Austin Bay

Prepare to toss the common peace negotiation recipes, ceasefire artifices and usual foreign policy nostrums out the window.

When asked about Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace plan, that’s my hunch in a sentence.

Henry Kissinger said that politics is the art of the possible. The businessman’s art of the deal is to create a win-win out of no win. Trump is a businessman turned politician for the right reasons. He wants to save his country from the Democrats’ elitist utopian stupidity.

Vladimir Putin’s driving delusion is recreating the Russian Empire. He said as much in 2005. In 2014, Putin and other Russian leaders began using the term “New Russia” (Novorossiya) to describe their goals in Ukraine. The New Russia project included regaining control of nine regions in Ukraine.

2014 is a reminder of the stakes. Ignore so-called experts who say this war began in 2022. Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014 and annexed it a month later. For the first time since the end of World War II, military aggression in Europe by a major European power led to political annexation and imperialist territorial expansion.

Putin also shattered a peace and nuclear disarmament agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration, the 1994 Budapest Accord. Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for territorial security assurances by Russia. The U.S. and Great Britain guaranteed the deal. No wonder Ukraine doesn’t trust peace deals with Moscow.

After Crimea, the Obama administration provided Ukraine with nonlethal material and economic aid. Poland became Ukraine’s chief ally.

In spring 2014, Moscow began a “slow war” of snipers and small-scale combat in eastern Ukraine. By 2016, the front had more or less frozen.

The Trump 1 administration began providing Ukraine with training, intelligence support and weapons — to include the Javelin anti-tank missile and modern soldier-portable anti-aircraft missiles.

In February 2022, Putin attempted to seize all of Ukraine in an armor-led blitzkrieg. He failed miserably. Credit the Ukrainian people’s will to resist and Javelin-type anti-armor weapons with defeating the invaders. But timely Western intelligence, and the modern anti-armor and anti-air weapons Trump supplied, were absolutely critical in the first three months of conventional war.

I think Putin invaded because the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle convinced him the Biden administration was weak and indecisive. Remember Biden urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to flee.

And here’s the harsh truth: Ukraine fights a just war of self-defense and self-preservation. Putin’s Russia has stolen land, annexed more territory, violated treaties, kidnapped Ukrainian children, raped women and destroyed cities.

Since 2022, Ukraine has received billions of dollars in arms and economic aid from the U.S. and other NATO nations. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact the Biden administration slow-walked offensive weapons like the F-16, modern tanks and extended range missiles. It also limited Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian logistical targets on Russian territory using U.S. weapons. Essentially, Ukraine could fight back but wasn’t allowed to win.

Meanwhile, the American people, suffering from the economic and social plague of 15 million illegal migrants, spent billions on Ukraine but felt they couldn’t defend their own border.

Ultimately, the Biden administration’s domestic insecurity policies undercut American public support for its Ukraine security policies.

As 2024 ends, Russian forces occupy about 20% of Ukraine’s pre-war territory. The Kremlin demands the world recognize its annexations as sovereign Russian territory. Ukraine says it must regain all its pre-war territory.

Most of NATO, western Europe, and western allies in Asia support Kyiv’s territorial demand. That has been new NATO member Finland’s position.

However, on Nov. 12 Finnish President Alexander Stubb told Bloomberg News, ” … Europe and the rest of the world need to understand that Donald Trump is very serious about getting a peace deal sooner rather than later. There’s a window of opportunity for these negotiations between the election and inauguration day.”

Stubb told reporters he sees four prerequisites for peace in Ukraine: territory issues (which remain to be decided); security guarantees; issues of justice (such as kidnapping); and reconstruction.

In my view, another Budapest Memorandum is a nonstarter. Ukraine wants to join NATO. But Stubb called reconstruction the “low-hanging fruit.”

That may be where Trump begins — after all, he’s had a career in the construction business.

Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and author.