Wild US policy shifts on Ukraine have left Kyiv reeling. This week may bring a clearer focus

The seismic shift of the past fortnight is hard to digest.

Ukraine and its allies hope, deeply, that the plank Kyiv has been slammed in the face with, is – to paraphrase US President Donald Trump’s presidential envoy to Ukraine – just to get its attention. That the White House is merely pausing military aid and intelligence sharing, demanding about half of the country’s mineral wealth to repay an alleged debt, and expecting a public apology from its president, as a negotiating ploy. That this is just tough talk ahead of a hard deal.

But a deeper change is apparent, and one that Europe has been reluctant to accept, and is scrambling to adjust to. The Trump administration sees itself not as an ally to Ukraine and its European backers, but as an intermediary between them and Moscow, hoping to rehabilitate Russia on the world stage. Trump has said he is “seriously considering” more sanctions on Moscow. Yet he has not applied them. So far, Russia has only tasted carrots and felt no sticks.

The pressure applied so far ahead of any deal is that of the contractor on its subcontractors – America on Ukraine and Europe – squeezing their terms to create a more attractive proposition for Russia. Hopes are high that a summit in Riyadh on Tuesday, between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team, will heal the Kyiv-Washington relationship.

Yet almost too much hinges on this meeting. Personal enmities must be put aside. A deal on rare earths and other minerals – which is, in the last draft CNN saw, essentially toothless yet a bold sign of American ambitions as to Ukraine’s natural wealth – must be inked. And, most importantly, the White House must reveal what sort of peace it has in mind.

This is the chasm that lies beneath Trump’s insistence that Zelensky “commit to peace.” Does Trump mean an indefinable vibe only he can determine? Does he mean the germs of a European peace plan, which so far involves a prisoner swap, a partial ceasefire at sea, in the air and on energy infrastructure, followed by a limited European peacekeeping force? (Russian officials have rejected much of this already). Or does he mean another version of peace that may be concocted between Moscow and Washington, without Europe or Ukraine at the table?

This last idea should be the most troubling for European security and Ukrainian sovereignty. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine and Russia, denied that a draft deal discussed in March 2022 in Istanbul – a rushed peace bid which fell apart in the early stages of the war due to the massacres in Irpin of Ukrainian civilians – would be the framework. But he called it a “departure point, at least.”

These proposed accords demanded that Ukraine relinquish its ambitions to join NATO, an aim which is now enshrined in the country’s constitution. The draft deal also demanded major cultural changes, the least of which was Russian being made an official language.

But above all, it tried to set limits on the armed forces Ukraine could retain which would have made them significantly smaller than Russia’s vast military. Its essence was capitulation. Not in terms of submitting to peace. But in removing Ukraine’s ability to convincingly defend itself in the event that Russia, as Ukraine says it has done more than 20 times in the last decade, violates a ceasefire and attacks again.

The pressure being laid onto Ukraine would suggest Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh – already extremely high stakes after the Oval Office catastrophe just over a week ago – is not intended to be a simple, glad-handing moment of making up. We may learn the kind of peace Trump envisions, and how much of that mirrors Moscow’s ambitions.

Europe’s future security depends on how much “art of the deal” there is in this deal. Trump’s accustomed business world is one where he would seek to make a purchase or a contract attractive to the other side. Perhaps he might fire the head of the subcontractor if the other side didn’t like them (hence the loose talk of Zelensky’s fitness for office). He might screw down on their terms to improve margins (pausing military aid). He might flatter his prospective client (his reluctance to speak ill of Putin).

But the deal would ultimately involve the purchase of bricks and mortar, or their construction: a simple and predictable future course of actions or change in ownership of property, protected and cosseted by lawyers and courts – by the rule of law. If the other side broke the deal, Trump could sue. The precedents and courses of action were well-defined, and the rule of law on his side in ensuring the terms of the deal were kept.