Donald Trump’s recent admission that he had a ‘lengthy and highly productive’ telephone conversation with the Russian President, Vladmir Putin, has sent alarm bells ringing throughout Europe. Trump’s well-known aversion to foreign adventures and his scepticism towards Ukraine has long worried policymakers in Kyiv, Washington and Brussels, and the news that Trump was looking to end the conflict, potentially with no return to the borders of 2014 (essentially allowing Russia to keep her territorial gains in the Crimea, the Donbas and around Kherson), nor any accession of Ukraine into NATO, looks like a clear win for Russia.

Behind the flurry of diplomatic activity, the essentials of the situation remain as they have been for some time. Russia cannot conquer Ukraine. The cost, already estimated by Ukraine to be over 800,000 men, with thousands of vehicles lost, has gutted the Russian military and put enormous pressure on her economy, already sagging under the weight of successive rounds of sanctions. How much longer the war can be sustained is the great question, but an indefinite continuation of such a massive military campaign is almost certainly impossible.

The war has clearly taken a heavy toll on Ukraine, but popular support for the war remains strong and it has been evident since 2022 that whatever burden Ukraine bears in resisting Russia, the alternative is unthinkable. Allowing Russia to expand her rule into large areas of Ukraine would undoubtedly involve mass incarceration of the population and an intensive process of ‘Russification’  – the kind that the Tsar, the Bolsheviks and the Soviets were keen on doing throughout the 20th-century. Even if American generosity now seems less assured, Ukraine’s support in Europe is as solid as it has ever been.

Trump is about to learn the difficulty of peace-making, particularly in a war without a clear victor. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, the agreement that brought the First World War on the Eastern Front to an end, saw many similar power plays and rhetorical flourishes, but there was a clear imbalance between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia. Germany had the ability to put pressure on Russia to agree to her terms, including the loss of vast tracts of land, because the military capability of the Bolsheviks was almost entirely absent (and would take years to rebuild). On the contrary, Ukraine can still resist Russia, even without the level of US support she has become used to, and has little motivation to agree to anything that would leave her weakened for what seems to be an inevitable ‘Second Russo-Ukraine War’.

As in 1918, the progress of the negotiations will not just be about what happens to Ukraine, but what this means for the international system and the balance of power more generally. When the Bolsheviks opened talks with the Central Powers in late 1917, they initially wanted to drag things out – waiting for revolutions and domestic upheaval to undermine her enemies – only to accept that territorial concessions had to be made to preserve the new regime in Petrograd (St Petersburg). Yet throughout the negotiations, they constantly asserted the global nature of what they were doing, hoping to embarrass their opponents in ways that made German and Austrian diplomats profoundly nervous.

The power (im)balance in 2025 is not the same as it was in 1918, nor can Putin sacrifice his gains to save his regime, because, unlike the Bolsheviks, he is the author of the war and cannot decouple himself from it without presumably fatal damage to his own personal rule. He must see it through whatever the cost, hoping that the Ukrainian premier, Volodymyr Zelensky, can be pressurised into conceding ground, thus releasing the sanctions and letting the Russians take a breather and try again as soon as they are able, or at the very least leaving the casino with some of their winnings intact.

Nor will the United States feel comfortable in this situation. The US President may not be particularly fond of Zelensky, but he will not want to hand Putin an easy geopolitical win and one that makes America look like it backed the wrong side. Moreover, if the war were to spill out of Ukraine and involve a NATO ally, then the United States, perhaps against its wishes, would become involved in a much bigger regional war that it could not ignore. The implications of an unfavourable peace on conflicts with a much more defined US interest, perhaps Taiwan or Israel, will also have to be considered. Peacemaking is a spectator sport, as much as war is, and nobody wants to look like a fool.

Making peace is never easy and it is not something that can be attained simply when one wishes, but is reflective of what has been achieved on the battlefield and what is likely to happen in the future. The fundamental problem that both America and Russia will have to overcome is Ukrainian unwillingness to agree to territorial concessions with little guarantee that the surviving rump of the country can be protected against another grab. Only Zelensky knows how much longer Ukraine can keep going, but until the consequences of agreeing to terms outweighs the costs of continuing the war, an end to the conflict is unlikely.

Perhaps Trump should consider how eager Putin is for negotiations to begin and make preparations accordingly. Instead of trying to secure peace in Ukraine, Trump should seek victory.