• The path to peace in Ukraine narrows down further — even if Trump secures a ceasefire

  • Apr 22 2025
  • Length: 8 mins
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The path to peace in Ukraine narrows down further — even if Trump secures a ceasefire

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  • After more than three years of war, the prospects of peace for Ukraine remain slim. There is no obvious, credible pathway even to a ceasefire, given Russia's refusal to extend a brief and shaky truce over Easter — despite the US, UK and Ukraine all signalling their support for this idea. And even if the considerable hurdles impeding a ceasefire deal could be overcome, a more fundamental problem would remain: none of the key players in the conflict appear to have a plan for an agreement that is likely to be acceptable to both Kyiv and Moscow.Less than a year ago, there were at least seven different third-party peace proposals.At one level this is surprising. Less than a year ago, there were at least seven different third-party peace proposals. Among them, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the Vatican had their distinct visions for how to achieve peace. In addition, there was a multilateral proposal by a group of African states, led by South Africa, and a joint proposal by China and Brazil.The best that could be said about these plans last autumn was that several of their sponsors had converged around the principles of the China-Brazil proposal by forming a Chinese-led "Friends of Peace" group in the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2024. Remarkably — because it was in clear contravention of the western opposition to a ceasefire at the time — EU and NATO members Hungary and Slovakia also joined the group, alongside South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia, Türkiye, and other countries from the global south. By the end of 2024, this initiative, however, clearly had run its course and arrived at a dead end, as indicated in a short press release after the only other meeting the group held at the level of their countries' permanent representatives to the UN. A statement on what Beijing calls the Ukraine crisis by China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, on March 7, 2025, made no mention of the group. More importantly, that statement also seemed to indicate that China was no longer pursuing an active role in mediation, limiting its involvement to simply welcoming and supporting "all efforts for peace".What these plans had in common was their primary focus on a ceasefire as a stepping stone to negotiations about an actual peace agreement. They were all light on detail of what a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine would entail but were nonetheless roundly rejected by Ukraine and its western allies as favouring Russia. Given that a ceasefire would simply freeze the front lines and very likely make them permanent with or without a subsequent peace agreement, this was not an unreasonable position. Except that what Ukraine proposed instead — and what its western allies backed, at least rhetorically — was hardly more viable. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's 2022 peace plan was already on life support at the time of the first "Summit on Peace in Ukraine” in Switzerland in June 2024. And when merely 84 of the 100 delegations attending the summit (out of 160 invited) supported a watered-down version of Zelensky's plan in their final communique without agreement on a follow-up meeting, Ukraine's peace plan was dead in the water. Its 'replacement' — Ukraine's internal resilience plan — with its focus on ensuring that the country can survive a long war of attrition with Russia is anything but a peace plan.Among its European allies, the absence of a peace plan is similarly glaring, albeit for different reasons. Europe remains committed to supporting Kyiv, but the Russian war against Ukraine is only one — though clearly the most important — security priority for an emerging coalition of the willing among western backers of Ukraine. For them, it is important to keep Ukraine in the fight while they build up their own defences in a new international order in which the world might well be carved up into American, Russian and Chinese spheres of influence.Such a carve-up is at the heart of efforts by US president Donald Trump who seeks to secure a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, as well as a deal that would give the US privileged access to Ukrainian resources, partly as a repayment for US support in the war to date. The latter appears to be relatively close to conclusion after it initially fell apart during an extraordinarily acrimonious press conference in the White House on February 28.The ceasefire deal Trump appears to envisage would divide Ukraine itself into spheres of influence…The ceasefire deal Trump appears to envisage would divide Ukraine itself into spheres of influence — as recently suggested by Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, retired general Keith Kellogg. Yet even such a pro-Moscow arrangement that would offer Putin control of 20% of Ukraine continues to elude negotiators, primarily because Russian president Vladimir Putin has few incentives to settle for less than Russia’s maximum demands and stop a war that he thinks he is still able to win on the battlefield,...
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