U.S. gives Russia an early win before Ukraine peace talks begin in Abu Dhabi
Opean officials and experts worry.
Jared Kushner, center, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff,
Yesterday [Nov 9] at 4:22 p.m. EST
The Trump administration believes that the only way to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine is to simultaneously make a broader agreement with Russia about Europe’s future security arrangements, officials said Monday, acceding to a long-standing Kremlin demand that the United States and its NATO allies had resisted.
Tuesday’s talks in Abu Dhabi over the Russian war in Ukraine offer President Donald Trump his first chance to reassert his position as a global power broker following bruising Republican losses in last week’s midterm elections. But his negotiators — led by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — appear to have already bowed to a key Russian goal by opening a broader discussion of European security in the meetings.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long sought to rebuild the influence the Soviet Union once had to dictate the direction of neighboring nations, rather than allowing them to choose their own path. He has also sought to portray his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a necessary response to what he claimed were threats to Russian security by NATO’s eastward expansion, as well as the supposed persecution of ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine.
U.S. officials appeared to be open Monday to the bigger discussion about Europe’s security that Putin has demanded.
To solve territorial issues inside Ukraine, “you do have to work on the postwar security architecture. It’s a very logical step,” a U.S. official told reporters Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss the sensitive negotiations. “If both parties know how to finish, they have to know what they’re finishing into.”
European leaders have previously said that because Russia’s attack on Ukraine was unprovoked, they would only be willing to discuss broader security issues with Moscow after it halts its war.
The U.S. official said the Trump administration was prepared to offer “an Article 5-like security guarantee to Ukraine” — a reference to the NATO pledge that an attack on one of the members of the alliance would be treated as an attack on all of them.
But the official also seemed open to negotiating limits on Ukraine’s ability to make sovereign decisions about its military, saying that “neither side will want to stop the fighting if it believes the other side will use the ceasefire to rearm and to prepare for another war.”
Because Russia has spent nearly five years waging intense full-scale war against Ukraine, Kyiv is likely to want to rebuild its ability to defend itself following any peace deal — a step the U.S. official appeared willing to restrict.
As part of a deal, the U.S. also seems ready to lift sanctions on Russia that were imposed because of its land grab. That would effectively reset the clock with the Kremlin in control of extensive portions of Ukrainian territory, instead of removing sanctions only after Russia withdraws.
“Maybe the sanctions over time can be used as a way to to incentivize Russia to keep whatever deal they have, and you leave them where they can spring back in place if Russia violates the agreement,” the U.S. official said. “So you do that where you create real incentives and costs to to break a future deal.”
The approach risks yielding to Russia’s demands for a greater say in Europe’s security even as Moscow has blown up existing agreements by seeking to redraw borders by force, according to European officials, former U.S. officials and security experts. Witkoff and Kushner may be wading into a quagmire that they have little understanding of, these observers said.
“We already have European security architecture in place,” Europe’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, told reporters, pointing to NATO and the European Union. “The problem remains that Russia keeps breaking the treaties that underpin it.”
The White House defended their envoys. Witkoff and Kushner “are proven dealmakers who have done more for global stability in the past year and a half than many government bureaucrats have done in their entire careers,” said Olivia Wales, White House spokesperson.
European officials — worried the U.S. will carry out a discussion about their security over their heads — are insisting that representatives of their countries take part in the talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, according to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.
“It’s a questionable start for negotiations. And underlying it is this ill-informed view that it’s just misunderstanding, and the Russians have legitimate security interests,” said Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe during the George W. Bush administration. “They do have legitimate security interests, but they have carried out their security interests in a way that suggests nobody else can be in the least bit secure.”
“Maybe Trump just wants a win,” Fried added.
The decision to put the discussion on the agenda marks another shift in Russia’s favor as the U.S. administration desperately seeks ways to end the war in Ukraine — something Trump, before returning to the White House in 2025, declared that he would do within 24 hours.
The administration has been struggling to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table, even as Moscow has refused to make any concessions and has intensified deadly strikes on Ukrainian cities, including a glide bomb attack on a humanitarian aid distribution point in the Zaporizhzhia region last week that killed at least 53 people.
Current and former U.S. security officials said they feared that Witkoff’s and Kushner’s lack of experience in high-level global security negotiations could be exploited by Russia, and that they had already been ceding too much ground by also appearing to offer the prospect of business deals before a ceasefire was agreed.
Further adding to the concerns that the U.S. administration could try to force through a deal favorable to Moscow, Trump said in an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday evening that he believed “we’re very close to making a deal” and that Ukraine probably would “end up with a little bit different shape” after the war.
Former U.S. and European security officials said strategic agreements forged between Russia and the West following the Soviet Union’s collapse, including the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, already established workable security arrangements until Moscow violated them when it invaded its neighbors, Georgia and Ukraine.
“It all sounds great. The problem is it’s exactly the security architecture Russia has been trying to destroy,” said Eric Ciaramella, a former acting senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council. “These people have a lot left to learn. It just feels like they’re learning, that they’re in an undergraduate course on European security for the first time, and they just haven’t finished the course yet.”
Respecting territorial integrity and the freedom of countries to choose their alliances “is not anything close to what Russia wants,” he said. “I don’t think they are going to get very far.”
Until this autumn, the Trump administration had appeared to adhere firmly to a position that it would not be willing to go ahead with any business deals the Kremlin had been dangling as part of efforts to win U.S. favor, or discuss European security, until Russia had agreed to a ceasefire on Ukraine. But now “we are seeing at least erosion on these fronts,” said Nate Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Russia director at the National Security Council.
The Trump administration may be hoping that expanding the framework of talks could sway Moscow into making concessions on territorial demands — such as its long-standing insistence that Kyiv withdraw troops from the heavily fortified area in Donbas, eastern Ukraine — but it would probably be mistaken, Reynolds said.
“I suspect Moscow will see it differently. The Kremlin will see that the American resistance … is eroding,” he added. “It will think it can make side deals with Washington to create fissures with Ukraine and Europe. It can then try to exploit the cracks to get a better deal on Ukraine down the line.”
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The comments express strong criticism of the Trump administration's handling of negotiations involving Ukraine and Russia, with many commenters accusing Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff of being inexperienced, self-interested, and overly sympathetic to Russia. There is a pervasive belief that these negotiations are more about personal gain and appeasing Putin than achieving a fair peace for Ukraine.
Commenters also express skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the U.S. involvement in these talks, suggesting that the administration's actions undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and security.
-- 242 comments [JB are the time I read it this time]
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