Will the Russia peace deal backfire on Trump?

The rumor reverberating around Kyiv is that the FBI has been leaning on Ukrainian anti-corruption police to investigate Zelensky’s inner circle in order to force him to swallow the bitter US peace deal. Trump, as they say, has put the screws, or the feds, on Zelensky.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau – which is unravelling a $100 million war-profiteering scandal that has implicated many of Zelensky’s closest political allies – has denied the accusation point blank, and there’s not a single shred of evidence that it is true.

Nevertheless, Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament and hardly a friend of Zelensky, told me, “A lot of people are saying anti-corruption bodies are taking orders from the United States to undermine Zelensky, to make him do the deal.”

That the rumor exists and has gained currency within the country crystallizes how Ukrainians have come to view their relationship with America: where once they looked east to find a belligerent state using its secret police to try to control their country, now they look west. 

The rumor also reveals how Ukrainians regard democracy and its guardian institutions: they don’t much care for them right now. In a time of war, the fight against corruption is subordinate to survival. It’s heretical in Ukraine to suggest that the country might benefit from elections to give its leader a democratic mandate and a stronger arm to bargain with. Elections would be complicated to stage during, no doubt, but they were managed during the US Civil War in 1864, so why not now? Ukrainians – even those who despise Zelensky – shrug at the suggestion and say, first, defeat the existential threat.    

However, the rumor does convey one probable truth: that Trump is desperate to make a peace deal happen at almost any cost, as he has been promising the world he would end the war for years. 

The proposed deal, which in its current state would codify Putin’s maximalist demands, would be a political death sentence if Zelensky were to accept it. Russian would become an official state language, the Ukrainian army (already too small to fend off Russian aggression) would be slashed by 60 percent, land in the Donbas – as yet unconquered – would be given away and many foreign weapons and all foreign troops would be banned from holding the peace. 

“It is a plan for the capitulation of Ukraine, agreed by the US,” a Ukrainian party leader told me. There is neither a majority in the parliament for the deal, nor in the country.  

Yet there are some who are cautiously optimistic. They dare to think that politics is back. First, the anti-corruption investigation has applied defibrillator paddles to the moribund parliament, shocking it back into life. Deputies are demanding the head of Andriy Yermak – Zelensky’s chief of staff who is accused of siphoning off funds earmarked for building defenses to protect Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. If he goes, it is hoped a full-scale clean-out of dead wood will follow. Not exactly a general election, but at least a political change. So far Zelensky is refusing to bow to pressure and fire Yermak. This has only increased speculation that Zelensky himself may have something to hide. 

There would be necessary compromises on both sides, but the 28-point plan might actually work. It is a starting point for serious negotiations.

A senior source close to Zelensky, who worked on the failed Russian-Ukraine peace deal in 2022 told me, “Trump is the only person in the world right now who wants to end the war. We choose to fight rather than surrender. Putin has his own plans to continue. China wants to supply both sides. Europe wants us to fight the Russians so they don’t have to. Only Trump is serious about peace.”

But how much is the famously conciliatory Vladimir Putin really willing to compromise on? He has the whip hand. His troops are on the march, slowly taking land in the Donbas and the southern flank Zaporizhzhia. He is paralyzing the Ukrainian energy grid with strikes, plunging the country into cold and darkness as winter bites. (As I write this, my Kyiv hotel is briefly hit by a blackout before the backup generator kicks in. Across the city people access an app to find out their daily allowance of electricity, usually three hours in the morning, three at lunch and three in the evening.)

Trump hopes that his new sanctions will help bring Putin to heel, even though the old ones didn’t really bite and history tells us that Russians are no strangers to suffering and dying for their country – and now they have state propaganda telling them they are fighting a just war against a Nazi threat.

Zelensky has cautiously welcomed the plan, saying he is ready for “honest work” with the US to “bring about a just end to the war.” He said he will speak to Trump soon to discuss it. 

The devil, as always, is in the detail. The document states that Ukraine will be given “reliable security guarantees,” but some commentators have questioned if that is possible if NATO troops are banned from Ukrainian soil, certain classifications of weapons are forfeited and the Ukrainian army is effectively neutered. Sources close to the president’s office, however, believe this issue can be circumvented by having rapid reaction NATO forces stationed in Poland and also by building large arms warehouse in Poland with vast stores of weapons that can be accessed in an emergency. If similar creative solutions can be found for other issues there is a glimmer of hope.

However, if a good deal cannot be struck there may be danger for Trump. So far, many Americans have ignored the media’s attempts to characterize his high-risk strategy of engaging with both sides as appeasement, or that he is in the pocket of Putin. They understand that you don’t make peace with your enemies – and that sometimes heads need to be knocked together. The process is infinitesimally less important than the outcome. Yet the benefit of the doubt they have afforded Trump may be withdrawn if it appears that he is trying to ram a capitulation deal down the neck of the plucky Ukrainian nation standing up to the world’s number one bully.

Zelensky can’t sell the current proposal to his nation, nor can Trump sell it to his. Of course, Trump can always simply walk away if it falls apart and blame everyone else, which is possibly the most likely outcome at this stage. Yet it may yet turn out that in even brokering this proposed pact, Trump has become party to a Faustian bargain.