Will Trump cave to Zelensky and sink his own peace deal?

By Larry Johnson, political analyst and commentator, former CIA analyst and member of the US State Department’s Office for Counterterrorism

From the start of its military operation in February 2022, Russia has been unequivocal in its objectives: demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. The US and its NATO allies, however, apparently do not believe that Russia is serious about this. If the reports about US President Donald Trump’s peace plan are accurate, then it will be rejected by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. There is no room for negotiation on these two points.

Western media reports, citing senior officials following talks in Geneva, claim that Ukraine agrees to limit the number of its armed forces to 800,000 soldiers. That is a non-starter for Russia because it would require Moscow to accept Ukraine having a larger military than it had at the start of the conflict.

On February 22, 2022 – right before the start of Russia’s operation – Ukraine’s military was undergoing reforms to modernize and expand its forces, but it remained smaller and less equipped than Russia’s. Data from authoritative sources such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Military Balance 2022, and contemporary reports, estimated Ukraine’s core standing army, including ground, air, naval, and support units, to be 196,000 in February 2022; The Ukrainian defense minister later referenced 261,000 as the baseline at the start of the military operation. Ukraine also had 900,000 reservists, which included former conscripts and territorial defense volunteers.

During their negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022, Russia and Ukraine agreed to cap Ukraine’s military at 85,000. Given that Russia is now successfully attacking Ukrainian positions along eight separate axes, Moscow has zero incentive to agree to a plan that would effectively leave Ukraine with the same size military force that it had at the start of the conflict.

The issue of the size of Ukraine’s military is not the only obstacle to a diplomatic settlement of the war. Points concerning territories and security guarantees for Ukraine remain unresolved. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was quite clear about Russia’s position in comments to reporters on Tuesday in Moscow. He said Moscow was expecting to see Washington’s interim version of the deal following input from Vladimir Zelensky and the EU, but implied Russia would remain firm on the goals Putin laid out during his meeting with Trump in Alaska.

“Because if the spirit and letter of the Anchorage agreement are erased, based on the key understandings contained therein, then, of course, we’ll be in a fundamentally different situation,” Lavrov said.

One of those key elements concerns the status of Crimea, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk, and Lugansk. Under the Russian Constitution, as amended and updated in 2022, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson are formally recognized as federal subjects (constituents) of the Russian Federation. This status was established through a series of legal steps in September–October 2022, integrating these territories (referred to as the Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporozhye Oblast, and Kherson Oblast) into Russia’s constitutional framework. Residents are considered Russian citizens from September 30, 2022, onward. Putin does not have the legal authority to unilaterally reverse that decision. He made it clear to Trump that those territories must be recognized as permanently part of the Russian Federation.

Then there is the issue of denazification. This means the removal of the “neo-Nazi regime” that seized power in Kiev in 2014, which persecutes Russian speakers and threatens Russia. The Kremlin points to far-right groups (Azov Battalion, Right Sector, Svoboda party), Holocaust-denial incidents, and the glorification of WWII collaborators (Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevich, the UPA) as proof that Ukraine is ruled or heavily influenced by Nazis.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is reasonable to assume that the bird is a duck. The same logic applies to the term ‘Nazi’. In other words, denazification means the removal of those who defend Nazi views and the prohibition of Nazi ideology on the territory of Ukraine. Zelensky and his crew will refuse to accept this condition, but Russia will not relent. The memory of the Great Patriotic War and the murder of 27 million Russians by Nazi forces has left a permanent scar on the Russian soul. As far as Putin is concerned, this is not an idle political slogan.

Achieving this diplomatically means that Ukraine must hold new, internationally supervised elections, and the participants in those elections must have no affiliation with neo-Nazi groups or ideology. While the Russians would like to achieve this through diplomatic measures and negotiation, I believe that President Putin and the Russian General Staff understand that the only practical way to satisfy this objective will be through the use of military force and the total defeat of the Zelensky government.

The Ukrainians and EU leaders still believe that they can compel Trump to reject Russia’s conditions regarding the Ukrainian military and the need to denazify Ukraine. Zelensky stated that he is ready to meet with Trump, but wanted the Europeans to be there, too. “I am ready to meet with President Trump – there are delicate issues to discuss. But European partners must be present with me at the negotiations,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

I will take that as a benchmark for judging whether or not President Trump is serious about securing a peace deal that is acceptable to Russia. If he caves to Zelensky and allows the Europeans to participate in the negotiations, then the peace plan is dead. Personally, I believe all the Sturm und Drang surrounding the peace plan is just a distraction cooked up by a White House desperate to avoid the military defeat of Ukraine and, by extension, NATO. It is a futile and feckless exercise. While the talks go on, Russian forces continue to advance all along the line of contact. Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable – it is merely a question of how many more Ukrainian soldiers will die before the reality of that defeat is grasped by Trump and his NATO allies.