European leaders left an extraordinary meeting at the White House on Monday relieved that US President Donald Trump hadn’t compelled Ukraine to make land concessions to Russia, and hopeful of a US-backed security presence — but without any meaningful progress towards a peace deal.
The mood in Europe was noticeably brighter on Tuesday than it had been over the weekend, after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. But while the immediate threat of a peace deal on the Russian president’s terms has been averted, European officials and experts are under no illusions, and are insisting on robust security guarantees for Ukraine in any deal that requires it to accept the loss of territory.
“I believe that the meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy was good news, and now everything is on the table,” Lithuanian defence minister Dovilė Šakalienė told The Parliament. “The Americans are now open to back a coalition of the willing to back security guarantees in Ukraine.”
But she also stressed the importance of an immediate ceasefire ahead of a permanent peace deal. “If you don’t stop shooting, it’s difficult to talk about anything,” she said. “One of Putin’s MO’s — to gaslight and pretend that he cares about peace — is still being continued.”
On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and half a dozen other European leaders met with Trump at the White House, where they argued for security guarantees modelled on NATO’s Article 5, as well as an immediate ceasefire. After the meeting, Trump pledged to organise a meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders soon.
Getting around a table with Trump is only the first step, however. Putin refused on Friday to make any concessions on a ceasefire, and there’s no indication that he’ll be any more accommodating when he’s sat across from Zelenskyy.
“What more can be achieved there than in Alaska, if even the US and Russia haven't reached an agreement yet?” said Mateusz Piotrowski, head of the Americas Programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw. “With Ukraine's participation, it's theoretically even more difficult.”
European security guarantees need to be backed by deployment
Beyond an immediate ceasefire, Zelenskyy and the European leaders who joined him at the White House on Monday stressed the importance of security guarantees — and were able to extract a vague promise from Trump that the US would be involved in “coordination.”
But experts stressed that any effective security guarantee in Ukraine would require Western powers to deploy troops on the ground so they would be automatically involved in the defence against a renewed invasion.
“There needs to be a presence on the ground,” said Jan Balliauw, a senior associate fellow at the Egmont Institute in Brussels and a longtime foreign correspondent in Ukraine. He pointed to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed the independence of post-Soviet states after giving up their nuclear stockpiles, and 2014-2015 Minsk Agreements that ended a Russian-backed separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine.
Neither of these treaties prevented Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, he noted. “If it’s just paper, it doesn’t work.”
Martin Kohlrausch, a professor of modern European history at KU Leuven, drew a deeper historical parallel with the 1938 Munich Agreement, which saw Czechoslovakia forced to cede the Sudetenland — along with its defensible positions — to Nazi Germany, only for Hitler to annex the rump of the country months later without military resistance.
Britain, France and other European countries have signalled their readiness to deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal. But even if the US were to make a similar commitment, Putin would need to first agree to stop the fighting — which would run up against one of his stated reasons for going to war, namely to prevent NATO encroachment on Russia’s historial sphere of influence.
“It would be very hard for Putin to accept anything that looks like a NATO presence or an American presence on Ukrainian territory,” said Peter Vermeersch, a professor of political studies specialising in Eastern Europe at KU Leuven.
Putin’s expansionist dreams
Experts expressed concern that Putin and Trump are operating on different timescales, which could give the Russian leader the upper hand in negotiations and the willpower to hold out for a deal aligned with his demands.
“Trump wants a quick victory and the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Juraj Majcin, a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre specialising in transatlantic and European defense and security. “You can make a deal with Putin easily if you blackmail Ukraine. But will that really be a long-lasting peace? I don’t think so.”
Balliauw stressed that Putin’s objectives, if achieved, would change the whole security architecture of Europe before it has had time to rearm and meet the Russian threat.
“I don’t think Trump understands what is really at stake at this war,” he said. “It’s really about the future of Europe. What will Europe look like in ten or twenty years? Trump just wants to end the war. But the consequences could be worse than the war there is now.”
Kohlrausch said Putin’s speeches reveal his admiration for Russia’s 19th century tsars, who carved out an empire by force — and expressed his concern that Trump also seemed sympathetic to that worldview, rather than support for the rules-based order that has underpinned American foreign policy since the Cold War.
“For both leaders, there is a strong idea that we should pursue politics like it has been done in the 19th century,” said Kohlrausch. “The war in Ukraine has many features of an imperial and colonial war, of a bigger power extending its hold on territory as an imperial power projection.”
Vermeersch also said the historical context of Russia’s lost empire was the key to understanding what drives its modern-day president. “If there’s one consistent element to what drives Putin, it’s his own take on history, and how he believes Russia should move from a pariah state to a world power,” he said.
“I don’t think Putin is interested in gaining economic assets in Ukraine,” Vermeersch added. “Instead, you need Ukraine to restore the greatness of Russia.”
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