Quality of mediation is a major issue in the Ukraine peace process

The ongoing talks between the US, Russian and Ukrainian teams of negotiators may yet produce a “peace deal” – so desired by President Donald Trump – by the end of the tumultuous year 2025, or at least before the disastrous war comes to the four-year mark.

The deal in question is certain to be described as “beautiful” by its US designers, but in fact the pause in hostilities it may yield would be very far from any notion of stability, let alone peace. The ugly features of this arrangement have come through clearly in the leaked memo, which became notorious as the “28 points plan”, even if those now revised talking points couldn’t possibly qualify as a “plan”. The scope of revisions remains confidential at the moment of this writing, but the undeniable pro-Russian tilt of the original document, which offended many US experts and the majority of European stakeholders, can only be attributed to the outstandingly low quality of US mediation.

The strong drive of the Trump administration for monopolising the role of mediator goes cross-purpose with the desire to preserve and even assert leadership in the Western coalition and to maintain Europe’s dependency upon the US in the security realm. The point in the list of 28 that suggests opening a “dialogue between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues”, is incompatible with the plain fact that the Atlantic Alliance is led by the US, whatever reservations Trump might have against the European allies.  For the majority of Russians, the USA is at the top of the list of enemies, even if the opinion polls may register swings in pro- and anti-American attitudes. Following the official stance, the mainstream commentary is deferential to Trump and cautiously critical of the US policy-making, depicting Europe as the “enemy of the world instead”.

This castigation of European elites undercuts their intentions to develop an alternative peace plan because the vision of an armistice they may cherish is doomed to be rejected by Moscow as a priori detrimental to Russia’s interests. Standing firm with Ukraine and embracing President Volodymyr Zelensky, the leaders of key European states refuse to talk with Putin, even though the arguments for opening a new channel of communication make plenty of sense. Reflecting on the bad experience of negotiating the Minsk agreements that ensured a “freezing” of the war in Donbas in early 2015, the European politicians cannot suggest any mediation, with the probable exception of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who hopes to host a Trump-Putin summit in Budapest. Among NATO member-states, only Turkey is well positioned to act as mediator, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan not only has long experience of negotiating with Putin, but also unique achievements in extracting concessions.

Trump, to the contrary, cannot figure out how to outmaneuver Putin and his appointment of Steve Witkoff as the key negotiator reflects this inability to understand the mindset of the counter-part with whom he met quite a few times. That Witkoff tends to consume uncritically Putin’s narrative on the “deep reasons” of the war having no knowledge of history and geopolitics is only a part of the problem. Another part is the approach to negotiations as commercial bargaining, in which calculations of potential benefits for the USA are mixed with expectations for personal gains. For Witkoff, as well as for Trump, the war doesn’t make any sense and stands in the way of doing profitable business, so he has no doubts about including into the “28 points” the idea that “all ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled” (in the Russian version, the word is “contradictions”). The US mediators cannot comprehend that for Putin the war makes a lot of sense because it constitutes a focal point of the existential conflict between Russia and the West.

The Russian ruler seeks to camouflage this obsession with “civilizational” confrontation in talks with Trump and has found a go-betweener who thinks and speaks in the same terms as Witkoff – a youngish upstart Kirill Dmitriev. This Kyiv-born and US-educated business executive focuses on the potentially lucrative deals that could be made as the war is put on a pause, and while such ideas as the construction of a tunnel between Alaska and Kamchatka are far-fetched, the main proposition on lifting all economic sanctions against Russia answers the urgent need of escaping from the trap of stagflation exactly right. Dmitriev apparently produced the first draft of the deal and convinced Putin’s more experienced aide, Yuri Ushakov, that Witkoff wouldn’t try to add any disagreeable alterations. Ushakov’s concerns were proven correct, and if Putin is irked by such propositions in the “28 points” non-paper as the US security guarantees to Ukraine (ambivalent as they are), the Europeans are angered by the intention to gain control over the “frozen” Russian financial assets, which they seek to channel for re-arming and reconstructing Ukraine.

Dmitriev’s ignorance in security matters is not his main shortcoming as a mediator, and neither is his alleged conflict with Russia’s veteran foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. While Witkoff has Trump’s full confidence, Dmitriev’s connection with Putin is tenuous at best, and his wife’s presumed friendship with Putin’s younger daughter Ekaterina doesn’t signify an entry pass to the Kremlin’s court. Putin is increasingly interested in circumventing and breaching the sanctions regime, but his main perspective on the war is not geo-economic, but geo-strategic, with the fundamental aims of subjugating Ukraine and undermining NATO’s integrity. Lavrov may be sidelined in the ongoing Miami-Moscow-Miami talks, but he has set his sails firmly on Putin’s war-making course and remains unperturbed by the passions around the exact drawing of the hypothetical ceasefire line.

Putin has deliberately focused his game of no-deal on gaining full control over Donbas knowing how sensitive is the territorial control question for the Ukrainians and how insignificant it appears for the US mediators. In reality, he doesn’t need the unoccupied twenty per cent of the devastated Donetsk region and cherishes the vision of a Russia-US entente that dissolves the trans-Atlantic unity and leaves Ukraine in limbo. A different team of mediators with a deeper understanding of these ambitions is needed for countering Putin’s game plan, but still bringing the war to an end.

The arrangement that Trump’s envoys are hammering out by putting hard pressure on Ukraine and offering various incentives to Putin will constitute a major breach in the European security system, which can only be reinforced by a fast rehabilitation of Ukraine and its firm anchoring to the EU and NATO by reliable security ties.

• Pavel K. Baev is a Research Professor at PRIO
• This text was first published as an opinion pies at Global Panorama