Peace for our time?

By Mike Froman

The stakes for brokering an enduring peace in the Russia-Ukraine War are high. Above all, a sovereign, secure and prosperous Ukraine. An unfavorable outcome could also cost President Donald Trump “the most prestigious prize in the world,” the Nobel Peace Prize, and perhaps, eternal life itself.

Earlier this week, Trump said that securing an end to the war might be his stairway to heaven. As he told Fox & Friends: “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.” 

The afterlife aside, it’s no secret that the president has had his eye on a Nobel Peace Prize for quite some time. Only four presidents have been awarded the honor: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Jimmy Carter in 2002, and Barack Obama in 2009.

To date, Trump has received several nominations for the award. Not all past nominees are equally distinguished. After British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, infamously permitting Adolf Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, he proclaimed “peace for our time” and encouraged Europe to “go home and sleep quietly in your beds.” Twelve members of the Swedish parliament nominated the Prime Minister for the peace prize, only to see Hitler invade Poland months later. Suffice it to say, Neville did not win the Nobel. His status in the afterlife is beyond my purview.

If anything, last week’s summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump revealed the difficulties of forging a lasting peace in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, to say nothing of scoring the peace prize. The hard truth is that leader-level dialogue can only achieve so much. Negotiations to reach the Korean Armistice of 1953 took well over two years and a hundred meetings. Indeed, many rounds of technical discussions will preface any long-term agreement on Ukraine. And the status quo on the ground will need to change for such discussions to make meaningful progress.

Alaska laid bare just how little progress has been made. For starters, there was no ceasefire. To the contrary, Russia appears determined to keep on bombing and taking offensive action against Ukraine while an overall peace agreement gets worked out. And the issues that would need to be worked out to have an overall peace agreement are many, difficult, and time-consuming. 

As the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted in their latest update, the Russian side still seeks its maximalist objectives, including the complete and permanent annexation of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, in addition to Crimea. They also “appear to be demanding that any [Western] security guarantees be based on those proposed in the Istanbul 2022 framework, which would grant Russia and its allies the right to veto Western military assistance to Ukraine and leave Ukraine helpless in the face of future Russian threats.” And per the same ISW report, the Kremlin also indicated that “Putin is unwilling to have an immediate bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the timeline proposed by US President Donald Trump.” The Russian’s territorial demands alone are nonstarters for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has little political or military incentive at this point to concede.

As things stand, Trump has two primary paths to alter the course of the war. Each has its tradeoffs. 

One path forward is to significantly reduce U.S. support for Ukraine. A dramatic reduction in support could force Kyiv to eventually negotiate on Russian terms, as the war of attrition gradually erodes the country’s capacity to fight. In February, Trump feinted in this direction—only to reverse course as the Europeans and Ukrainians doubled down in their determination to continue the fight, while Putin escalated Russian strikes on civilian and critical infrastructure targets across Ukraine.

Another path forward is to convince Putin that U.S. and European support for Ukraine is a long-term, large-scale enterprise, capable of freezing the front lines—if not pushing them back—in perpetuity. This approach requires providing increasing military support to Ukraine, including intelligence and air assets only the United States has. It would also demand new rounds of biting economic sanctions, targeting Russia’s $240 billion in annual trade with China, yet-to-be sanctioned Russian banks, and Russia’s still-sprawling oil and gas export industries. It could likewise entail spending or transferring seized Russian central bank assets in support of Ukraine.

This path will test the president’s mettle and might well impose costs on everyday Americans in the form of higher energy prices and acute supply chain shocks, if secondary sanctions on Russia re-ignite U.S.-China trade tensions. And given the state of the U.S. defense industrial base, providing substantial new military aid for Ukraine could diminish our preparedness for other contingencies, including in the Indo-Pacific.

There are some reasons to believe that Trump is leaning in this direction. The Financial Times reported that the United States, Europe, and Ukraine are considering a $100 billion weapons deal. In addition, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff stated that Ukraine could enjoy “Article 5-like” protections. And Trump himself suggested the U.S. will provide air cover “because nobody has stuff we have.” As for the funding, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remarked, “We are selling arms to the Europeans who are then selling them on to the Ukrainians, and President Trump is taking a 10 percent markup on the arms. So maybe that 10 percent will cover the cost of the air cover.”

Europe has acted with greater unity of purpose and action than many would have expected. Witness the remarkable display this week of seven European leaders descending on the White House as President Zelenskyy’s wingmen and wingwomen. But Europeans will need to bear an even greater burden going forward and that could cause pain at home. To start, it would be good if they would stop buying Russian fossil fuels. Notwithstanding sanctions on Russia, the EU imported nearly 22 billion euros of Russian energy products last year.

As I wrote last year alongside my colleague Charles Kupchan for Project Syndicate, “Trump is right to try to end the war and stop the death and destruction.” However, anything short of a sovereign, secure Ukraine “would embolden adversaries, split the Atlantic alliance, and constitute a grievous failure of US diplomacy. And it would all happen on Trump’s watch.”

No matter which course the president charts, he should understand that a swift endgame is unlikely. But a peace forged on Russian terms is unlikely to win Trump a Nobel Peace Prize: One doesn’t get the prize for capitulation. Just ask Neville Chamberlain. 

Let me know what you think about the prospects for peace in Ukraine and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.

Photo: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House, August 18, 2025. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

What I’m reading this week: 

• My colleague Inu Manak argued in the Financial Times that Trump isn’t creating a new global trading order. Instead, she says the United States is “simply denying itself the benefits of the system that already exists.”
• Jonathan Czin and John Culver make a convincing argument for Foreign Affairs that despite widespread military reforms and purges President Xi Jinping does not yet have the military force that he desires.
• Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. shares how he got his start as an economist as part of a new CFR series on careers in foreign policy. 
• Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wang sketch out the strategic, geopolitical risks posed by superintelligence.
• The Financial Times’ A. Anantha Lakshmi and Diana Mariska analyze why a generational commodities boom is not lifting Indonesia’s economy.