Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, efforts to secure either a temporary ceasefire or a permanent peace deal have resolutely failed. Endless rounds of talks in Belarus, Turkey, Abu Dhabi and Geneva have all proved futile. To Nigel Gould-Davies, it’s obvious why. A former British diplomat, he was head of economics at the Foreign Office in Moscow before his stint as the UK’s ambassador to Belarus. Today, he is senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Gould-Davies tells me that there are established norms for negotiating during military conflicts. Diplomats look for the interests, needs and red lines that each side articulates, in pursuit of the elusive “win set”.
“A peace agreement is only possible when both sides believe that it better serves their interests to end the fighting than to continue,” he says. “You have to find that overlap in the Venn diagram that leads to a defined set of conditions which, despite involving painful compromises, is ultimately judged to better serve each side than continuing to fight.
“The problem with this situation is that Russia has no interest in ending the war,” he says. Tricky to find common ground, then.
It is through this lens that we should view all Russia-Ukraine talks since Trump’s return to the presidency, Gould-Davies suggests. “They have not really been negotiations,” but “parallel efforts by Russia and Ukraine to persuade the White House it’s the other side’s fault” that a peace agreement (and, perhaps more importantly to Trump, that elusive Nobel peace prize) had failed to materialise.
That said, the respective red lines aren’t difficult to identify. Ukraine has time and again said it is willing to accept an unconditional ceasefire. “Russia, by contrast, has repeatedly said publicly that it is not interested in a ceasefire,” says Gould-Davies, only in a full and final end to the war that, in Russian terms, means “decisive superiority and dominance over a severely weakened Ukraine”.
That’s an outcome Ukraine can’t, and won’t, sign up for.
The ‘non-standard president’
This is already a headache for UK, European and American diplomats, who most recently met in Miami at the end of last week. But there’s also the added Trump-shaped impediment to grapple with; what Gould-Davies diplomatically describes as the challenge of having “a non-standard president” in the White House. When Trump unilaterally declared an energy ceasefire, Gould-Davies says, it had “no basis whatsoever in reality”. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv was aware. “He simply made it up … a product of a fantasy.”
The botched digital diplomacy aside, Trump’s interests also don’t appear aligned with Ukraine or traditional US allies. “[Trump’s] natural centre of gravity is to favour Russia,” says Gould-Davies, citing restrictions on US weapons supplies and past pauses in intelligence sharing. Yesterday, Zelenskyy accused Trump of restricting Ukrainian access to “military-grade” Starlink services, hampering Ukrainian drone strike missions and air defences.
Granted, Trump has at times sided with the Ukrainian president: sanctioning Russian oil companies and helping Ukraine target Russian energy infrastructure. But for all Trump’s “lurching”, says Gould-Davies, his theory of ending the war involves concessions to Russia and coercion of Ukraine.
The price of a deal
After a period of relative quiet from Trump on the Russia-Ukraine front, this week Trump’s attention returned. With Americans facing soaring energy costs, he announced a plan to import Russian diesel in the hope of bringing down pump prices, much to the dismay not just of European leaders but a bipartisan group of US senators, too.
Leave aside, for a second, suggestions that these imports could be illegal under American law and that quantities being discussed are seemingly too small to actually affect prices, even if the fuel could reach the US ahead of next month’s midterms, as Trump hopes.
In some diplomatic circles, there are concerns that the diesel deal “is only the visible tip of the iceberg”, says Gould-Davies, with the White House privately pivoting towards a “much more substantial” pro-Russia tilt.
Gould-Davies suspects that Trump could be, via Russia, seeking to get Iran to ease the blockade on the strait of Hormuz, in the hope of actually bringing down fuel prices before American voters head to the polls. Putin’s quid pro quo for brokering these efforts, Gould-Davies says, “could be an easing of America’s sanctions on Russia and an ending to America’s support for Ukraine”.
It’s just a theory, he caveats, “but join the dots and it logically makes sense”.
Either way, for diplomats it’s just further proof that Trump’s mercurial methods are more a hindrance than help.
The quiet work behind the scenes
Nonetheless, diplomatic back channels remain operational: secret, closed-door meetings and off-the-record communications between all sides. Not that Gould-Davies thinks they’re worth the effort. “There is a degree of collective delusion here,” he says: “A hope that Russia can somehow be persuaded” to change course, for which “there is literally no evidence for that whatsoever”. He worries that these informal discussions could even be “actively unhelpful, because they perpetuate the illusion that peace may be around the corner”.
And, while Europe might traditionally have focused its diplomatic efforts in hostile territory, attention has now turned towards the US itself. There’s still hope that Trump’s whispers might pay further dividends. As Gould-Davies puts it, this “Avengers assemble” approach has seen European leaders and diplomats descend on Washington when Trump’s veered too far off course. For all the tumult, he says, this has proved effective in averting “the nightmare scenario” of Trump binning off America’s old transatlantic partners for good.
But as fans of Netflix’s The Diplomat will know, even diplomacy between allies isn’t plain sailing. “Right now even ‘the White House’ is an abstraction,” says Gould-Davies. “It consists of many different players, plenty of whom have different views privately from President Trump.” Take John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, who visited Moscow this summer. There is “reliable speculation”, says Gould-Davies, that he hoped to “warn Russia against escalation into Europe”. It’s a totally different note to those currently being struck by Trump.
“There are people in positions of power and influence still in this administration who understand the problem of Russia in the right way,” says Gould-Davies. With that in mind, western diplomats will continue to try to shift the balance of influences within the White House, but they’re reliant on what he labels a White House Kremlinology – “trying to understand the different views and moods of those around Trump and who will be the last person to whisper in his ear.”
Ukrainian rescuers work at the site of a Russian strike on a residential building in Kharkiv. Photograph: Sergey Kozlov/EPA
