What’s hard to keep in mind, with all the hype that’s flying around, is that there’s no particular reason for either side in the Ukraine war to want a ceasefire right now, let alone a full peace settlement. The only one who’s in a hurry is Donald Trump, and that’s just because he’s terminally impatient.
The war, which has just passed its third anniversary, is as deeply stuck in the mud as the First World War that it so closely resembles. The Russians use their huge numerical superiority to make small advances at great cost in Russian lives, but at their rate of advance during the past year they would only be nearing the outskirts of Kyiv some time in early 2029.
That does not mean that the current war of attrition will last until 2029; just that nobody can confidently predict the winner now. It could come at any point when there is a drastic change of circumstances on either side: a mutiny in the army, a change of government at home, even some third party joining the fight.
In the meantime each side hangs on, plays its allotted role in the attritional war (much higher Russian casualties but very slow Ukrainian retreat), and waits for the unforeseeable but eventually almost inevitable shift in circumstances to happen. After that, usually, things happen very fast and you have a decisive outcome in a matter of months.
Senior Ukrainian and Russian officers will almost all have been educated in the old Soviet military tradition even if they are too young to have served in that defunct army, and will have passed on this wisdom (if that’s what it is) to their respective civilian superiors. They will do what they can in the meanwhile, but they are really waiting for something to change.
And then along comes Trump with a completely different set of motivations and expectations. For him, what kind of peace deal he creates is irrelevant so long as it wins him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump was outraged when Barak Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the first minutes of his presidency in 2009 (“for nothing,” as Trump rightly pointed out). There may be a racial element in this, but the injustice of Obama getting the prize when Trump didn’t get one has been a frequent feature at his rallies ever since (most recently last October).
“They gave Obama the Nobel Prize,” Trump told the Las Vegas audience. “He didn’t even know why the hell he got it, right? He still doesn’t. He got elected and they announced he’s getting the Nobel Prize. I got elected in a much bigger, better, crazier election, but they gave him the Nobel Prize.”
For whatever reason, Trump badly wants the Nobel Peace Prize, and he wants it NOW. Once inaugurated, he created an artificial deadline for a ceasefire, claiming that Ukraine had to agree because it had ‘no cards’ and was doomed to lose the war. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky knew better, but would have lost some Western sympathy if he said so.
Naive people of good will often take the position that any war must end as soon as possible – especially in faraway places they know little about – because then the dying will stop.
But people who seek to gain by war don’t want to stop until they get what they want, and the people they attacked don’t want to stop so long as there’s some chance of getting back what they lost.
Or would you rather have frozen World War 2 in mid-1942? (Germans in France and at the gates of Moscow, the Holocaust gearing up, and most of East and Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation.)
So Zelensky insisted on preconditions before entering peace talks, whereupon Trump lost it. He ruthlessly cut off the flow of American arms, aid and intelligence information to Ukraine, knowing that in the short run Zelensky could not replace them fully with supplies from sympathetic European states. Zelensky caved, as he had to.
Why is Trump in such a tearing rush? Perhaps for the same reason that he is usually rude and insulting: to unbalance the other side. “It’s like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose,” his special Envoy on Russia and Ukraine General Keith Kellog explained. “You get their attention.” Or maybe he was just born that way.
However, by the end of last week a parade of Western diplomatic and Ukrainian advisers had convinced Zelensky that accepting Trump’s ceasefire proposal would probably do no harm. If Putin is still on top of his game, he will agree to the thirty-day ceasefire, knowing full well that the subsequent negotiations will probably collapse quite fast.
And Trump can relax: the next Nobel Peace Prize will not be announced until October.
