BORIS JOHNSON: It's time for Donald Trump to take the boot off Ukraine's neck and put the squeeze on Putin
When Putin this week launched one of his most vicious attacks so far upon the innocent citizens of Kyiv, it was an act of supreme contempt.
The Russian tyrant was showing his disregard for human life, for the 12 who died – including children – and the 90 injured. He was showing his disdain for Western public opinion. He was, above all, displaying his total condescension towards those who are currently trying to make peace.
Putin believes that he is winning. He thinks, wrongly I still hope and pray, that he has got Donald Trump where he wants him. He thinks he has nothing to fear. He thinks that the more brutal and violent he is – the more civilians he kills and maims with his missiles and drones – the more respect he will instil in the West, and the more cowed and abject we will all be.
When you look at the so-called peace deal Putin is currently being offered, you have to admit – he does not appear to be wholly wrong.
The proposal that the US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff brought back from Moscow was, I am afraid, an undisguised capitulation to aggression.
After three years of criminal and unprovoked attacks on a wholly blameless European country, Putin is being offered the following inducements to stop his butchery.
It is suggested that the United States should become the seventh country – after Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea – to recognise Russian sovereignty over captured Crimea.
The original scheme was that Washington would accept Putin’s legal claim over all four of the contested oblasts currently claimed by Moscow – Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhiya.
Putin believes that he is winning. He thinks, wrongly I still hope and pray, that he has got Donald Trump where he wants him
Donald Trump berates President Zelensky in the Oval Office in February
This would have meant that the US was asking Ukraine to give up, by law, large chunks of land that Putin’s troops do not even occupy. It was truly insane.
The proposal has now been modified, so that the US would only be recognising the Russian right to the conquered Crimean Peninsula – though that is in itself a reward for aggression, and intolerable to Ukrainians.
Then Putin is being handed what he wants most of all – the right to control the future of Ukraine, in the sense that he will get a veto on Nato membership.
Next, he gets all sanctions lifted on Russia, and a long-term economic partnership with America. To cap it all, he also gets the chance to have another go.
Under the current proposals there is neither a bankable Western security guarantee for Ukraine, nor a long-term credible plan for Western military aid. There is nothing in this deal to stop a third invasion. All Putin need do is rebuild his armed forces, wait for another propitious moment and strike again.
Read his 2021 essay on Ukraine, in which he frenziedly denies the existence of a separate Ukrainian identity. Listen to his interview (if you can bear it) with Tucker Carlson, the US broadcaster, in which he says that Ukraine is an ‘artificial country’.
Of course, Putin may swear blind to the current White House that the terms of this deal – echoing the immortal phrase of Adolf Hitler in 1938 – is the last territorial demand that he has to make in Europe. Hitler lied, just as Putin lied and lied before his invasion in 2022.
He is lying again. He wants Kyiv; he wants the whole thing, and he is prepared to wait. If this deal were agreed, he might wait till after the Trump presidency. He might wait till after the mid-term elections in 2026. There is nothing like enough in these proposals to stop him.
An explosion of a ballistic missile lights up the sky over Kyiv during a Russian missile and drone strike
Under the current proposals there is neither a bankable Western security guarantee for Ukraine, nor a long-term credible plan for Western military aid
Think what these plans mean for the Ukrainians. They have spent three years spilling their blood and enduring Putin’s hideous attacks not just because they are defending their own freedom, but because we – virtually every Western leader – have assured them that they are fighting for freedom and democracy around the world.
And this is what they get? Their country carved up, their future alliances to be determined by Moscow, and nothing but a worthless pledge from Putin that he will stop the slaughter, for the time being.
The plans are a grotesque insult to the Ukrainians, and though they have so far studiously avoided outright rejection, the truth is that no Ukrainian president or parliament could accept these terms.
Volodymyr Zelensky wants peace. But if – after three years of heroic resistance – he was to sign his name to the loss of sovereign Ukrainian territory, he knows that his immediate future after leaving office would be a trial for high treason.
These concessions to Putin can’t work and won’t work. They are also completely unnecessary – because Putin’s real position is far, far worse than is popularly understood.
The story of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine continues to be a chronic embarrassment to the reputation of the Russian armed forces. The Russian gains are glacial and immensely costly in Russian lives.
They still can’t capture the supposedly key town of Pokrovsk. They are being outplayed by Ukrainian drone technology. They are once again facing a humiliating Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory, in the Belgorod region. There is increased factional infighting in the Kremlin, while the faltering Russian economy is likely to be in an even worse position in six months.
Putin may recognise all this, or he may not, because he is apparently shielded from bad news, but in a sense it doesn’t matter. His biggest advantage is not his actual military strength but the weird and superstitious Western belief – in spite of all the evidence – that Russia is somehow fated to win this war.
Why do people keep saying this? It’s rubbish. Putin will not win, and he cannot win. He has stirred a patriotic feeling in Ukraine that cannot and will not be defeated.
That is precisely why this war is so utterly tragic, and so costly – as President Trump rightly and repeatedly observes. That is why the US president is right to try to make peace.
Both sides are in a wretched state. Russia may not be winning this war; but then neither, sadly, is Ukraine.
The Ukrainians know they have no realistic chance, for now, of recapturing the land they have lost. They want the killing to end, and in truth they would settle for a deal – if that deal genuinely respected the sovereignty of their country.
There are at least two important ways in which the current proposals could be improved.
First, we should just get rid of any suggestion of de jure recognition of areas conquered by Russia, whether in Crimea or anywhere else. It is a clear breach of international law, and simply undeliverable in Ukraine.
If that proposal remains in the package, it will scupper any chances of agreement.
We should go back to the original Trump proposals, for a ceasefire and freeze along the current line of contact, with no inflammatory erosions of Ukrainian sovereignty, and the prospect of eventual return of lost land.
Second, the Ukrainians need much greater clarity about their long-term security and the protections they can expect. It is a pity that Nato membership is seemingly off the table, at least for now. But there are other ways.
It would be an excellent thing if Britain and other like-minded countries were to send a reassurance force, to put boots on the ground in Ukraine and to help the Ukrainians with training and logistics.
It is essential that force be backed up by American intelligence and other support, though not necessarily with US ground forces. But no one believes that any multinational reassurance force is going to be enough, on its own, to stave off a third Putin attack. They would not be there in a war-fighting capacity, and it is not clear that they would be much use if they were. The best fighters in Europe – and the best people to defend Ukraine – are obviously the Ukrainians themselves.
What they need to deter a further Putin invasion is a ten-year plan for abundant Western military support, with very little restrictions on what kit they can buy and use. That plan for long‑term and credible military assistance to Ukraine should appear explicitly on the face of the deal, and should be guaranteed by the US, UK, France and all other Western backers of Ukraine.
In an ideal world, there would also be a tripwire clause, so that any third Putin invasion triggers automatic Ukrainian membership of Nato. I believe that something on those lines could conceivably work and could ultimately be deliverable in Ukraine.
The country would remain what it is today – a free, sovereign and independent democracy – and the Ukrainians would have achieved terms far better than Putin was offering at the outset of the war, when he had conquered much more of the country.
They would be on the path to the West, and EU membership. They would have Western allies on their soil. They would have an economic partnership with America. They would have control of their armed forces. They would have a credible plan to deter further Russian aggression.
That would be a reasonable deal for Ukraine, and yet for Volodymyr Zelensky – or any Ukrainian president – it would be incredibly painful. No democratic leader would find it easy to sign an agreement that means the de facto loss – for an unspecified period – of 20 per cent of his country.
No one would find it easy to agree proposals that left the aggressor effectively unpunished. For Zelensky to agree such terms would require amazing statesmanship and courage.
Before the Ukrainians sign any such deal they will want to know: will Putin agree to it? And why should he, when he has found it so easy to force the West into concessions? Putin knows that if Ukraine survives as an independent country – which it would, under these amended terms – it would slip away from his grasp.
He knows the anti-Russian feeling that now burns in Ukrainian breasts. He knows there is zero political support for closeness with Moscow. So, he will do everything in his power to block the type of deal I have outlined. He will oppose the Western security guarantees, the Western boots on the ground and the package of long-term Western support.
He will deny the sovereign Ukrainian right to claim their entire territory. He will deny their right even to aspire to Nato membership.
He will threaten blue murder – or more of it.
Which is why the time has finally come for Donald Trump to do what only he can, and time for the rest of us to give him the support he needs. It is time to take the boot off the Ukrainian neck and put the squeeze on Putin.
The influential Trump-backing US Senator Lindsey Graham has tabled a Bill before Congress designed for just this eventuality – a Putin refusal of a deal. The Bill already has 57 signatures out of 100. It would apply secondary sanctions on all countries trading – buying oil and gas – from Putin.
Secondary sanctions would really bite. They would force Putin to the table. But the Americans can’t do it alone.
It has been far too easy for the Europeans – UK included – to treat this problem as one that must be solved by Trump on his own. Why have we not been campaigning for Ukraine in Nato?
Why have we totally ignored the chance to take Putin’s $300bn in frozen assets – mainly in Belgium – and use them for Ukraine?
You may have missed it, but the other day the European Union quietly shelved the idea and put it in the ‘too difficult’ box. If we Europeans are going to be so faint-hearted about our own security, why should the Americans take us seriously?
If the US is going to put secondary sanctions on Putin – a big step – then that needs strong UK leadership, now, from Starmer, and strong European support for Senator Lindsey Graham and his Bill.
The Ukraine peace proposals currently on the table won’t work and won’t give Ukraine enough long-term protection.
There is only one way to get better terms, and that is to stop trying to squeeze more concessions from the victims – they can’t give any more – and start standing up to the aggressor.
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