

A new world order?

Presuming this conundrum of how to stop the Russians fighting can be overcome, the biggest question remains of how to stop them starting again? It is not one to which Trump has so far presented an answer.

One theory is that, in typical Trumpian fashion, America has just outlined an extreme position from which to begin negotiations. Indeed, a softening of the rhetoric has already begun. British defence officials on Friday said they believed the Americans might be persuaded to provide air cover for a peace-keeping force in exchange for access to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals.

And comfortingly – if confusingly – for Ukraine, later in the week Hegseth later gently amended the hard line he had held on Wednesday. “Everything is on the table,” he mused. No Nato membership for Ukraine now did not mean no Nato in 25 years, he went on. His remarks about the 2014 borders were not a “concession” but an observation.

Even so, the stark reality for now is that his Government has bluntly signalled that it might not even be interested in a long-term security guarantee for Ukraine. Hegseth told Nato defence ministers that the United States would no longer be “primarily focused on the security of Europe”. An earlier draft of his speech suggested he wanted to go further and say America would no longer be the “primary security guarantor of Europe”.

The fear of some European officials is that this is not merely an American retreat, but the emergence of a new world order – a world order in which Ukraine is simply a card to be played in the grander bargain that Klimkin thinks the Trump administration is seeking with Russia.

Us defence secretary Pete Hegseth has signalled a drastic shift in Washington's position on the war. Photo / Getty Images

The evidence for this is in a subtle – but critical – change of language.

Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, last week told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.

“It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet,” he added.

It is a choice of words that sent a jolt through the foreign policy community.

To academics, “multipolarity” is a theoretical term referring to a world with equally influential centres of global power, and the subject of obscure papers by international relations professors.

But in the late 1990s Yevgeny Primakov, the Prime Minister who is credited with establishing the world view Putin still pursues, made it a Russian foreign policy objective.

It has been a central pillar of Russian rhetoric ever since, with officials including Putin himself trotting it out to express their vision of how global power ought to be divided up.

“At one level it implied a democratisation of international affairs: we don’t want to live by Washington’s diktat, so we want a world with multiple centres of power,” said Sam Greene, professor in Russian politics at King’s College London.

“But it became about Russia establishing itself as one of a limited number of genuinely independent centres of gravity, and the idea that you are only a centre of gravity if you have others in your orbit.”

Primakov wanted Russia to be one of the few indispensable and truly sovereign powers that regulate a multi-polar world. To get there, it would need to achieve supremacy in the former Soviet sphere of influence, and to limit Nato expansion.

It is, in other words, the philosophy that underpins the invasion of Ukraine and calls for recognition of spheres of influence.

When Primakov died in 2015 at the age of 85, the term was still marginal outside Russia.

American and Western officials, when they thought of it at all, treated it as a childish protest at the grown-up realities of the world; the adolescent tantrum of what Barack Obama dismissed as merely a “regional power”.

To hear an American Secretary of State use the term is therefore remarkable.

It raises the possibility that the Russians have not only won the intellectual argument, but that the Americans are looking to assert their own pole – or sphere – of influence.

It is a thought that has already occurred to some of America’s neighbours.

Trump’s first foreign policy moves had nothing to do with Russia, China, or even the Middle East, points out Michael Ignatieff, a former leader of the Canadian liberal party.

Instead, Trump announced his intention to acquire Greenland, take control of the Panama Canal, and make Canada the “51st state” on pain of devastating tariffs.

“The implication that everybody needs to think about is that this is a declaration first that America has a sphere of influence from Greenland in the north to Chile in the south, and wants to have seamless economic integration with Canada and basically absorb us economically,” said Ignatieff.

“But the most serious thing is that it might imply conceding a sphere of influence to China in East Asia. It might imply conceding a sphere of influence to Russia at the Eastern borders of Europe and basically say the world should be divided into three.”

It should be noted that neither Trump nor his Government have explicitly called for such a division of the world. Mike Waltz, the White House National Security Advisor, denies plans to invade Canada. But he has observed that America has overlooked “our own hemisphere where we have the energy, the food and the critical minerals for way too long”.

It is a shocking concept that shatters the post-Cold War consensus. Yet it also has plenty of precedent.

As long ago as 1494, through the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the entire planet between them. More recently, at Yalta in 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin carved up Europe. In fiction, George Orwell’s dark vision of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in eternal war foreshadows this moment.

The academic studies of multipolarity warn that when you create multiple hegemonies, you get multiple conflicts: between the rival great powers who cannot agree on where their spheres end, and between those of their satellites who do not want to submit. So while Trump might imagine that multipolarity is a route to peace and stability, others suggest it is risky in the extreme. Which in turn may make some Russian observers wonder just how serious Trump is about this new vision.

“If I were in the Kremlin or adjacent to the Kremlin I would be curious about the degree to which the US is actually likely to dismantle the structures that have underpinned its foreign policy since the Second World War,” said Greene.

That won’t stop medium and smaller powers calculating just what the new world order would mean for them, should it indeed come to pass.

For some, far from the frontline, little may change. But for others, located in the liminal lands where America’s sphere of influence rubs up against those of Russia or China – multipolarity’s new “Big Three” – present stability and sovereignty may come under radical threat.

“Our problem will be that we will lose our political sovereignty, which matters a hell of a lot to Canadians,” says Ignatieff. “But it’s not going to matter to others.

“But I think the Europeans have an awful lot to worry about. They’ve made a historic bargain that began in 1945 with the arrival of American troops and the Marshall Plan and all that stuff. That ought to send tremors through the European Union and through British policymakers.”

Across Europe and the world, away from the battlefield it is, then, a moment of historic proportions. Yet the one place Trump’s phone call with Putin has not made much impression is at the front itself.

In the trenches, the mayhem in Munich is an irrelevance, said Mikhaylo, a mortar commander fighting near Toretsk: the Russians still periodically launch assaults, the Ukrainians try to hold them off, and when the Russians have mustered enough men and equipment for another big push, the dance begins again.

Perhaps suitably, these are the tactics of the Great War. Beyond the trenches, as a century ago, great imperial powers are assembling to cut a deal and establish broad spheres of influence beyond. Now, as then, the world will wait to see whether the outcome is stability – or calamity.