Putin’s ‘Peace’ Proposal Would Be a Prelude to More War

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 18, 2025

 

The Russian president is demanding a steep price for peace — on terms so favorable for Moscow that it would likely be a temporary reprieve.

 

The best news to come out of the Alaska summit on Friday was that Donald Trump was reportedly so vexed by Vladimir Putin’s stubbornness that he was at one point “ready to walk away.” The worst news is that, in the end, he didn’t.

 

For those within the faction of the president’s movement whose foremost foreign policy goals seem to revolve around getting America out of the Ukraine-supporting business, the contours of a peace deal that emerged from the Anchorage summit must be depressing. At minimum, they commit the Trump administration to deeper involvement in the diplomatic process. Beyond that, the implementation of the terms with which Trump and Putin are toying would obligate “us” — the U.S. and its NATO allies — to deeper and more fraught commitments on the European continent.

 

For all their efforts to make the Alaska summit on Ukraine about everything and anything but Ukraine, the Russians were clear in their demands.

 

Moscow wants Ukraine “demilitarized,” though it will graciously negotiate with the Europeans what weapons it will allow Kyiv to possess. Russia reportedly signaled that it would cease its persecution of Ukrainian language-speakers in exchange for “official status” for the Russian language in all or part of Ukraine. It also called on Ukraine to restore the right of the “Russian Orthodox Church to operate freely,” allowing the Kremlin-subverted Patriacrhate to once again support Russian political objectives from behind vestments.

 

In addition, Putin wants land — more of Ukraine than his troops could capture on the battlefield. The Kremlin is eyeing roughly 2,550 square miles of Ukrainian turf in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts; a territory deemed the “fortress belt” that includes several industrialized towns and defensive positions from which Russian troops could vault deep into Ukrainian turf in the event of a third war for control of Ukraine. For this, the Kremlin would exchange the roughly 155 square miles of land Russia occupies in Ukraine’s Sumy and Kharkiv regions.

 

Putin would also appreciate if the West formally recognized Crimea as Russian territory, legitimizing the illegal Russian conquest in ways the West nobly declined to do throughout the Cold War. He’d like the West to check Ukraine’s ambition to have a foreign policy independent of Moscow’s, closing off Kyiv’s access to Western diplomatic and military institutions. Oh, also, the West should ease sanctions on Russian firms, reintegrating Moscow into the global economy.

 

That’s a steep price for peace — on terms so auspicious for Moscow that it would likely be a temporary reprieve. So, what is Putin willing to give up? “Putin accepted, Trump said, that any peace would need to include the presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a way of ensuring its durability,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Although Trump supposedly told his European counterparts that “Putin wanted to keep fighting” for now, a combination of Western security guarantees and the “tripwire”-style presence of NATO forces on Ukraine’s soil, including “U.S. military support for a European-led security force” (although short of U.S. deployments on the ground), might unlock a cease-fire agreement.

 

If Trump was as perturbed by Moscow’s overreach as has been reported, there’s little evidence of it in the president’s social media missives. He has reverted to pressuring Kyiv to “end the war with Russia” — a bit of elbowing the Russian press just loved. Although the presence of much of Europe’s political establishment in Washington today may curb some of the pressure the White House would otherwise apply to Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s reasonable to expect another effort to muscle Kyiv.

 

It’s also reasonable to wonder if the terms would produce the peace for which so many claim to clamor. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has said security guarantees should function like NATO’s Article 5 commitments. That would render the argument over Ukraine’s accession to NATO rather academic. But what use are those guarantees if they are not ratified by the U.S. Senate? The 1994 Budapest Memorandum’s security assurances in exchange for Ukraine’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons capabilities weren’t worth the paper on which they were written. Both Ukraine and Moscow know that, and their experience at Istanbul in 2022 and with the two Minsk agreements will lead both to conclude that such agreements are subject to revision on the battlefield.

 

If Ukraine did surrender the “fortress belt,” it would almost invariably serve as a springboard into Ukraine in a future, third effort by the Kremlin to swallow up its neighbor. That would satisfy other revisionist powers, like China, which would watch as the West commits ever more military resources to the alliance’s frontier in the effort to contain Russian ambitions. The indication that Western powers will abandon their principles once they get tired of defending them gives other irredentist regimes a green light to pursue their territorial objectives.

 

Ukrainian officials have earned their sense of betrayal. Trump’s flirtation with peace terms that render all Russia has sacrificed in its war of conquest worth it would set the stage for similar expansionist wars. And all this comes at a time when the American public is more supportive of arming Ukraine than it has been for well over a year — including a majority of self-described Republicans.

 

Trump is forging ahead with the peace process to which he has become wedded. But the terms that have emerged from Anchorage are hardly propitious. If “peace” in Europe had not become the MAGA McGuffin it now is, we might expect a little more skepticism about this deal from those who insist their real goal is a détente in Europe and a pivot to Asia. This deal, to the extent we understand it, would make both of those outcomes harder to envision.