Trump Can't Decide Who's To Blame For Ukraine Peace Fail

The impasse is unsurprising. Washington's proposal included a US commitment to recognize Crimea as Russian, a promise that Ukraine would not join NATO, and accept Moscow's control of the territories in eastern Ukraine that it currently illegally occupies. It also included lifting all sanctions against Russia.

In other words, Ukraine would give up large parts of territory and receive no security guarantees, while Russia is rewarded with reintegration into the global economy.

It is the territorial concessions asked of Kyiv that are especially problematic. Quite apart from the fact that they are in fundamental breach of basic principles of international law – the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states – they are unlikely to provide solid foundations for a durable peace.

Much like the idea of Trump's Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, to divide Ukraine like post-1945 Berlin, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what, and who, drives this war. Kellogg later clarified that he was not suggesting a partition of Ukraine, but his proposal would have exactly the same effect as Trump's most recent offer .

Both proposals accept the permanent loss to Ukraine of territory that Russia currently controls. Where they differ is that Kellogg wants to introduce a European-led reassurance force west of the river Dnipro, while leaving the defense of remaining Ukrainian-controlled territory to Kyiv's armed forces.

If accepted by Russia – unlikely as this is given Russia's repeated and unequivocal rejection of European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine – it would provide at best a minimal security guarantee for a part of Ukrainian territory.

What it would almost inevitably mean, however, is a repeat of the permanent ceasefire violations along the disengagement zone in eastern Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian forces would continue to face each other.

This is what happened after the ill-fated Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015, which were meant to settle the conflict after Russia's invasion of Donbas in 2014. A further Russian invasion could be just around the corner once the Kremlin felt that it had sufficiently recovered from the current war.

The lack of a credible deterrent is one key difference between the situation in Ukraine as envisaged by Washington and other historical and contemporary parallels, including Korea and Cyprus.

Korea was partitioned in 1945 and has been protected by a large US military presence since the Korean War in 1953. After the Turkish invasion of 1974, Cyprus was divided between Greek and Turkish Cypriots along a partition line secured by an armed UN peacekeeping mission.

Trump has ruled out any US troop commitment as part of securing a ceasefire in Ukraine. And the idea of a UN force in Ukraine, briefly floated during the presidency of Petro Poroshenko between 2014 and 2019, never got any traction, and is not likely to be accepted by Putin now.

The assumed parallels with the situation in Germany after the Second World War are even more tenuous. Not only did Nazi Germany unconditionally surrender in May 1945 but its division into allied zones of occupation was formally and unanimously agreed by the victorious allies in Potsdam in August 1945.

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Muddling up Potsdam and Munich?

By the time two separate German states of East and West Germany were established in 1949, the Western allies had fallen out with Stalin but remained firmly united in NATO and Western Europe. So the West German state was firmly protected under the US nuclear umbrella.

The agreements made in Potsdam didn't have the same implication of permanence as the US suggestion to formally recognize Crimea as Russian territory. The suggestion was always that the allied forces would pull out of Germany at some stage and restore the country's sovereignty.

Most importantly, the allies did not reward the aggressor in the war or create the conditions for merely a brief interruption for an aggressor's revisionist agenda. After all, what has driven Putin's war against Ukraine is his conviction that“the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

The Trump administration deludes itself that it is applying the lessons of Potsdam by recognizing Russia's territorial conquests in Ukraine and handing them over. Instead, it is falling into the trap of the 1938 Munich Agreement .

Negotiators in Munich tried, but failed, to avoid the Second World War by appeasing and not deterring an insatiable aggressor – a historical lesson that doesn't need repeating.

Stefan Wolff is professor of international security, University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko is professor of international security, Jean Monnet Professor of European Security, National University Odesa Law Academy

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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