Trump, Putin, and the Ukraine Minerals Deal
How not to tear up the rules-based order
No matter what one’s opinion of Russia’s geopolitical sensitivities is, its invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. The Kremlin may claim that it was provoked - via Kiev’s enthusiasm for membership of the EU and, worst of all, of NATO – but this is to stretch provocation as legitimate casus belli too far.
All of that said, after a decade of conflict we are where we are. And where we are as we approach the end of Easter, happily coinciding this year across both Western and Eastern Christianity, is a place where the political mood music from the White House sounds decidedly bleak. Letting it be known that it will "take a pass" on brokering further Ukraine/Russia talks if positive results do not come soon, the closure of the window on a negotiated settlement, and the opportunity for Donald Trump to throw Ukraine under a Russian bus, seems to be fast approaching. Not for decades would the bully have been so richly rewarded.
The implications of this cannot be underestimated, especially for Ukraine. I remember conversing with a colleague about the situation in the weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion, and commented that to get an idea of the Kremlin’s territorial ambitions, one needed to look no further than the results of the Ukrainian presidential election of 2010. The regions that sent the subsequently deposed pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych to the presidential palace in Kiev unambiguously revealed them (in blue):
And as has been well documented, the effects of such a concession would reverberate far beyond Ukraine, not least in East Asia, and would only encourage other actors to undermine the rules-based order still further.
Yet such a doom-laden tune, as ominous as it is, should not be listened to in isolation from that other part of this geopolitical danse macabre: the US-Ukraine minerals deal. The latest is that the deal is as good as signed, with the formalities to be done next week. And it is here where things get interesting, not just geopolitically, but for the reading of Trump as a closeted, or not-so-closeted, pro-Putin authoritarian who could not care less about the rules-based post-WWII settlement. For with the minerals deal, and as Secretary of State Rubio has been saying all along, the US will have a materially direct strategic interest in both unoccupied and occupied Ukraine:
Factor in now the other part of Trump’s position; that on Ukraine, as on funding for NATO and so much else, it has always been “about the money.” Contrary to much of the coverage, the minerals deal is in fact neither just about the money nor a vindictive form of state-to-state extortion. Rather, and as any economist worth his salt knows, it only reflects a material reality of this conflict that diplomacy often feigns to hide.
In Trump’s view the problem with the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy was that, having failed to call Russia’s bluff in February 2022, it committed itself, at least in public, to open-ended but only indirect support of Kiev. It has been this reluctance to put boots on the ground, even if only at a distance (for example in the west of the country), that for Trump has brought us to where we are now. Within a context of marked asymmetry in material and human resources between Ukraine and Russia, and without a commitment to either deploy NATO forces, or at least to increase indirect support in a militarily transformative way, such a policy was always going to risk amounting to little more than the subsidy of mass Ukrainian casualties and steady territorial loss. Keeping Ukraine on life support - but without the promise of victory - was never going to be sustainable over the long run.
So, far from threatening to upend the Western alliance, tear up and replace the rules-based order with Great Power politics, or irrevocably erode decades of trans-Atlantic cooperation, Trump has merely dragged the obvious out into the open: that undoing the West’s policy mess on Ukraine can now only take place within the reality on the ground that that mess has helped to create.
It would be tempting to claim that all of this shows that just as there is no such thing as a blank cheque in politics, there is no such thing as a blank cheque in geopolitics. But here comes the twist. The minerals deal. The minerals deal is like a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, but before rather than after the war has concluded. Most importantly for the prospects of peace, it turns the West’s blank cheque into Ukraine’s down payment. Most crucially for the diplomacy, that means that because Kiev will bear a much greater part of the economic burden for its own defence, but without that being a burden right now, the way will be opened, possibly within weeks, for greater and longer-lasting US material support of Ukraine’s war effort against Russia should it seek to renege on peace. That would not only fatally subvert the Kremlin’s victory-by-attrition strategy, but quite possibly turn Ukraine’s largely defensive posture into a more sustainably offensive one. With such a dramatic changing of the reality on the ground soon becoming a credible threat, that is precisely the position of strength at negotiations that European and US efforts to date have failed to deliver for Ukraine.
Time will tell whether this is all just wishful thinking. But if this reading of the state of play is right, it means that it may well be Russia’s window of opportunity, not Ukraine’s, that is now rapidly closing. Of course, Russia may still end up with most of what it currently controls in Ukraine in any negotiated settlement:
But the geopolitical impact of the minerals deal means that even that may soon become unrealistic, unless Russia comes to the table… fast.