Mixed results for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy following the historic meeting with US President Donald Trump and seven European leaders on August 18 in the White House.

The good news is his Western allies seem committed to offering Ukraine “strong bilateral security guarantees” as part of any peace deal and the Kremlin has already signalled that it would not object to that.

However, the bad news is Trump once again said that Nato membership for Ukraine is off the table, and the Kremlin has also repeatedly said since before the invasion of Ukraine that Nato membership is a red line that it will not tolerate.

Trilateral meeting

Trump is determined to make the Putin-Zelensky meeting possible and is likely willing to repeat a trilateral joint statement-like event similar to the peace deal he recently brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

One of the significant changes in Trump’s position is his backing away from the 30-day unconditional ceasefire he proposed in February and is now insisting on going straight to a peace treaty instead.

Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz clashed at the negotiating table with the German leader still insisting on a ceasefire before the peace negotiations can start.

“I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire,” he said. “So let’s work on that and let’s try to put pressure on Russia because the credibility of these efforts we are undertaking today depends on at least a ceasefire.”

Trump has backed Putin’s line fully that there will be no ceasefire and that the talks should go straight to the more protracted, but ultimately more permanent, peace negotiations, should a successful formula be found.

Exceptionally, Trump interrupted the meeting with European heads to put in a call to Putin, with whom he spoke for 40 minutes, to test the waters on the idea of a bilateral meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin. The Russian leader said he was game and a meeting could happen at the end of August, according to Merz.

Despite Trump selling himself as a peacemaker, his proposals are still very similar to the list of demands put forward by Putin, both in the April round of negotiations, and again in Alaska where he again demanded the “root causes” of the war be addressed: the Kremlin’s code words of his maximalist list of demands.

The main points of Putin’s Alaska offer include:

·        ceasefire until a comprehensive agreement is reached — will not happen;

·        Ukraine must withdraw troops from Donetsk and Luhansk regions in exchange for freezing the front line in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions;

·        return of occupied parts of Sumy and Kharkiv regions under Ukraine's control;

·        formal recognition of Russia's sovereignty over Crimea;

·        lifting at least some sanctions against Russia;

·        Ukraine's ban on joining NATO;

·        official status of the Russian language in some parts of Ukraine or throughout Ukraine, as well as freedom of activity for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Strong security guarantees

But the key development from the Washington summit is the focus on putting new strong security guarantees in place. The proposal is that the assurances will be backed by the US and the EU, which will assume the costs, and with China’s participation, according to media reports.

“We discussed security guarantees,” Zelenskiy said in a social media post after the meetings. “This is a key issue, a starting point towards ending the war. We appreciate the important signal from the United States regarding its readiness to support and be part of these guarantees… The US President also supported a meeting at the level of leaders. Such a meeting is necessary to resolve sensitive issues.”

Security deals are central to the hopes of bringing the war to an end and Ukraine’s allies seem to have changed their attitude to them. The 2022 Istanbul peace deal failed as the Ukrainian and Russian delegations agreed that Ukraine would give up its Nato ambitions but instead sign bilateral security deals Western allies. However, the deal collapsed a few days later after former Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and told Zelenskiy that the West would not provide any security deals and to fight on. Zelenskiy pulled out the deal after that.

The European leaders travelled to Washington nominally to support Ukraine and get a deal to end the hostilities, but they also had their own agenda: keep the US security umbrella over Europe open.

A key ask by Europe is if they offer real security deals to Ukraine they also want a US “backstop”. With Russia producing as many arms and ammo in three months as Europe can produce in a year, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a European-back security deal is meaningless until the US backs it up.

Trump has shifted on the question of providing a security backstop in the last month and has suggested that the US is now willing to provide security promises, but he has given no details at all and the form of the US security deal, if there is one at all, will be crucial.

Encouragingly, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke about Nato “Article 5-like” collective security guarantees in air quotes, and only a fully-fledged, but bilateral, set of promises to come to Ukraine’s military aid should Russia re-invade, will work. Anything less will be little more than the security assurances that Ukraine has been offered so far and do not include commitments to military aid should the war with Russia restart.

Strong guarantees are the best possible deal Zelenskiy can get. Over last winter he touted his victory plan around Western capitals that had accelerated Nato membership at its core, and that was universally rejected. Security has become a core demand by Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) and a strong guarantee would allow Zelenskiy to contemplate cede – on a de facto, not a de jura – territory to Russia.

To sweeten the deal, Zelenskiy offered to buy $100bn worth of US weapons, paid for by Europe, in exchange for security guarantees, the Financial Times reported. In addition, Zelenskiy repeated his offer of a $50bn mega drones-for-weapons deal. Asked by journalists at the White House about new US military aid for Ukraine, Trump said: “We’re not giving anything. We’re selling weapons.”

The talks on the exact form of these guarantees are clearly still ongoing and Zelenskiy, in his only comment on the topic while in Washington, said he would go back to Kyiv and “think about it”, clearly waiting for more details. The chances that Zelenskiy will cede territory surged by 34% following the White House meeting, according to Polymarket, a decentralised markets information platform.

No peacekeepers

If Article 5-like guarantees are not offered, then several alternatives of perhaps additional measures, have been suggested.

Zelenskiy repeated earlier comments that the best security guarantee is to build up the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to effectively counter Russia's military might – a point that was openly supported by several members of the European delegation.

Putin seems to have softened his position on this point. During the 2022 Istanbul deal, the Kremlin was insisting that the size of the AFU be radically restricted, which the Ukrainian delegation conceded. However, while the Kremlin has been vague on this point since, it appears these restrictions have been dropped since, which would be almost impossible to enforce anyway, as demonstrated by Finland’s building up what is now one of the most powerful armies in Europe, despite conceding limits on its military as part of a peace deal with the USSR after the end of the Winter War in 1939-1940 during WWII.

There will be no drastic downsizing of Ukraine’s Armed Forces after the war ends, Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal said the same day as a White House meeting, but there will be some downsizing. The process will be gradual, "planned and calculated", Interfax reported.

Shmyhal said Ukraine is already discussing this with its partners, particularly with regard to the future structure of the Ukrainian military. "First, it must be contract-based and professional. Secondly, it will not be drastically reduced after the war ends; the process will be carefully planned, calculated and gradual," the minister noted.

Another possible security guarantee could be the deployment of Western peacekeepers to Ukraine. The West has flip flopped on this idea. First proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, it was later abandoned as unworkable. But at the last coalition of the willing summit in London last month, the UK’s Defence Minister John Healey revived the idea.

The Kremlin appears to be anticipating this option being revived and Russian foreign minister spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said over the weekend that the Kremlin would not tolerate Nato-backed troops on Ukrainian soil in any shape or form, adding that such a force would be “fraught with unpredictable consequences.”

Trump remains vague on the nature of America’s commitment, if any, to security agreements in general and a possible peacekeeping force in particular. The US would provide Ukraine with a “very good security guarantee,” was all Trump would say when quizzed by journalists in the Oval Office after his meeting with Zelenskiy.

Trump insisted European countries would be the “first line of defence” in providing security guarantees for Ukraine, but that didn’t mean they were on their own. “European nations are going to take a lot of the burden. We’re going to help them and we’re going to make it very secure,” he said.

Previously, he has said the US would not participate in any peacekeeping force or provide any security guarantees, but in the last week he has suggested some US personnel might be involved. In connection to security guarantees he has talked about US trainers and intelligence personnel. Ukraine relies heavily on US real time satellite intelligence -- a capacity Europe does not have – that is operated by US military personnel to inform AFU troops in the field. It is assumed that some US liaison officers are already working in Ukraine providing this information, but clearly the provision of this intelligence in some form would be a core part of any US security guarantee, if agreed.

Territorial concessions

Strong security guarantees would clear the way for Zelenskiy to make some territorial concessions. Analysts are unanimous that to end the hostilities Zelenskiy will have to give some land away and he himself suggested this time last year that he would hold a referendum on the issue to gain a mandate if it became necessary.

Although Russia has only managed to capture some 20% of Ukraine’s territory after three years of war and having a much more powerful military machine, it is also clear that the embattled AFU has no chance of retaking any of that land without a significant upscaling of Western military support that is equally unlikely to appear given the Nato allies “some, but not enough” policy of military support in place since the start of the war.

However, Zelenskiy has painted himself into a corner, by repeatedly saying territorial concession is “impossible” under the terms of the Ukrainian constitution. Nevertheless, a fudge is possible. The Kremlin itself suggested there was some wiggle room on territorial borders, as reported by Reuters. One option would be for Bankova to concede de facto control over the occupied regions, but not de jura. In the 2022 talks another option was to transform the Donbas into an autonomous region that Moscow would de facto control, but would nominally stay part of Ukraine. And another suggestion was to kick the whole issue of sovereignty over Crimea 50 years down the road and allow future generations to settle the issue.

Since then, thanks to the Kremlin’s irresistible, but slow, progress on the battlefield, the Kremlin’s position has hardened and it is now demanding the recognition of its sovereignty over the Crimea now and full control of all of the Donbas, including the 30% of Donetsk it doesn’t control.

This would be a big problem for Zelenskiy. Withdrawing from Donetsk, where the AFU has built extensive defences, would be particularly difficult. As bne IntelliNews reported, a withdrawal from Donetsk would both expose the retreating AFU troops to devastating attacks and also open the way for Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) advances into the Kharkiv Oblasts amongst other things.

However, a solution could be to persuade Putin to drop his demand for an AFU Donetsk withdrawal and to freeze the conflict along the line of contact in Donetsk, leaving the AFU defences in Ukrainian hands, in the same way that the Kremlin has already said its prepared to freeze the fighting on the line in the two southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Even in these cases, any territorial concession by Zelenskiy would probably be political suicide for him. He is already trailing in the polls to former commander in chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi and his popularity in the polls has been further hurt by accusation of his increasingly authoritarian methods and an own goal by rushing through Law 21414 on July 22 that gutted Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms and sparked the first anti-government protests since the war started.

Asked in the White House if he was willing to hold elections that would be triggered by the end of martial law, Zelenskiy responded saying “of course.” For his part, Putin has questioned Zelenskiy's legitimacy after his five years term in office expired in May. As for the electorate, a recent poll found that 69% want a negotiated end to the conflict, but a similar number don’t want to see any land ceded as part of the deal.