I doubt this peace deal will work, though I really hope it will.
Some way must be found to end this stupid, pointless war, which began long before most people in the West noticed it and has now lasted 11 years.
It has created graveyards which can be seen from space. It has demolished much of Ukraine. Yet if president Zelensky agrees to these terms, he will not be garlanded with flowers and called ‘Volodymyr the Peacemaker’. He will be accused of ‘capitulation’ (a wild exaggeration). He will swiftly fall from office. He might even be driven out by an ultra-nationalist putsch like the one which overthrew another Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.
Very strong nationalist forces in Ukraine do not want peace on such terms. Nobody wants to take the blame for such a defeat.
This is always the problem with modern wars. Rulers tell their peoples for years that they are angels and that their foes are demons. Then they have to sit down with those fiends and make peace with them.
This problem is one of the reasons why the First World War lasted two years longer than it needed to, and why this one may not stop for years. Mind you, it is a worse deal than Kiev could once have had when the war was in its infancy. If they had agreed to the peace terms Mr Zelensky negotiated in 2019, we’d all be a lot better off. But the militants called that deal a capitulation, too – and killed it.
To me, the great paradox is this – a Russia-hating faction in Washington DC sought this war for years, goading the Kremlin with westward expansion of Nato.
With matching stupidity, Putin gave into the provocation and mounted his cruel, savage and illegal invasion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska visit the Holodomor Genocide complex of the National Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 22, 2025
Vladimir Putin delivers a speech at an operational meeting with permanent members of the Russian Security Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on November 21, 2025.
This gave the American Russia hawks what they wanted. Because Ukraine was not a member of Nato, they could have a shooting war with Moscow, in Europe, that would not lead to a nuclear confrontation.
No Western troops took part, so the miseries of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were avoided. It was all done by sending money and weapons, and sharing intelligence.
They presumably hoped that this would bring down Putin. But it didn’t.
So now America, as so often, is bored with a war it once desired and now seeks to get out of it.
You might think the leaders of Europe would welcome the chance to bring it to an end, especially as it is costing them so much and gaining them nothing. It wasn’t even their idea.
But no, they want it to go on, as they are all in the grip of a strange fantasy. They claim to think that Russia – broke, rusty, decrepit and even more corrupt than Ukraine – is poised to sweep across the Continent and wash its tank tracks at Calais.
Well, Putin has yet to take the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, ten miles from Russia’s border.
And the nations of Europe together already spend roughly three times as much as Russia does on defence.
Maybe they are worrying too much.
