Back in January this year, I wrote about the chances that Donald Trump would be able to keep his promise to achieve peace in Ukraine: “That is unlikely to happen. The reason is that Trump will have to show that he has made a bargain which favours the US, but Russia is unlikely to deliver that. So unfortunately, the war is more likely to continue in 2025, and may even escalate before it ends.” And so it went. Unfortunately.
Despite that the EU countries welcomed Trump’s apparent change of mind on Ukraine, they are not really happy. For at the same time, Trump has practically said that the EU, NATO and Ukraine are on their own. The US will happily deliver the weapons with no restriction on their use, as long as somebody else picks up the bill. They would have liked a new multi-billion US aid package, Biden-style, but that is apparently not going to happen. If they want the war to continue, they will therefore have to pay themselves. We shall come back to that in a forthcoming article.
This comes after loud statements from Trump on how he would force Russia to accept a cease-fire and a freezing of the conflict by making it impossible for Russia to sell its oil and gas on the international market. To do that he promised a 100% tariff on imports from countries buying Russian oil and gas. This threat was supported by a powerful bi-partisan group in the US Congress. But can it work?
It won’t be easy.
Firstly, it would lead to a surge in oil prices in the international markets. NATO desk strategists have claimed that it could work if Trump could get OPEC countries to increase oil production to compensate for the lacking Russian oil, so the market price of 60-70 USD per barrel could be maintained. However, there is no sign from OPEC that they are considering such a deal.
The main buyers of Russian oil are India, China and Turkey. Turkey may accept if it gets something in return, but both India and China have up to now refused to stop buying Russian oil. Negotiations are still ongoing between the US and these two countries, but Russian oil is not the main issue. Trump is eager to reach a deal, particularly with China. He will not get that if he starts charging 100% on Chinese imports. And he knows that.
This therefore appears to be an empty threat, as he is unlikely to be able to carry it out.
Secondly, the other proposal from NATO desk strategist is to flood the market with oil, triggering a decline in the oil price, a proposal also mentioned by Trump. This would heavily affect the Russian Federal budget which depends 20-25% on oil and gas. But this is not viable either. The US is the world biggest oil producer, but it relies heavily on shale oil production, which is more costly to produce. Actually, the shale oil companies claim that oil prices should be 65 USD or above for new wells to be profitable. Saudi Arabia has furthermore a so-called ‘fiscal break-even price’ (where the state budget breaks even) of 90-100 dollars. In other words: forget it.
Despite being sanctioned, Russian private company Novatek started shipping gas from the second production line at its Arctic LNG 2 site. Main buyer of the LNG is China. Trump wants China to stop buying Russian LNG. Photo: Novatek
What is happening now looks increasingly as an anticipated blame game for an upcoming NATO defeat in Ukraine, as pointed out by the newspaper ‘Financial Times’. Trump is unwilling to imitate Biden’s Ukraine policy, as this would mean that ‘Biden’s war’, as he likes to call it, would become ‘Trump’s war’ instead. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to take the blame for a defeat either. That is why he offers the EU countries that if they stop buying Russian oil and gas and put in place a punishing tariff on China and India, he will do the same. He very well knows that they will not do that, as EU doesn’t want a trade war with India and China. He can thus wash his hands and let EU take the blame. Good luck, he said. Quite smart, actually. And evil.
But why did Trump fail to convince Putin to accept his cease-fire proposals?
As I see it, the fundamental problem is that US, NATO and the EU countries (with a few exceptions) fail to understand what is the root of the conflict. For Russia this is not mainly about territory, but about security (Ukraine as a neutral state with no foreign troops) and the fate of Russian and Russian speakers in Ukraine (language and religious rights). Russia has stated, firstly, that it wants a durable peace agreement, not a cease-fire, and secondly that it doesn’t accept any peace agreement which implies NATO membership for Ukraine or foreign troops in the country. This hasn’t kept Macron from fussing around with a ‘coalition of the willing’, which should station troops in the country following a cease-fire (or even before), despite that everybody knows that this proposal will never fly with the Russians. This is a recipe for the war in Ukraine to continue eternally and may even lead to a direct Russia-NATO war,
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is now pressing for a cease-fire at the present front lines. Then negotiations can follow, he says. This is a change from earlier, where he insisted that a cease-fire would only benefit the Russians. Trump goes a bit further, insisting that Ukraine should give up the claim to Crimea (which Zelensky has rejected out of hand). A cease-fire would imply a “freezing” of the conflict, as on the Korean peninsula in 1953, or the division of Germany in East and West Germany after World War 2. NATO military would be Ukraine’s security guarantee, as the American troops are in South Korea. You don’t have to be political expert to foresee that this will never fly with the Russians either.
Russia’s claim for a peace agreement are well-known. They want to base it on the draft agreement reached in Istanbul in 2022 at the beginning of the war. The ‘common Istanbul Communiqué’ was called ‘Key Provisions of the Treaty on Ukraine's Security Guarantees – a framework of a possible treaty’. It proposed that Ukraine would end NATO membership plans and become a neutral country, in exchange for security guarantees; whereby Russia and various Western countries would be obliged to help Ukraine militarily if it were attacked. It also proposed limits on Ukraine's military. Ukraine would be allowed to apply for EU membership, and there would be a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea. The question of Donbas was left out for later negotiations. This was the draft agreement supposedly sabotaged by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Russia has since toughened its stance on a peace agreement. Apart from what is established in the Istanbul Communiqué, they now require that the four provinces (and Crimea) be transferred to Russia. Under pressure from Trump, the Russians accepted that the conflict can be frozen on the present front-line in Zaporizhia and Kherson provinces, but that Ukrainian troops will have to pull out of Donetsk province (where they control around 25% of the territory). This has been characterized as outrageous by the mainstream Western media, alleging that this is Ukraine’s main defence line. The neo-con Institute for the Study of War (ISW) even claims that Russia will never be able to take the rest of Donetsk Province. ISW is by the way closely related to the Military-Industrial complex, but even many NATO governments (including Denmark) consider it the highest expertise on the Ukraine War. However, it is to my opinion highly likely that the Ukrainian army will be pushed out of Donetsk anyway, perhaps in a year’s time, but with heavy losses on both sides. It is therefore difficult to see what Ukraine’s government will gain from continuing the war.
In conclusion, there is unfortunately no hope for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine conflict in the near future, and this should come as no surprise. The EU is apparently convinced that it can continue and win the war in Ukraine even without financial support from the US (but buying American weaponry). As Trump maliciously said: ‘Go for it’.
In the next article we shall look at Europe’s options.
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I have commented on the Ukraine conflict since 2014. Click on the links below to read.
January 2025: Why Trump may not end the war in Ukraine
October 2024: All wars eventually end. So will the Ukraine war.
August 2024: The President in his labyrinth
July 2024: How to perpetuate slaughterhouse Ukraine.
February 2024: It is now it is becoming dangerous
October 2023: Just wondering: Who is it exactly that is being strategically defeated in Ukraine?
July 2023: What are the Ukrainians dying for?
May 2023: And what if Ukraine loses the war?
January 2023: Oh, what a lovely war!
April 2022: Seems NATO did decide to throw Ukraine under the bus
December 2021: Has NATO decided to sacrifice Ukraine?
November 2021: How to conserve the peace in Europa
September 2014: Will sanctions hurt Russia?
April 2014: Does the EU know what it is doing in Ukraine?
