“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Donald Trump complained the other day. “I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.” He has coveted the prize since it was bestowed on Barack Obama in 2009. And the talks with Russia underway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which he convened to end the Ukraine war, may be a gambit to put him in the running. Top officials in his administration point to his efforts as proof that he deserves the honour.
So far, the talks have produced provisional agreements that favour Russia. Consider the one to end attacks by Russia and Ukraine on each other’s ships in the Black Sea (so that grain and other food products can be exported without risk). At first, it seemed a revival of the accord Turkey and the UN brokered in July 2022, and that Russia backed out of 12 months later.
Not so. After this latest agreement was revealed, Russia announced a precondition for implementing it: relief from economic sanctions, including renewed access to the Swift payment messaging system used worldwide to settle international trade accounts for “Rosselkhoz bank [the Russian state’s main agricultural bank] and other financial institutions that provide operations in international trade in food (including fish products) and fertilizers”. This stipulation, apparently acceptable to the US, was rejected by Europe, whose consent is required to reconnect Russian banks to Swift. The Europeans insisted that Russia first withdraw from Ukrainian territories.
The upside of the Black Sea deal for Ukraine is hardly clear. Russia’s agriculture exports have increased despite the sanctions, and Ukraine has continued shipping grain, though not yet at pre-war levels. Furthermore, the deal does not include a ban on targeting ports. This omission would allow Russia to continue attacking Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which it did in a drone strike on Mykolaiv within hours of the agreement’s unveiling.
Another agreement reached in Riyadh calls for an end to strikes on energy-related sites for 30 days. Ukraine has been hit hard by Russian attacks on its energy sites over the past several months. But thanks to its ambitious programme of drone production, Ukraine has been hitting refineries deep inside Russia too. The terms would have been far more beneficial to Ukraine had they covered all infrastructure, as recorded in the American read-out of the 18 March Trump-Putin telephone call. But the Russian rendition mentioned only “energy infrastructure”.
As for Trump’s principal proposal, an overall 30-day ceasefire, Ukraine, eager to remain in Trump’s good graces after he and his vice-president JD Vance savaged Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, accepted quickly. Vladimir Putin did not, and instead implied that he would agree only if the West ended arms supplies to Ukraine during the hiatus and that Ukraine, without Russian reciprocity, paused the rebuilding of depleted military units and the formation of new ones.
Whatever Trump’s emissaries are doing, it’s not mediation. (That involves serving as a neutral go-between to resolve disputes and conflicts.) Trump himself has left no doubt about his sympathy for Putin, whom he has long showered with praise – to the point of hailing his invasion of Ukraine as “savvy” and evidence of “genius”. Conversely, Trump has never hidden his disdain for Zelensky, berating him as “the greatest salesman on Earth” who, after each visit to the United States, “walks away with $100bn”.
For Trump, the biggest barrier to peace in Ukraine is Zelensky’s refusal to make territorial sacrifices sufficient to satisfy Putin. In Trump’s world-view, powerful countries are entitled to dominate their neighbours – take note, Canada and Mexico – and complex global problems are settled through deal-making between the likes of him, Putin and Xi Jinping.
Trump’s emissaries are in lockstep with him, especially the US envoy to the Middle East and Russia, Steve Witkoff, who has long been a close friend. His closeness to Trump makes him more important than the secretary of state Marco Rubio. After meeting Putin this month, Witkoff gushed that he was “smart” and “gracious”. As for Ukraine, he called it a “false country”, a paraphrase of Putin’s standard line, and parroted the Russian leader’s assertion that the four Ukrainian provinces he claims are rightfully Russia’s because of a (bogus) post-invasion referendum held in their occupied regions in September 2022.
The big question: will Trump, given his fervent desire to be hailed as a peacemaker (with or without a Nobel Prize), fondness for Putin, and contempt for weak countries, rush to end the war, even if the agreement doesn’t last? He could do so by conceding many of Putin’s demands after squeezing Ukraine, which relies heavily on American economic, and especially military, support. The final agreement, hammered out during talks with Russia that exclude Ukraine, Britain or any European countries, would be presented as a fait accompli. Trump would then proclaim that he ended a war that has killed thousands of Ukrainians, never mind that polls show which a majority would rather fight on than make large territorial concessions to Russia, even if the US cuts off all assistance. This scenario, while not foreordained, can’t be excluded.
[See more: Peacekeepers in a world without peace]
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