The Ukraine War Was Always Going To End This Way

President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday didn’t yield the ceasefire deal Trump was hoping for, but there was apparently enough progress made that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and top European leaders are meeting with Trump in Washington today to discuss the possibility of peace negotiations and a deal to end to the war for good.

What might such a deal look like? Simply put, it would consist of territorial concessions in exchange for security agreements. Ukraine would cede portions of Russian-occupied territory in Crimea and the eastern provinces in exchange for a security alliance with the United States and European powers. Trump himself has alluded to this, mentioning “land swaps” ahead of his meeting with Putin on Friday.

This formula — Ukrainian territorial concessions in exchange for security and political independence — was always how the Ukraine war was going to end. The corporate press is pretending to be shocked and scandalized by the mention of an adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, but the outrage is feigned. Given Russia’s strategic imperatives and Ukraine’s indefensible borders, the broad outlines of a peace settlement are exactly what they were in February 2022, before Russia launched its invasion.

Putin himself, in his remarks to the press on Friday, affirmed the need for Ukrainian security, indicating that the Russians have likely resigned themselves to the inevitability of European troops in Ukraine once the war is over. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed that during Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Putin agreed with Trump that the U.S. and its European allies could, as part of a peace deal, offer Ukraine NATO-like security guarantees. “We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee,” Witkoff told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, describing it as “game-changing.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio alluded to this on Sunday, saying that territorial concessions will be up to the Ukrainians, and also that “Ukraine has a right, like every sovereign country, to enter into security alliances and agreements with other countries.”

Hence, Moscow is likely focused entirely on territorial adjustments in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, which makes perfect sense to anyone with passing familiarity with Ukraine’s recent history.

Ukraine’s current borders are a relic of Soviet propaganda, invented by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as part of an effort to make the Warsaw Pact look like a diverse coalition of strong states. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those fictional borders were made “real,” leaving Ukraine with a Soviet nuclear arsenal, Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and control of the ports of Sevastopol and Odessa.

The situation this created was obviously untenable. Under pressure from the United States, Kiev returned the nuclear arsenal and the Black Sea fleet to Russia, and signed a long-term lease agreement giving Moscow control over the warm-water port at Sevastopol. But it left Ukraine itself with an indefensible territory and millions of Russian inside its borders. As Mario Loyola explained in these pages three weeks before Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022, Ukraine in 1991 wasn’t really a viable state: “It wasn’t at all clear that Ukraine would be strong enough to maintain both political independence and territorial integrity given the weight of vital Russian interests involved.”

As long as Ukraine stayed in Russia’s orbit, it could control its territory. But, as Loyola writes, “the moment it definitively broke away from Moscow in 2014, it immediately lost control of those areas that were most vital to Russian interests, and nobody with an even minimal sense of Russian and Ukrainian history can pretend to have been taken by surprise.”

As it now stands, Ukraine can have political independence or territorial integrity, but it cannot have both. That was true in 2014, it was true in 2022 before the Russian invasion, and it is true today. It’s not parroting Russian propaganda to say that Ukraine will have lasting peace and stability only with an adjustment of its borders, it’s simply a statement of historical fact. If Ukraine wants to be oriented toward Europe and politically independent of Russia, then its borders will have to be adjusted.

This should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the relevant history and geography. Indeed, these solid, unchanging realities of history, geography, and Moscow’s strategic imperatives have always been at the heart of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. There was never a scenario, for example, in which Russia was going to allow the government of Ukraine to control the warm-water port at Sevastopol, much less join NATO (although, as we’ve seen, Moscow might be willing to accept a NATO-like security guarantee for Ukraine). Those are red-lines for Russia, and the idea that the United States or the E.U. was going to cross them, risking World War Three for the sake of preserving Ukraine’s indefensible Soviet-era borders, was always unrealistic — a corporate media fiction totally unmoored from reality.

Reality is really the big difference between the Biden administration’s approach to the war and Trump’s approach. Biden and his top officials routinely talked about Ukraine in a way that was so unrealistic it bordered on the fantastical. More than once, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken dismissed the possibility of a negotiated peace until Ukraine could “defend itself” and Russia withdrew all its troops from Ukrainian territory. In June 2023 he told CBS News that any peace agreement must uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence. Biden and Blinken repeatedly insisted that nobody can veto NATO membership. But of course that’s not true; Putin vetoed NATO membership for Ukraine when he invaded the country.

And here we come to heart of the difference between Biden and Trump’s view of the war, and of foreign policy broadly speaking. The establishment foreign policy experts that ran things during Biden’s term (and Obama’s) think the world operates according to theories and abstractions rather than solid realities like history and geography. They thought they could simply invoke something like sovereignty, without grappling with the possibility that sovereignty and territorial integrity, given Ukraine’s history and its untenable borders, might be mutually exclusive.

That mindset is representative of an entire class of policymakers in Washington who fail to grasp that the outcome of a war — any war — is far more likely to be decided by something as unmovable as a mountain range or a warm-water port than vague invocations of sovereignty. Likewise, a common language or a shared 1,000-year history between warring peoples are going to be more important factors than the bureaucratic minutiae of a multi-lateral security agreement drafted in Brussels.

After years of attrition warfare between Ukraine and Russia, bankrolled largely by western powers, the underlying factors in the conflict have not changed — and they never will. An adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, together with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, is actually in everyone’s best interests, not just Russia’s. Ukraine as it’s currently constituted is indefensible, as events have shown. Lasting peace will require grappling with the history of Ukraine’s borders and adjusting them to reflect solid realities — not some hazy platitudes about democracy and sovereignty. Those kind of abstractions are a big reason we’re in this mess, and rejecting them is the only way we’re going to get out of it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.