What’s at stake at the Trump-Putin Ukraine peace summit? | Donald Trump
1 and 1 Territory
Russia occupies about a fifth in Ukraine after more than three years of fighting but continues to demand land. Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia wanted the rest of Donetsk Oblast, 9,000 square kilometers of territory, in exchange for a ceasefire. Zelenskyy said that Ukraine could not agree, especially for so little in return. It is unlikely that the public of Ukraine will agree to give more land to the invader.
Kyiv is willing to accept a ceasefire on the current fronts, which would be followed by discussions on the future status of the occupied territory. This is a particularly sensitive problem. Russia has requested official recognition of at least part of the territory it has seized, in particular Crimea, but at best Ukraine is likely to accept a de facto occupation. An alternative is that the status of occupied territories is stationed for a future negotiation – “in 25 years”, suggested John Foreman, a former British defense attaché in Moscow.
2 Security guarantees
Russia says that it wants Ukraine to be neutral, although in practice it means a weak neighbor without links to the West. In previous negotiations, still referenced by the Kremlin, he demanded that the kyiv soldiers be reduced to 50,000 tokens. He also calls on the country to be “denazified”, interpreted as a call for the replacement of Zelenskyy.
Ukraine would like to join NATO, although this has been rejected by the United States, leaving it in search of bilateral or multilateral security guarantees of its Western allies. Great Britain and France have promised to direct a “comfort force” with European predominance which will enter Ukraine in the event of a stable ceasefire, although Russia opposes this.
On Wednesday, French president Emmanuel Macron said Trump said the United States was also ready to be part of the security guarantees to prevent the war that will explode again. We do not know what Trump is ready to offer, and a bilateral guarantee of Japan or South Korea seems unlikely. Meanwhile, unless Russia is ready to accept that Ukraine can determine its own security agreements, agreed progress seems impossible.
3 and 3 Sanctions and exchange
Russia wants economic sanctions that have been imposed in Moscow are lifted. Trump, however, can only speak for the United States, with the United Kingdom and the EU likely to be more hostile, unless Ukraine has registered a global peace agreement. The Kremlin also wants to go further, and today Putin’s advisor Yuri Ushakov said that leaders would discuss wider cooperation, “including in the commercial and economic sphere”, as part of an arrangement offered between the two countries. Without tangible progress on other subjects, a unilateral relaxation of sanctions by the United States would be surprising.
4 War crimes, repairs and reconstruction
War crimes and allegations of repairs cannot be canceled as part of a peace agreement. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has an arrest warrant against Putin for the forced transfer of around 20,000 children from Ukraine to Russia. Zelenskyy asked that young people have returned to the first stage of any discussion on peace, but the CPI’s request will not disappear. Ukraine “remains the obligation to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own citizens,” said human rights lawyer Wayne Jordash.
The World Bank estimated that the total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine – where most of the war has been waged – amounts to 506 billion euros (4.35 billion pounds sterling). After a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, a register of compensation complaints was set up by the Council of Europe to register complaints eligible for compensation. However, Russia has so far refused to help finance reconstruction, leaving Ukraine to find other ways to finance its post-war reconstruction. An option is to grasp the Russian assets held abroad, or about $ 280 billion (207 billion pounds sterling), but the realization of an international consensus on the crisis was difficult.
5 Other problems
There are many other practical concerns. Ukraine requests the release of all prisoners of war alongside an initial ceasefire. Russia has more than 8,000 Ukrainian and Ukraine prisoners of war, a smaller quantity, which makes the exchanges of one for a delicate. But there have been dozens of exchanges since the start of the war, and this can be one of the simplest problems on which to agree.
At the start of the war, Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. Shortly after, it was closed, but the site remains in the territory held by Russia and there are signs that Russia wants to restart it and connect it to the country’s energy network, a forced transfer that Ukraine will not recognize, but can be helpless to prevent.
