President-elect Donald Trump preparing for his appearance on election night. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
BRUSSELS — Among Ukraine’s European allies, there is a quiet but growing shift toward the notion that the war with Russia will end only through negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow involving concessions of Ukrainian territory.
The conversation has taken on greater urgency with the election victory of Donald Trump, who has said he would quickly end the war, without detailing how, and has signaled he could back a deal that keeps some seized territory in Russian hands. In Europe, the closed-door discussions have also been fueled by a bleak battlefield situation, with Ukrainian forces on the defensive and fears of dwindling U.S. funding.
Interviews with 10 current and former European and NATO diplomats suggest that while declarations of enduring support persist, some of Ukraine’s allies are increasingly looking to lay the foundations for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, even as the parameters of a deal remain elusive.
European and NATO officials acknowledge that talk of territorial concessions no longer raises as many eyebrows as it once did, and diplomats frame it not as “land-for-peace,” but rather as land for Ukraine’s security.
“I think everybody has more or less reached this conclusion, it’s hard to say it publicly because it would be a way of saying we are going to reward aggression,” said Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington.
A Western official who, like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said, “It’s certainly not fringe anymore.”
It’s unclear exactly what a deal might look like, as diplomats weigh blueprints of “peace plans” floated since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With Russian forces in control of roughly a fifth of the country — including in the eastern Donbas region and the annexed Crimean Peninsula — freezing today’s front lines or outlining a demarcation line would mean Ukraine ceding swaths of its territory.
There’s now broad recognition that “negotiations might be coming earlier” than expected and that they “will entail some concessions on both sides,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general and a distinguished policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.
European leaders have “a big question mark on how the Trump team will want to play it,” he said, and while they hope the next administration would push Russia to the negotiating table, they fear it may corner Ukraine into a bad deal by cutting off aid.
Boosting aid, watching Trump
European policymakers say they must keep reinforcing Ukraine so that it has leverage if talks eventually begin. They also want to avoid being blindsided if the incoming Trump administration pushes for a deal. Trump briefly raised the issue of land in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he advised the Russian leader not to escalate the war, several people familiar with the matter said.
Backing the Ukrainian army as long as necessary “is the only path to negotiations,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday, standing alongside NATO chief Mark Rutte. “And let me be clear,” he added, “when the moment comes, nothing must be decided on Ukraine without the Ukrainians, nor on Europe without the Europeans.”
In a 25-minute phone call with Trump, Macron made clear last week that any negotiations must involve meaningful concessions from Moscow, according to people familiar with the call.
At a dinner of European leaders last week in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, many made the case for maintaining money and weapons support for Ukraine and discussed how to keep the funds flowing in case of a U.S. cutoff, officials said.
A European Union diplomat said the prospect of a future negotiated settlement was slowly gaining traction, largely behind the scenes: “Nobody in the room was going, ‘We need to give up the Donbas.’”
As they try to persuade Trump to stay the course, European countries have boosted defense spending and funding for Ukraine to contain the fallout of a possible U.S. policy shift. They face an uphill battle to maintain aid in the long run, with struggling economies and political chaos in countries including France and Germany.
Reflecting the sense of urgency after the U.S. election, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a lightning trip to Brussels on Wednesday, meeting senior NATO, E.U. and Ukrainian officials to strategize on the future. Since Trump’s victory, the U.S. focus has been on rushing as much military aid as possible to Kyiv before the incoming administration takes over, recognizing that it will likely have a very different approach.
‘50 shades of gray’
For now, a resolution to the conflict remains out of reach, not least because Russia has not relented on its demands, the Trump administration’s policy on Ukraine has not been fully articulated, there’s no consensus on security guarantees that could be acceptable for Ukraine and, as Grand put it, “there are 50 shades of gray” among European views on how negotiations should unfold.
Discussions have centered on the prospect of a cease-fire along a demarcation line in return for Western security assurances — a de facto, at least temporary concession of existing areas of control even without formal recognition.
Yet European policymakers are far from agreeing on what any security guarantees might be, with key allies, including the United States and Germany, so far rebuffing Ukraine’s request for an invitation to NATO — a big sticking point as the Kremlin has long used the threat of the Western alliance to justify the war. Other ideas on the drawing board have included European boots on the ground or promises of more weapons — also seen as nonstarters for Russia.
Moscow has signaled it would accept nothing less than Ukrainian capitulation. Putin has maintained that Ukraine would have to accept total neutrality for any talks to succeed. He has said that “if Ukraine’s neutrality does not exist, it is hard to imagine any good neighborly relations with Russia.” He has also said that any cease-fire could not be a temporary arrangement that would merely allow Ukraine to stock up on munitions.
Also, before any negotiations begin, Russia wants to retake all of its Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces seized land in a cross-border attack over the summer, to keep Russian territory off the negotiating table. Kyiv had hoped its gamble with the Kursk attack would give it leverage, but Russian forces have since retaken parts of the region and made gains in Donbas.
The deterrence debate
After a failed 2014-2015 cease-fire deal dubbed the Minsk agreements, Ukrainians say they fear that a land-for-peace deal would just give Russia time to regroup for another attack.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Wednesday that pushing Ukraine to negotiate on unfavorable terms was akin to forcing “Ukraine to give up its resistance.” He posted that it was absurd to discuss “peace at the expense of the victim only,” saying it encouraged further attacks and neglected “real scenarios of forcing Russia (the aggressor) to stop aggression.”
Kyiv’s official position, and what it would consider a victory, remains that Russian forces must leave all Ukrainian territory. Public opinion polls show a majority of Ukrainians support this, though the percentage of those who could accept some loss of land in a peace deal appears to be gradually rising as the war grinds on. A survey, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of
Sociology and released on Tuesday, indicated that 58 percent of Ukrainians thought that “under no circumstances” should Kyiv sacrifice land, while 32 percent were open to giving up “some of [Ukraine’s] territories” to reach a deal to end the conflict - a threefold increase since the start of the invasion.
Like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, European leaders would also have to navigate public messaging on negotiations after more than two years of warning of an existential threat to Europe that requires sending Kyiv billions in aid.
Zelensky told reporters last week there could be no cease-fire without guarantees that Ukraine can deter any future Russian attacks.
Earlier this year, Macron sparked backlash from some European allies for saying he would not rule out that some troops could be deployed to Ukraine as a possible deterrent.
Some countries, including Britain and Eastern European and Nordic nations, are now eyeing the idea of boots on the ground as a possible security guarantee in the event of a deal, analysts said.
“We’re not against negotiating,” a Western diplomat said, “but the moment matters, and the leverage Ukraine has and what they get in return.”
Public suggestions of land-for-peace are confined to the proposals of Moscow-friendly Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. Baltic nations and Ukrainian neighbors such as Poland are gripped by fears of Russia pushing at NATO’s borders, and they chafe at mentions of territorial concessions, especially without a clear deterrent.
Those who made land-for-peace suggestions were “practically burned at the stake” in the past, but now the idea prompts less outrage, a senior NATO official said. Ukraine’s ability to defend big cities including Kharkiv and Odessa played to its favor, he said, but “we all realize it will be difficult in the short term for Ukraine to regain sovereignty over 100 percent of their territory.”
European officials maintain that any agreement should not allow Putin to declare victory in reshaping borders through war, though that’s a tall order if Russia keeps control of chunks of its neighbor.
“That is one important thing about any arrangement we make,” the official said. “It can never be seen as a victory for Russia.”
Catherine Belton in London, David L. Stern in Kyiv and Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.
