As Ukraine peace talks continue, Putin is the one left holding all the cards

Behind a smokescreen of talks about ‘technical details’ in Saudi Arabia, secret dealings on the big questions of the peace deal are likely in play, writes Mark Almond – the question is, will the Russian president accept Trump’s rush for peace, or does it serve him to string it out?

Donald Trump’s special envoy for negotiating with Russia over Ukraine, Steve Witkoff, has come in for scorn from veteran Ukraine watchers for his ignorance of the terrain that he is apparently ready to carve up with Vladimir Putin.

When Russia staged referendums in southeastern Ukraine under the barrel of a gun in 2022, Witkoff saw “legitimate” expressions of popular opinion. In fact, the Russian army did not even control all of the regions that Putin was nominally annexing – and actually lost much of Kherson oblast only days later.

Anyone who remembers Liz Truss’s toe-curling visit to Moscow just before the war – when, with her usual attention to detail, she got her Russian and Ukrainian territory jumbled up – knows that self-confident ignorance is not an American monopoly. But don’t sneer too quickly at Witkoff, however wrong he is about the facts. Remember, Witkoff is a weather vane – indicating the global outlook of a powerful cohort of Trump-backers.

A kind interpretation of Witkoff’s casual approach to Ukrainian reality might be that he is only concerned with getting a deal – not in passing an exam in recent conflict studies. And buttering up President Putin’s vanity by echoing the Russian case is what Americans backing Trump’s foreign policy revolution might call “thinking outside the box”.

Cringe-inducing, yes – but diplomatic? Perhaps. There is, after all, an essential difference between a superpower’s indifference to inconvenient facts on the ground, and the knowledgeable impotence of old-world statecraft: Washington can mould reality by force and intimidation, whereas the Europeans have little power beyond the hope that moral persuasion will work miracles.

So, as much as Britons are riled by Witkoff’s dismissal of Keir Starmer’s meetings with European leaders and military chiefs about a peacekeeping force as “posture and pose”, we must ask ourselves: was he really wrong on that one?

After all, although Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have tried to herd the European Nato members into backing a ceasefire line monitoring force, potential big players like Italy and Spain have rejected it. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has no desire to break with Trump, whose domestic “anti-woke” agenda mirrors her own culture war in Italy, while Spain’s Pedro Sanchez runs a country that is far from the Russo-Ukrainian front line, and has a strong left-of-centre pacifist tradition.

Not only are America’s European allies splitting from Trump’s Washington: they are divided among themselves. They might be united in deploring Russian aggression and Trump’s appeasement-style approach to mediation, but their disunity over what to do about it confirms the US administration’s belief that making big deals with authoritarians like Putin, or the Saudi hosts of the Ukraine talks is the way to go, rather than trying to keep an army of squabbling “allies” in line.

Allies who don’t contribute much – even when they can agree on policy – can be ignored completely.

Back to Riyadh: behind a smokescreen of talks about “technical details” in the Saudi capital, secret dealings on the big questions of the peace deal are likely in play. The question is: will Putin accept Trump’s rush for peace – or does he think drawn-out negotiations can better serve the Kremlin’s aim of permanently weakening Ukraine?

If the Russian media are celebrating Witkoff’s praise for Putin’s “sincerity”, Ukrainian newspapers are pondering whether their country is going to suffer the fate of South Vietnam, abandoned by Washington 50 years ago.

America is the only superpower that survives – even prospers – despite its proxies falling like dominoes.

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford