The memos reported for each government Monday include positions completely mutually incompatible

The memos presented by Ukraine and Russia at their direct talks in Istanbul on Monday make it absolutely clear that, absent a strong U.S. intervention based on a detailed U.S. peace plan, there will be no peace settlement in Ukraine.

It is not just that several of the positions on both sides are completely mutually incompatible; they suggest that at present neither side is in fact interested in an early peace.

The Ukrainian memo, presented before the talks, sets a “full and unconditional ceasefire in the sky, on land and at sea as a necessary background and prerequisite for peace negotiations.” Russia has already rejected this and will continue to do so — naturally, because it would mean giving up its main point of leverage for nothing in return. Nor indeed is a fragile and unstable ceasefire in the interests of Ukraine or the West. If Ukraine is to begin the extremely challenging process of economic reconstruction and democratic reform, it needs a stable and permanent peace.

The Ukrainian memo also states that “no restrictions may be imposed on the number, deployment, or other parameters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as on the deployment of troops of friendly foreign states on the territory of Ukraine.” Russia has already stated that it will not under any circumstances accept the presence of Western troops in Ukraine since it sees this as NATO membership in all but name. European leaders have also stated that a European force could only be deployed with a U.S. guarantee of support, a condition which the Trump administration has rejected.

The Ukrainian memo continues, “some sanctions may be lifted from Russia, but in stages and only gradually, with a mechanism for resuming sanctions if necessary (snapback). Frozen Russian sovereign assets are used for reconstruction or remain frozen until reparations are paid.” Moscow will obviously not agree to a final peace without the lifting of sanctions or firm assurances that they will be lifted.

On one key point, the Ukrainian memo does leave room for compromise: “Ukraine is not forced to be neutral. It can choose to be part of the Euro-Atlantic community and move towards EU membership. Ukraine’s membership in NATO depends on consensus within the Alliance.” Russia has in fact already publicly stated that Ukraine has the sovereign right to seek EU membership. And on NATO membership, the memo is correct that this does not depend on Ukraine but on unanimous agreement (not merely “consensus”) among existing members.

The Trump administration (or any European government) is therefore in a position to block Ukrainian NATO membership without reference to Kyiv. The problem for Moscow however is that Poland and other European members of NATO continue to declare their support for Ukraine’s membership; and, if the Democrats win the U.S. elections in 2028, they could overturn Trump’s veto. The Russians therefore are insisting on a Ukrainian constitutional commitment to neutrality and/or a U.S.-Russian treaty to that effect — which Kyiv is refusing.

Meanwhile, accounts of the Russian memo presented in Istanbul, as reported by the Russian media, include reported conditions for a ceasefire that Moscow must know are totally unacceptable to the Ukrainians — though this does not in itself rule out the possibility of Russia being willing to compromise on some of them in a final settlement if it meets its goals in other areas — especially bilateral relations with Washington.

They include “complete withdrawal of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. The second option for the ceasefire is a ban on major redeployments of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the abolition of mobilization and martial law, and the cessation of supplies of foreign weapons.”

This is not going to happen, absent Russian victory on the battlefield. Ukraine will never agree to surrender territory that it still holds, nor will European countries agree to end all weapons supplies.

In return for a ceasefire, the Russian memo as reported calls for “international recognition of these regions and Crimea as part of Russia.” This is utterly pointless. It is not just that neither Ukraine nor Western countries will legally recognize the Russian annexations; China, India and South Africa have also refused this, and will continue to do so. The best that Russia can hope for (as was indeed provisionally agreed at the Istanbul talks in March 2022) is to defer the legal status of these territories for future negotiation.

As part of an eventual peace settlement, Russia is also apparently demanding that:

Formal endorsement of the peace treaty by the UNSC makes very good sense. The other Russian conditions however will be exceptionally difficult for Kyiv to meet under Russian pressure — not least because in several cases they would need the legal approval of the Ukrainian parliament, which is very unlikely to give it.

Only Washington can offer Russia compromises in other areas (for example on U.S. force deployments in Europe) that could persuade Moscow to reduce these conditions to reasonable levels; and only Washington could then pressure Kyiv and European capitals into accepting them. Some of the Russian conditions (including minority rights) are not only legitimate, but essential if postwar Ukraine is to progress towards eventual EU membership, but a formula has to be found whereby Ukraine can agree to them as a starting point of the EU accession process, and not as surrender to Moscow.

The Trump administration can be forgiven its exasperation with the state of the peace process. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake — from the point of view of America’s own interests — for the U.S. to walk away from it. Apart from the fact that sooner or later Washington would inevitably be dragged back in, three recent developments have highlighted how a prolonged continuation of the war will involve serious risks for the U.S.

Thus the weekend’s devastating Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet undermines nuclear security between the U.S. and Russia.

The bipartisan bill to go before the U.S. Senate next week (with the encouragement of the EU presidency) proposes 500% tariffs on imports from countries that buy Russian oil and gas. Presumably the senators are thinking of China. They appear to have forgotten that it also means India (and other U.S. partners). India has no intention of bowing to a U.S. diktat that would radically increase its energy costs and undermine its economy; and the imposition of 500% tariffs on India would ruin a vital U.S. relationship in Asia.

Finally, the EU has passed a new package of sanctions against Russia including measures to target the so-called “shadow fleet” of internationally-flagged tankers transporting Russian energy exports. This is also an affront to countries like India that buy this energy — and consider that they have a perfect right to do so under international law, since Western sanctions against Russia have not been approved by the United Nations, or agreed by themselves.

Last month, an Estonian patrol boat attempted to board a tanker bound for Russia in international waters, and Moscow sent a fighter jet to warn the Estonians off. Finland and Sweden have also threatened to detain such ships. Russia in response briefly detained a Liberian-flagged Greek tanker exiting Estonia through Russian waters. Russian politicians have threatened retaliatory seizures: “Any attack on our carriers can be regarded as an attack on our territory, even if the ship is under a foreign flag,” warned Alexei Zhuravlev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee.

If both sides stick to their positions, then naval clashes will be not only possible, but certain. It is also obvious that these NATO members would never engage in such wildly reckless behavior unless they believed that in the event of such clashes, the U.S. military would come to their aid. The Trump administration needs to rein them in very firmly indeed. It also however needs to continue trying to bring an end to the Ukraine War, for as long as the war continues, so will the danger of a local collision between Russia and NATO members, from which the U.S. will not be able to remain aloof.

In a dangerous echo of past miscalculations, the E3 — France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — are once again escalating tensions with Iran, this time by threatening to trigger the reinstatement of U.N. Security Council sanctions (the so-called “snapback”) if U.S.-Iran nuclear talks collapse.

The E3 sees such a step as deploying leverage to force concessions from Iran on its nuclear program. However, it risks derailing diplomacy entirely and plunging the Middle East into deeper crisis.Leading this charge is France, reprising its role as the E3’s most hawkish voice, reminiscent of its hard line in the JCPOA negotiations in 2015. At a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting on proliferation at the end of April, French Foreign Minister Jean Noël Barrot exemplified this combative turn, saying that if the U.S. – Iran talks do not bear fruit, France and its European partners “will not hesitate for a second to reimpose all the sanctions that were lifted 10 years ago.”

Weeks later, after Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi received a Cannes Film Festival award, Barrot hailed the accolade as a symbol of “resistance to the Iranian regime’s oppression.” While there is nothing wrong with praising the victory of an Iranian director, the politicized framing and the timing — amid delicate nuclear talks — was diplomatically inept, needlessly antagonizing Tehran.

Such rhetoric aligns with France’s and other European countries’ broader patterns of conflating Iran’s domestic policies with its nuclear obligations, an approach that only hardens Tehran’s stance. Little surprise, then, that Barrot’s remarks were received poorly in Tehran, with the French envoy summoned to the ministry of foreign affairs, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi lashing out at France’s perceived hypocrisy on human rights.

But France is not alone. Britain’s influential and outspoken ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, appeared to side with those in Washington who demand an end to any domestic uranium enrichment in Iran — the thickest of Iran’s red lines and the main bone of contention in the ongoing talks with the U.S. These suggestions were met with an immediate reaction from Tehran, with Araghchi warning about an end to any negotiations with E3 if “zero enrichment” was indeed to become the official European position.

In a remarkable about-face, the E3, which in early 2000s spearheaded the process that eventually led to the JCPOA, are now increasingly aligning with the Washington hawks, who, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, opposed the JCPOA from the outset. In fact, there seems to be two competing tracks in motion right now: one is the Trump-Witkoff track that appears to be a genuine effort to strike a deal with Tehran, to the extent of President Trump openly admitting that he warned Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against any steps that might derail a deal. And the other track is led by Rubio and the E3 privileging coercion over diplomacy. Since the U.S. can no longer invoke the snapback as it’s not a part of the JCPOA, Rubio is encouraging the E3 to do just that.

In that context, Barrot’s assertion that “there is no military solution to Iran’s nuclear program, but the path of diplomacy is narrow,” sounds disingenuous. It aligns with the views expressed by the former Biden top Middle East official Brett McGurk who pushed for “deadlines” for diplomatic negotiations, backed up by perennial “credible military threat.”

Yet history shows that pressure only causes Tehran to dig in, not fold. Objectively, there is also no reason for that: yes, Iran’s enrichment levels reached 60% which is far beyond the 3.67% permissible under JCPOA. But Tehran also consistently signaled that it is open to negotiate “everything” provided that its domestic enrichment rights are respected. That leaves ample space to negotiate the technical details, such as the caps on the enrichment, sunset provisions, the fate of the stockpiles of the enriched uranium, and verification.

During the Tehran Dialogue Forum, which I attended last week, many ideas in that regard were floating around. One informal — not coming from an official source — suggested a temporary suspension of enrichment as a confidence-building measure, with the stockpiles exported to Russia once the enrichment is renewed. The idea of a regional enrichment consortium — provided Iran’s enrichment rights are safeguarded — is gaining ground

Iranian officials also privately hinted at the possibility of pausing some of their advanced centrifuges. And while Tehran opposes perpetual restrictions on certain aspects of its nuclear program in principle, negotiating a renewal of sunset provisions for another 5 or 10 years should not be impossible. It would allow Trump to claim a superior deal over the one negotiated by Obama. As far as verification is concerned, Iran has signaled, in an important shift, that it is open to admitting American inspectors to its nuclear sites within the IAEA inspections.

These dynamics show that there is a space for diplomacy. The hawks’ and E3 insistence on artificial deadlines is unjustified — complex issues between two longtime adversaries cannot be resolved in a few meetings in Muscat and Rome. Building trust requires time. But what seems to matter to the E3 the most is not the resolution of the nuclear stand-off but using its leverage as an end in itself. “Use it or lose it” seems to be the new mantra in Paris, London and Berlin.

What explains that course is the E3’s apparent desire to punish Iran for issues unrelated to the nuclear file, such as its military ties with Russia or domestic human rights abuses.

These concerns are valid. Europe sees Russia’s war in Ukraine as an existential threat. Seen through this lens, Europeans hold a dim view of Iran. Amplifying the negative perceptions are issues related to alleged activities of Iranian intelligence services on the European soil and arrests of European citizens in Iran on apparently spurious grounds, which the EU sees as hostage-taking.

However grave and legitimate these grievances, merging them with nuclear diplomacy is a recipe for failure. The JCPOA was never intended to address all problems with Iran; it was a narrowly crafted nonproliferation agreement. Holding the nuclear deal hostage to extraneous demands guarantees its collapse — and with it, any hope of containing Iran’s nuclear program or its other policies the E3/EU finds objectionable, such as military ties with Russia.

Tehran has warned of “severe consequences” if the E3 invokes the snapback. Top among these could be withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a scenario that would eliminate international oversight of Iran’s program. The current moderate government would be weakened — and it already faces criticisms from hardliners for supposedly being too quick to frontload Iran’s concessions, such as a readiness to temporarily go back to the JCPOA-levels of enrichment. In a déjà vu following the demise of the JCPOA at the tail end of the pragmatic Rouhani presidency (2017-2021), hardliners could reassert themselves again, ironically exacerbating every policy the E3 dislikes — accelerated enrichment, deepened ties with Russia, and tightening the screws domestically.

This is why the E3’s threat of snapback is not just irrational — it is self-defeating. Europe, already grappling with the Ukraine war, can ill afford another avoidable crisis. If the E3 can’t help with the U.S.–Iran talks, it should, at least, refrain from actively undermining them.

Ukraine is already asking for more money to continue fighting into 2026, a sure sign that President Volodmyr Zelensky has no plans to end the war.

With the battlefield continuing to favor Russia, European leaders have their collective heads in the sand on who will pay. How long before President Trump walks away?

At the G7 Finance and Central Bank governors’ meeting in Banff on May 21, Ukraine’s Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko sought financial support for 2026, “including the provision of support to the Ukrainian army through its integration into the European security system,” according to reports.

I have said before that Ukraine cannot keep fighting into 2026 without a significant injection of European money. Even if the war were to stop tomorrow, Ukraine would still face a huge funding black hole. And that prolonging the war simply extends Ukraine’s indebtedness and delinquency, nudging it every closer towards the status of a failed state.

Making light of the price tag, German-based Kiel Institute has suggested extra EU support to Ukraine’s army would only need to cost an extra 0.2% of GDP or $43.3 billion per year. This assumes no additional U.S. funding under President Trump and is a figure practically identical to the $41.5 billion figure I forecast two months ago.

The Ukrainian side pointed out two assumptions that underpin their request — first, that funding Ukraine’s military supports macro-financial stability in that country. That is untrue. By far the leading cause of the increased financial distress of Ukraine is its vast and unsustainable prosecution of a war that it cannot win. As I have said before, ending the war would allow for immediate reductions to be made to military spending, which accounts for 65% of total government expenditure.

Second, that paying for Ukraine’s military is keeping Europe safer. It isn’t. The best route to European security would be to end the war tomorrow. The risk of escalation only grows for the longer the war continues and President Zelensky resorts to increasingly desperate tactics as the battlefield realities turn against him.

This latest request for money is a clear signal that Zelensky is not serious about U.S. demands for peace, and would prefer to continue the fight, drawing directly upon European funds. It has long been clear to me that Zelensky is evading peace because it would bring his presidency to a close, not to mention elevate risks to his personal safety.

He has therefore been piling on more pressure for Western leaders to impose more sanctions and other measures, which will only serve to prolong the war. Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent brain wave that the U.S. impose 500% secondary tariffs on countries that trade with Russia is a classic example. No doubt other countries, China in particular, would respond negatively to this, as it has already to the launch of Trump’s tariff war. It would kill President Trump’s efforts at engagement with Russia, by boxing him in to Beltway demands in an identical rerun of his first presidency, making him appear toothless in the eyes of Putin.

But these are not the real points. Having suffered over 20,000 sanctions already since 2014 yet maintaining a stable, growing economy, what makes people believe that Russia will back down to even more sanctions now?

The war continues to favor Russia on the battlefield. In recent days, in addition to expanding territory in the south of Donetsk, the Russian army has made major gains in the pocket around now-occupied Toretsk. Progress, as always, is slow and grinding as it has been since the start of 2024. Ukraine has undoubtedly mounted a formidable defence of its territory, for which its fighters deserve great credit.

But Russia has never fully mobilized the country for the fight in Ukraine, for various domestic political reasons. Putin also wants to maintain relations with developing country partners and a more devastating military offensive against Ukraine would make that harder.

Pumping more billions into Ukraine’s army will merely slow the speed of defeat. Even the Ukrainians now accept that they cannot reclaim lost territory by force. Ending the war would at least draw a line in the sand for future negotiations.

For their part, Europe simply can’t afford to pump another $40 billion per year into Ukraine’s army, at a time when member states are trying to boost their own militaries, revive their flagging economies and deal with an upsurge in nationalist political parties that want to end the war.

An April pledge for extra military donations in 2025 elicited just $2.5 billion per year from Germany, and reconfirmed the £6 billion from the UK already committed, without pledging new funds. Keir Starmer’s government is in the process of making an embarrassing U-turn on previously agreed cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners.

I seriously doubt that British people would consider another big increase in funds for Ukraine’s war would be a sensible investment if peace was on the table. That this isn’t actively discussed in Britain, in a way that it is in the United States, is driven by the complete lockdown of debate in the UK and European mainstream media.

Right from the beginning, the war in Ukraine has been an attritional battle of who can sustain the fight for the longest period of time. A longer war will always favor Russia because the economic liability Europe faces will ratchet up to the point where it becomes politically unsustainable. We make the assumption that Russia’s aims in Ukraine are to prevent NATO expansion and to protect the rights of native Russian speakers in that country, and of course, on the surface, they are.

But on the current track, Putin gets the added benefit of watching the European Union project slowly implode, without the need to go all in on Ukraine.

President Trump for his part continues to walk a fine line that involves criticizing both Putin and Zelensky for the continuance of the war. In the face of intransigence on all sides, I wonder how long it will be before he washes his hands of the mess and walks away.

This article is co-published with The American Conservative

If the Trump administration truly makes good on its threats to walk away from its efforts to settle the war in Ukraine, the situation is very likely to get worse for all parties to the conflict, including for the United States. Potentially far worse.

This would most obviously be true for Ukraine if President Donald Trump’s diplomatic disengagement were paired with a cutoff of military and intelligence assistance. Ukraine is highly dependent on American intelligence data and on the U.S.-provided Starlink satellite network to target and coordinate attacks on Russian forces.

Without this support, few of Ukraine’s precision-guided weapons would function effectively, and Ukrainian communications would be far more vulnerable to Russian jamming, disruption, and interception.

Kyiv could still elect to fight on under such difficult conditions, but its battlefield fortunes would greatly suffer. Coupled with Ukraine’s ongoing manpower challenges and with the dwindling number of U.S. Patriot air defense systems to protect against large-scale Russian missile attacks, the blow to Ukrainian morale might prove decisive. Trump is correct that the Biden administration deserves considerable blame for failing to prevent the war in the first place, but in the ensuing controversy over who lost Ukraine, many would be quick to point fingers at Trump.

In fact, absent a compromise settlement of the war, Trump has no clear way of avoiding that blame, justified or not. Doubling down on Biden’s sanctions strategy by toughening enforcement or imposing secondary sanctions on Russia’s trading partners stands little chance of forcing the Kremlin’s capitulation to American demands for an unconditional ceasefire, but it very likely would roil American relations with India, Turkey, and others while undoing recent hard-won progress in Trump’s trade negotiations with China.

Opting to sustain or even increase current levels of U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine would delay defeat, but not prevent it. Many point to the slow pace of Russia’s advance along the front line as a sign that Ukraine can sustain a stalemate with sufficient Western political will. But gauging Ukraine’s fortunes by tracking Russia’s progress on the map is misleading. In a war of attrition, progress is measured not by battlefield breakthroughs, but by how many well-trained and well-equipped troops each side can put in the field.

By this metric, Ukraine is in big trouble. Russia’s defense industry is greatly outproducing U.S. and European military factories in such critical munitions as artillery shells, and it is assembling attack missiles at a faster rate than the West can produce air defense missiles. At least a million Ukrainians have been killed or wounded on the battlefield; many millions more have fled the fighting for Europe, Russia, and beyond.

Although Russia has also suffered great casualties, it has five times Ukraine’s current population and has employed sound approaches to training and replenishing its forces. These trends point not to a long-term stalemate, but to a World War I-style Ukrainian implosion sooner or later, probably during Trump’s term in office.

Contrary to popular perceptions, however, a Ukrainian collapse would not be entirely good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Granted, Russia would be in a commanding battlefield position that would allow it to occupy all four of the Ukrainian regions it has officially annexed but not entirely conquered. And Moscow could reasonably expect that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not survive such a defeat politically, paving the way for regime change that Russia claims to want.

But that would very likely amount to a Pyrrhic victory.

Although Moscow can break Ukraine, it cannot fix it. Its territorial expanse is too vast and its war-stricken population too anti-Russian for military occupation beyond Ukraine’s east and south to be viable. Absent a compromise peace settlement, Ukraine’s societal repair and economic reconstruction would be difficult to imagine, as few refugees would return, and no one would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in projects that could be wiped out by Russian missile and bomb barrages in a matter of hours.

A physically and militarily broken Ukraine could very well become politically broken, too, leaving Putin with a failed neighbor, whose dysfunction would in turn radiate problems — such as crime, terrorism, ethnic unrest, and political extremism — that could pose threats to Russia itself.

For Putin, such an outcome would be preferable to a Ukraine that is a military ally of the United States and NATO, but failed peace efforts would still spell bad news for Russia’s efforts to address its broader security concerns with the West.

Absent new arms control and confidence-building measures — which will be almost impossible without a settlement in Ukraine — Europe’s rearmament would be constrained only by its own political will and industrial capacity, and such informal NATO sub-groupings as the Nordic-Baltic axis combine a high degree of military capacity with deeply held anti-Russian views. Even with a massive militarization of the Russian economy, using conventional forces to defend a border with NATO that has doubled in size since the Finns joined the alliance would be almost prohibitively costly for Moscow.

It would be only a short hop from that dilemma to new, more cost-effective deployments of Russian nuclear forces in the European theater, resurrecting the days of nuclear decapitation scenarios and hair-trigger warning times that ended when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the now defunct Treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces in 1987.

Some in Washington might look indifferently at a re-nuclearized Europe that lacks the diplomatic safeguards that kept the Cold War cold but features a host of imaginable new East-West flashpoints in Belarus, Kaliningrad, Moldova, Georgia, and the Balkans. They might ask, why would this be America’s problem?

For starters, American fingers would still be holding the nuclear triggers on one side of that tense Russia-West divide. The United States is scheduled to deploy new intermediate-range missiles in Germany next year, and the political pressure to pair them with nuclear warheads will be enormous if Russia points new nuclear weapons at Europe. Trump officials have openly discussed drawing down US ground forces in Europe, but no one has suggested withdrawing America’s nuclear umbrella, because doing so would prompt Germany and other technically capable European states to develop their own nuclear weapons, which in turn would fuel proliferation in other regions and increase the odds these weapons would one day be used.

Moreover, this more volatile version of the Cold War in Europe would deepen Russian dependence on China, incentivize Russian mischief-making in the Middle East, and make Trump’s vision of stabilizing and counterbalancing relations among great and rising powers in an increasingly multipolar world considerably less attainable. Much of Washington is already opposed to Trump’s broader efforts to pursue détente with Russia; improved US-Russian relations will be well-nigh politically impossible absent a compromise settlement in Ukraine.

For obvious reasons, Trump does not want this. For less obvious ones, neither does Putin. And neither of them has a good way to avoid this mutually troubling future without a negotiated end to the war.

The path to that compromise will not begin with an unconditional ceasefire, however. Having been burned before by perceived American deception over NATO expansion and European double-dealing over the Minsk 2 accord in Ukraine, Putin will not agree to a ceasefire (which would ease military pressure on Ukraine and undermine Russian negotiating leverage) until he gets strong assurances that the United States is addressing his key security concerns.

Ukraine and Europe lack both the desire and the capability to bargain with Russia over these issues. Only Trump can deliver the kind of deal that can secure Ukraine, stabilize Europe, and still address Russia’s core concerns.

To test Russia’s interest in peace, Trump’s negotiators should press Moscow directly to agree to a settlement framework that codifies the key geopolitical compromise — Western assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO in return for Russia’s support for Ukraine’s EU membership — and establishes a roadmap for resolving the range of complicated issues required for a stable peace.

The sooner we begin the hard negotiations over these core issues, the better. They will not get easier to resolve if the Trump team steps away from the table.

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