Ukraine and the battle for Trump’s mind

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While Ukrainian and Russian troops are fighting to the death for every inch of land in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, their leaders are locked in another titanic if less murderous struggle: the battle for Donald Trump’s mind.

President Trump said at his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago on Sunday that his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian leader Vladimir Putin wanted to “make a deal” to end the war. Trump said the two sides were in the “final stages of talking”. In reality, of course, the talking between them has not even begun. Each side is talking to Trump and his officials to ensure it is not seen as the obstacle to peace and then punished for being so.

Putin has shown no sign of settling for anything other than his maximalist objectives, including the surrender of the remaining territory Ukraine holds in Donbas. In Kyiv and other European capitals there is zero faith that Putin wants to end the war on terms other than Ukraine’s capitulation and permanent destabilisation if not subjugation. Since Putin has been unable to achieve his aims through military means after more than a decade of war, doing so through negotiations with an amenable Trump seems like a good bet.

Zelenskyy’s number one objective is to stop Trump from siding with Putin. It is proving a Sisyphean task. Three times this year, Trump has turned on Zelenskyy and sided with Moscow only for Ukraine and its European allies to pull the US president back to a more reasonable position.

Since the White House confirmed in November it was behind a 28-point peace plan drawn up with Russia’s input, Zelenskyy has pulled out the stops to turn it into a formula that was less favourable to Moscow. Ukraine’s painstaking shuttle diplomacy has proved surprisingly adept, educating US negotiators about realities on the ground while taking pains to appear always constructive and committed to Trump’s goal of peace.

Zelenskyy has cleverly pretended to be open to turning contested territory in the Donbas into a demilitarised, special economic zone as long as any pullback by Ukrainian forces was mirrored by Russia’s. This was widely interpreted as a significant Ukrainian concession. In reality it would mean Moscow foregoing control of land it formally regards as Russian and pulling out of areas it has spent hundreds of thousands of lives trying to seize. It is plainly a non-starter.

An Élysée Palace official said on Friday that Russia now has “no clear prospect of agreement with the Americans in spite of the Ukrainians and Europeans”. But even after their skilful rearguard diplomacy, Ukraine and its European allies cannot be sure they have Trump on side. The French official said “attaining convergence” of views across the Atlantic was still the number one objective. Zelenskyy went into Mar-a-Lago saying there was 90 per cent agreement between Ukrainians and Americans on the revised peace proposal. He left saying the same. There is still some converging to do.

Putin is meanwhile waging cognitive warfare of his own — and not just through his uncanny ability to fit in a lengthy conversation with the US president before each Trump-Zelenskyy meeting.

On Saturday, Putin made his latest exaggerated claims about Russia’s military advances, saying his troops had taken the towns of Myrnohrad and Huliaipole. The claims were denied by Ukraine’s military. But at Mar-a-Lago, Trump repeated that Ukraine would be “better off” ceding territory in a peace deal “than losing it on the battlefield in the coming months”, echoing the Russian narrative that its victory is inevitable.

Trump spoke warmly of the Russian leader, at one point describing himself as the “apple of his eye”. He again portrayed him as a fellow victim of the “hoax” of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. As the military analyst Mick Ryan observed: “Putin is a coloniser in the real world and in the minds of people. He has successfully and thoroughly colonised Trump’s mind.”

Russia has rejected the broad terms of the peace proposal revised by American and Ukrainian negotiators. But it blames Ukraine and European allies for sabotaging the original 28-point plan, rather than reject Trump’s peace push outright. Trump and Putin agreed to set up two working groups on Ukraine, which looks like a way to spin out the peace process, not bring it to a head.

The Europeans hope that once a peace formula is agreed between Kyiv and Washington and transmitted to Moscow, Russia will be exposed as the real obstacle to peace. As Zelenskyy put it on Friday: “If Russia does not agree, it means the pressure is insufficient.” Trump, it seems, still needs persuading. There is no end in sight for this struggle. Nor sadly to Russia’s killing machine.

ben.hall@ft.com