Your editorial (FT View, February 14) on President Donald Trump’s “dangerous” approach to peace in Ukraine feels, I’m afraid, like mere carping.
Trump has simply said publicly what everyone close to the issue has known for a long time, but many have chosen to deny.
The heedless expansion of Nato, and particularly efforts to include Ukraine, fed Russia’s deep-seated security fears and helped provoke the war. It follows that any eventual peace will necessarily exclude early Ukrainian Nato membership.
The war itself is in effect deadlocked, nobody sees a “silver bullet” to end the deadlock, so it is time to try to stop the bloodshed through negotiations. Nobody, not even Volodymyr Zelenskyy, believes there is any early prospect of Ukraine regaining all its occupied territory.
And, finally, it will be principally for Europe, not the US, to provide the guarantee of postwar Ukrainian security which must be the basis of establishing Ukraine as an essentially neutral but western-leaning European state.
Successful diplomacy depends upon a shared realism about the underlying facts. Trump has brought us considerably closer to that situation.
There is still of course a long way to go. But the shape of a settlement which could help blow back the clouds of European war for a generation is now much clearer.
Sir Antony Brenton
Former British Ambassador to Russia, Cambridge, UK