This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Trump ices Europe out of Ukraine peace plan’
Marc Filippino
US President Donald Trump is ready to bring peace to Ukraine and he says he will work, quote, very closely with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to make it happen. But there is a problem. He won’t commit any US money or troops.
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This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in US politics. I’m Marc Filipino, and this week we’re asking: what happens if Trump goes it alone in trying to settle the Ukraine conflict? Here with me to discuss is Max Seddon. He covers Russia for the FT. Hi, Max.
Max Seddon
Hi.
Marc Filippino
We’ve also got Keir Giles, a senior fellow at Chatham House and the author of a new book called Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent. Hi, Keir.
Keir Giles
Hello, Marc.
Marc Filippino
So, Max, why don’t you catch us up on Wednesday? Donald Trump had a 90-minute call with Vladimir Putin, and when he finished, he wrote on Truth Social, the social media network, that negotiations on Ukraine would begin immediately. What do we know about this phone call and what signal does it send for these peace talks?
Max Seddon
Well, Donald Trump, in the course of these 90 minutes, basically through three years of Western policy on supporting Ukraine against the Russian invasion out of the window under former President Joe Biden. The motto everybody was working under was nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. And the idea was very much that Ukraine’s allies in the US and Europe had a joint strategy that they would work on together on bringing Russia to the table. And Trump essentially dispensed of that and revealed the view that I think is much closer to Putin’s view of this, which is this is not a question of Russia invading a sovereign country. This is about talks between two great powers. He didn’t inform Ukraine or any European countries about the call in advance. And the message that the administration has been sending this week is very much that we will agree to some sort of deal, and we will present it to Ukraine at some point and it will be Europe that has to deal with the longer-term consequences of whatever this arrangement may be.
Marc Filippino
Keir, the conversation that we’re talking about between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin got a lot of negative response, especially from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but also a lot of European officials. Why were they mad?
Keir Giles
Yes. And of course, it’s not just Ukraine and Europe. It’s actually the United States’ partners and allies around the world that are looking at this aghast. And to understand that, you have to factor in not just what President Donald Trump has said, but also the more or less simultaneous remarks by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Trump has said in fairly vague terms that there’s gonna be immediate talks on peace. But it was Hegseth that laid out what appears to have been pre-emptive concessions to Russia that have already been agreed even before those talks actually start.
No Nato membership for Ukraine, no support for Ukraine’s future security from the United States, even if there is a European peacekeeping force and no hope of regaining Ukrainian territorial sovereignty — explicitly ruling out the return to the 2014 borders. So it’s the combination of these two efforts. It’s the combination of Trump talking to Putin over the heads, not just of the Ukrainians, but of all of the other countries that this will directly affect. And, of course, what the United States appears already to have given up to Putin before that process even starts. That has got everybody distinctly concerned.
Marc Filippino
This is a lot for Europe to swallow, but this seems like even more for Ukraine to deal with it and accept. Max, can you give us a sense of what this might look like from Kyiv? What kind of peace talks does it want and why are some of those, you know, hard-line positions Putin repeated on Wednesday, unacceptable to it?
Max Seddon
Well, if you look at what Putin has said, his position hasn’t really changed since the start of the war. Russia is sticking to these very hard line demands, which are . . . Essentially what they add up to is that Ukraine, you know, if this happens, will cease to exist as a functional state because it won’t be able to have a strong military. It will have to agree to surrender not just territory already occupied by Russia, but even some other territory that Russia has not occupied at any point during the war. And what this all adds up to is Ukraine either becoming some sort of vassal state as part of Russia or just being so weak that Russia could eventually conquer it again if they so chose. And this has left Ukraine basically on the outside looking in to the point where Zelenskyy had to say, I’m not gonna be able to accept any peace deal that is just imposed on us without our input.
Marc Filippino
Why would Putin do this? I mean, he’s saying things and suggesting things that are clearly unacceptable to Ukraine. Is this a way of just bargaining? You know, you start high and then, you know, the other side brings you down. What is the plan here?
Max Seddon
I think the plan is very much about using this openness to Trump to help bring Russia back in from the cold as it were. Because if you look at the Kremlin readout of the call, one of the things that they discussed, as well as the war in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program, they even talked about things like artificial intelligence and bilateral economic co-operation, a thing that does not really currently exist because of all the sanctions that the US and its allies have imposed because of the war, and would presumably have to be lifted before there were any meaningful economic co-operation.
And this is something that Putin can use not just to get a seat back at the table of nations, but what he is essentially proposing is sphere of influence for Russia, much like the way it carved out Europe with the United States and the UK at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. And they have demanded Nato essentially roll back all of its deployments east of the Iron Curtain has made in the past 25 years. So I think with Putin, this is something that secures not just his aims during the war, but this really is about things that he’s wanted for a very long time and it would really secure his political legacy.
Marc Filippino
You know, I think there’s a lot of discussion about Europe having, you know, basically control over its own fate when it comes to security. Right now, this weekend, there’s the Munich Security Conference where a lot of these things are being hashed out. So we could hear more shortly. But, you know, Keir, you write a lot about European denialism and the sense that Europe would like to have a more reduced role in its own security. And I wonder if that era is over. I mean, are European leaders thinking that maybe after all they will have to be more responsible for the defence of Europe?
Keir Giles
You would like to think that finally that realisation has hit home. But the problem is we’ve been here so many times before. That alarm call has sounded so many times before, and European leaders have hit the snooze button on it. And for so long there’s been the cosy expectation that these ambitions of Vladimir Putin were unrealistic. And so, of course, they were right up until the point where you have an incoming US administration that says, OK, Russia, all of that sounds good to us. We will force that through on the Ukrainians and the Europeans on your behalf. And now suddenly you have panic in Europe again, because Western European leaders in particular are once again confronted with the results of their own delinquency.
It is not Trump’s fault. It’s not any US administration’s fault that Western Europe has taken so little interest in defending itself while it’s been sheltering under the American security blanket. And now that after a period where that blanket has been gradually edged away, suddenly it’s being ripped off. It’s exposing the consequences of those decisions. And so Europe, of course, faces calculations of how much it will cost to defend itself that are vastly greater than if they’d simply maintained defence capability, or even started building it up a decade ago when the need became clear. So we’ll see if — not just over the next coming days in Munich, but also in general over the weeks and months to follow — if this will finally give the impetus to Europe to start looking to protecting itself instead of outsourcing defence to the United States.
Marc Filippino
Max, what happens if Europe isn’t able to get it together quickly and Trump pushes forward? I imagine there’s a lot of fear in Ukraine on this, and could Russia, you know, use that to its advantage?
Max Seddon
I think Russia certainly could, but I would also emphasise that this is likely going to be a lot more difficult than maybe even Trump necessarily realises at the moment. There are a lot of things that they’ve already stated as policy, but de facto, they can’t really change without the consent of Nato allies and likewise they’re going to find that any kind of sustainable deal is going to require at least some level of Ukrainian buy it.
I think the danger is more that we don’t know exactly how serious Putin is about negotiating an end to this war at all. It appears that Trump very much wants to get it out of the way, but there is much less indication that Putin is interested in this at all because right now they’re winning the war. They have more men on the front than Ukraine. They are sustaining enormous casualties, that they are more or less able to sustain their numbers at the front. And if they don’t get everything they want, then there isn’t necessarily that much reason for them to stop. And I think that would be the biggest danger here and something that the US could potentially be underestimating.
Marc Filippino
Yeah. Why quit while you’re ahead? How do both of you guys see this playing out? Putin and Trump have said they may meet in Saudi Arabia. What else are key moments we should be looking out for?
Keir Giles
I think, first of all, let’s look very closely at how Russia is responding to this, as Max suggested, a much more muted response, specifically on what Trump appears to have offered in the phone call with Putin. But that, of course, is reflective of the fact that so much has already been conceded before the process even starts. So Russia is in a position where it may well feel that it can push for more from the United States.
Marc Filippino
Max, what about you? What are your thoughts?
Max Seddon
I think the first indication will be who is appointed from the Russian side to be the counterparts in these talks, because the last time there were any kind of serious talks with Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, the delegation mostly consisted of these pretty mid-ranking officials who were all so distant from the actual war fighting process that it wasn’t clear to a lot of people involved the extent to which they even really had Putin’s buy-in for negotiations. We know that there have been talks going on throughout the war with the US on things like prisoner exchanges, and that has involved much more senior officials than the people who are involved in the peace delegation. And the degree of their direct involvement with the US, I think would be a major selling point about how serious Putin is, because ultimately this is only up to him.
You know, we only need to remember the last time Trump was in office and made all sorts of rapturous noises about wanting to be friends with Russia, the spectacle of their summit with Putin in Helsinki, where he basically said he trusted Putin more than he did his own intelligence officials. But what was the result of that? And I’ve had a few people on the Russian side say this to me in the last few months is that it all ended in total disaster. And by the time that Trump left office, US policy towards Russia was more hostile. And it happened when he came in. So I think there is still a lot to be done, regardless of how eager Trump may be to get this agreed.
Marc Filippino
Guys, I wanna thank you both for your time. Max Seddon leads our coverage of the war in Ukraine and covers Russia. Thanks, Max.
Max Seddon
Thanks for having me.
Marc Filippino
And Keir Giles, a senior fellow at Chatham House and the author of a new book Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent. Thanks, Keir.
Keir Giles
Thank you very much, Marc.
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Marc Filippino
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. If you wanna sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we’ve got a link to that in the show notes. Our show is mixed by Sam Giovinco and produced by Katya Kumkova. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Original music by Hannis Brown. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
