Trump saying ‘Ukraine may not survive’ is a dire warning – and threat

Ukraine could be reduced to a buffer zone – rather than a real country – under Trump’s plan for ‘peace’, writes Mark Almond. There are now serious questions over the US president’s approach to diplomacy

Donald Trump is a unique political phenomenon. Certainly, no one does peace-making like the 47th president of the United States. A showman as much as a businessman before he entered politics, Trump treats diplomacy as a spectacle.

When his predecessor in the White House, the 28th president Woodrow Wilson, denounced “secret diplomacy” as the cause of the First World War and called for “open covenants of peace openly arrived at”, he could not have imagined how Trump would seize the 24-hour news cycle to promote his “plan” to end the war in Ukraine.

Fox News is the US president’s favoured outlet for updates on the negotiations. In one interview, he warns menacingly, “Ukraine may not survive” unless… only to follow up with impromptu remarks on Air Force One to the same channel that “Ukraine’s going to do well, Russia’s going to do well. Some very big things could happen this week.”

Talks will begin in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia tomorrow between Trump’s emissaries and Putin’s men, with a Ukrainian team down the corridor – and President Zelensky offstage elsewhere in Riyadh.

That the world’s three major oil producers might find something to talk about and make deals over, apart from what America and Russia might agree on regarding Ukraine, is not irrelevant to its fate.

President Trump has made clear that Ukraine’s potential in rare earth minerals is a price which Kyiv will have to pawn for peace, but actual energy prices can be decided now by the Big Three producers.

While backdoor deals may be being made in Riyadh, Ukraine looks set to effectively receive a Russo-American ultimatum: keep the rump of your country for the price of disarmament and neutrality.

Ukrainians dislike the traditional English name for their country, “The Ukraine”, which translates as “The Borderland”. Soon, it could become a buffer state.

Maybe the least bad outcome for Ukraine today would be a peace rather like the one that Stalin granted Finland 85 years ago.

Everyone remembers the “Winter War” between Finland and the USSR – or thinks they do.

Stalin invaded at the end of November 1939, intending to replace Finland’s government with a puppet one led by a Soviet communist of Finnish origin, but the Red Army got a bloody nose – rather as Putin’s troops did in 2022.

People forget Russia’s numbers broke the Finnish resistance and Stalin took chunks of the country. However, the Kremlin left the Finns alone and free at home after 1945, so long as they were neutral.

“Finlandisation” was a term of contempt in Nato for decades before the Russian attack on Ukraine and the country’s decision to renounce non-aligned status.

Yet that robust Finland – democratic and defensible – could show the way for a viable post-war Ukraine.

Today’s occupant of Stalin’s office in the Kremlin may not be so forgiving as his predecessor. Putin could well calculate that a peace deal rammed down Zelensky’s throat could choke Ukrainian patriotic solidarity.

Even if the public could accept the amputation of Crimea and the southeastern regions for peace, could the hardline nationalist militias integrated into the Ukrainian army stage a coup to stop it? Civil conflict would delight Putin but would kill chances of US and EU support for a post-war Ukraine.

Ukraine played such a big role in his impeachments that Trump has a personal motive to end the war at any cost to Ukraine, regardless of future risks to it or even to Nato allies in Eastern Europe’s “tough region”, as he calls it. But Team Trump is also on board for what would be a rewriting of the global order, not just a redrawing of the Russo-Ukrainian border. As Trump said, “Some very big things could happen this week.”