President Donald Trump took his first steps toward securing a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine last week. Following conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump offered optimism that a peace deal would be reached.
We hope Trump is indeed able to end a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and replace it with a peace that provides enduring prosperity and sovereignty for Ukraine. We are also heartened to see that the president appears to have read our Jan. 24 editorial suggesting he meet Putin in Riyadh. The president said Saudi Arabia is likely to host such a meeting.
But what might a successful peace deal entail?
Contrary to the media furor surrounding Trump’s opening gambit, the practical requirements of a viable peace deal are quite clear. Those include negotiated land swaps to return some Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory to Ukrainian control while allowing Russia to retain other territories it has unjustly seized since 2014. Crimea, for example, is highly unlikely to be returned to Ukraine as part of a peace accord. This is unfortunate but necessary if the bloodletting is to end. Any sanctions relief on Russia will also have to be staggered to ensure sustained Russian compliance with a peace deal.
This is no small concern. If Putin thinks he can get his sanctions relief while slowly continuing to eat up Ukraine via covert action, he will pursue that option. But the key element of ensuring a full and final suspension of Russian military and covert action against Ukraine will be the provision of an international peacekeeping force to defend Ukraine’s postwar borders against the threat of a future Russian attack.
Putin will attempt to manipulate Trump against this peacekeeping force. He will suggest that any European-led peacekeeping force is one and the same as a NATO force. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has rightly repudiated this notion. He stated last week that the peacekeeping force would not operate under NATO or its Article Five mutual defense protections. That statement should not be taken as a Trump administration refusal to support allies if Russia attacks their peacekeepers. Rather, it is a necessary public hat-tip to Putin designed to deny the Russian leader the credible means of portraying this force as NATO except in name.
Trump will have to be firm. Putin will view European peacekeepers in Ukraine as an embarrassing contradiction to his prewar agenda of fundamentally dissecting Ukraine from the West. To avoid that possibility, he’ll dangle other concessions to Trump. These might include the utterly fictitious prospect of a U.S.-Russia détente at China’s cost, his abandoning talks entirely, and possibly even nuclear threats. Again, however, the only way that Ukraine can accept very painful territorial concessions after three years of heroic resistance is if it truly believes that Russia will be deterred from invading yet again. If it doesn’t receive this basic assurance, Ukraine will have little choice but to keep fighting with support from its European allies if no longer from the United States.
After all, in the absence of NATO membership, which remains, at best, a long-term prospect, Ukraine could not agree to a peace deal without the attachment of international peacekeepers. It is also for this reason, of course, that Putin will be so determined to prevent any peace deal carrying a credible European peacekeeping force with it. But the nuts and bolts of how a peacekeeping force might operate are clear.
The United Kingdom and France are likely to lead that peacekeeping force with support from other European nations such as Poland. The U.S. is likely to provide intelligence and aviation support. The U.S. would also likely offer quiet assurances to its allies and Russia of U.S. military action in the event that Russia attacked the peacekeepers as part of a new onslaught against Ukraine.
In a further positive signal, Hegseth clarified that the peacekeeping force was a prerequisite toward preventing any peace from being “Minsk 3.0.” That’s a reference to the 2015 Minsk 2 accord debacle, which failed because it had no teeth to stop Putin from agreeing to end military operations. This is a history former German Chancellor Angela Merkel likes to whitewash and her fawning Western media supporters blindly ignore.
A European peacekeeping force in Ukraine will have the additive benefit of forcing our trans-Atlantic allies to increase defense budgets significantly. This is long overdue. In 2024, 19 of NATO’s 32 member states either failed to meet or just barely met the 2%-of-GDP defense budget target, a target all members agreed upon at the alliance’s 2014 summit. But higher defense spending will be necessary because sustaining thousands of combat-ready troops and enabling forces in Ukraine won’t come cheap. And because the peacekeepers will also need the backstop of credible supporting forces that can rush to their aid in the event Russia attempts to challenge them. America can and should provide some of these reaction forces, but Europe must bear the outsize weight. As Hegseth rightly noted, America’s military resources must now prioritize China’s threat in the Pacific.
Still, European nations could bring potent capabilities to bear in any peacekeeping force.
As the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan has noted, “Rotations of the British Army’s 1st Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade Combat Team, 7th Light Mechanized Brigade Combat Team, 4th Light Brigade Combat Team, and 20th Armored Brigade Combat Team would be well suited to deterrent-defensive deployments along any buffer zone. The French Army’s 7th Armored Brigade, 6th Light Armored Brigade, and 2nd Armored Brigade would be similarly suited to this role. These elements could be supported by helicopter combat aviation and air force quick reaction forces. Assuming some European allies provided additional, if limited, military support to this effort, Ukraine’s borders would quickly become a very hard nut for even a reconstituted Russian military to crack. Especially since attempting to crack the nut would lead to war with more than just Ukraine.”
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Put simply, the U.S. should be ready to push Zelensky toward painful concessions to end this brutal war. A war, we must never forget, that Putin started without any justifiable cause. But while considerations of territory, future investment in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, Ukraine’s diplomatic freedom of action, and other issues will be important in any negotiations, one concern must be paramount.
Namely, a European-led peacekeeping force that ensures Russia cannot resurrect the grievous misery it has imposed on Ukraine at some point five, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road.
