In May 2023 at a CNN Town Hall meeting, Donald Trump, already well advanced in his campaign to become president of the United States again, said: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want to stop them dying. And I’ll have that done – I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

He has repeated the claim often, saying it would be contingent on his sitting down with Vladimir Putin, the Russian aggressor, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. He also claimed that had he been president, and not Joe Biden, Putin would never have dared invade as he did in February 2022.

Notably, since he won the US election convincingly on Nov 5, the president-elect has offered no more detail on what the world can expect from his promised peace initiative.

There has been much talk from the two combatants, however. The Russians have repeatedly indicated that they are happy for talks, though very much on their terms – such as holding them in Slovakia, a rare EU country that, because of its dependence on Russian gas, continues to fawn on Putin and is regarded, as a consequence, as unreliable.

President Zelensky has indicated his belief that the only way Russian troops will be removed from the one-fifth of Ukrainian sovereign territory that they now occupy will be through diplomatic, and not military means. Ukraine continues to lose small amounts of territory to the invader, at an enormous cost in lives to Russia.

Lest that imply Russia is having a walkover in Ukraine, one must remember that its attempt to conquer the country started almost three years ago, and it is now relying heavily on North Korean cannon fodder for its meagre gains.

If Russia were the formidable military force it purports to be, and had inexhaustible manpower, the conflict would have ended soon after it began, and legions of mercenaries would have been unnecessary.

But the war is now in its 35th month; and even though territory has been lost, Ukraine has put up an astonishing fight. It is no surprise though, that it would like to end things.

An American estimate last October suggested that 57,500 Ukrainians had been killed and another 250,000 wounded since the war started, a gruesome rate of attrition and one now thought to be an underestimate.

The BBC estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 Russians have been killed and up to another 600,000 wounded.

We await details of Trump’s initiative to bring this horror to an end; unless, of course, it is delayed by reservations expressed to him and his team by some Nato allies. In particular, they could raise fears over how a settlement seen to favour the Russians would impact international relations, effectively rewarding Putin for his aggression.

Putin’s 25 years in power suggest that whenever he is allowed to get away with any outrage, he then seeks to push boundaries (literally and metaphorically) even further.

His apparent desire to re-conquer parts of the old Soviet Union provides obvious potential targets for him. Moreover, if America’s Nato allies believe their resolve not to hand Putin a victory is compromised by pressure from Trump, the coherence of the alliance, and indeed its whole future, could be threatened.

Pax Americana

Trump will hold the whip hand in Nato, and will feel his allies are in no position to give America, the organisation’s main funder, lectures on foreign policy. During his election campaign, as during his first term, Trump complained about the European contingent in Nato not paying its way.

He was not breaking new ground: President Barack Obama made the same complaint when in office. In fact, the conflict in Ukraine has prompted many Nato countries to increase defence spending to 2pc of their GDP – the long-agreed total – for the first time.

There are 31 members of Nato and this year 23 of them are expected to meet the 2pc target; only three did so in 2014.

It is the first time since the early 1990s that the alliance has managed to spend as much as 2pc of its GDP on defence. The eight members not meeting the target – which include Italy, Spain and Canada – are all at least spending more this year.

By contrast, the United States is actually spending less on defence this year than last, at 3.38 per cent of GDP: but the actual sum is enormous given the overall size of the country’s output.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the countries situated closest to Russia tend to spend the most. Estonia spends, in GDP percentage terms, even more than America at 3.43pc, while Poland, which has been very hawkish about the Russian threat (and has the history to prompt it to be so), is spending 4.12pc, up from 3.9pc in the previous year. British spending, by comparison, is up from 2.07pc of GDP in 2023 to 2.33pc last year.

But America, which in 2023 spent $916bn on defence – more than any other nation on earth – is the foundation on which Nato rests.

If the other members want to take Trump on once he is back in the White House, because there are aspects of his foreign policy they don’t like, they should remember there might be severe consequences for their security. Hence the mounting tension about what Trump may, or may not, seek to do.

Desperate Kremlin

Judging from reports from the front, there is widespread scepticism about Trump’s ability to end the war as swiftly as he hopes. To do so without signalling to Putin that his aggression has worked, to avoid undermining Nato and to limit the likelihood of further assaults, Putin would have to make some sort of concession.

There is room to do so, and President Zelensky has intimated there is scope for negotiation. So much of the Ukrainian question is complicated by history, but that complicated history might, paradoxically, allow room for manoeuvre.

The Russian Empire annexed Crimea, one of the sources of contention, in 1783. Before that, the region had been a khanate, technically independent but under the influence of the Ottoman Empire.

When the Soviet Union was formed, Crimea was incorporated into the bloc; but in February 1954, almost a year after Stalin’s death, the Russian Soviet Republic announced the transfer of the Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

It was said to be a “personal” gesture on the part of Nikita Khrushchev, then cementing his power in the Soviet Union, to a republic he admired.

Since both Russia and Ukraine answered to Moscow, it hardly mattered under whose jurisdiction Crimea came. But it was then after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that Ukraine became independent, taking Crimea with it – to the annoyance of many Russians who saw it as part of their cultural heritage.

A year later, Russia’s Supreme Soviet accused Khrushchev (who had died in 1971) of treason for having given it away. In 1997, Russia signed a treaty with Ukraine under which it accepted the latter’s borders, including Crimea. But that was before Putin and his regime. He openly decided to repudiate this understanding as part of his project to rebuild a Russia that included lands with a number of ethnic Russians. Ukraine was one such place.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, it annexed Crimea without any world power attempting to intervene. America did not wish to get involved, marking it down as a European problem.

The European Union, which for some years had sought to entice Ukraine to look westwards, rapidly took flight from the question. An entirely bogus referendum in Crimea showed 96pc of the voters supporting the annexation.

However, given the lack of historical ties the region has with Ukraine, it might be a subject for any diplomatic negotiations to focus upon.

There are other historical considerations. What is now Ukraine was once divided unequally between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by a Habsburg emperor from Vienna, and the Russian Empire, ruled by a Romanov from St Petersburg.

The Russians have been talking in recent weeks about the need to re-draw not just Ukraine’s borders with Russia, but also those of countries in Eastern Europe.

The borders are the product first of the settlement at Versailles in 1919 after the First World War, and then the carve-up of the region between the dying Roosevelt and the ruthless Stalin at Yalta in 1945 (Churchill, who was also present, had rings run around him).

The recent talk of redrawing those borders is ludicrous, and an effort at distraction by Russians whose position is weaker than they want the world to believe. Such a policy would aim to reduce Ukraine to a rump and to divide and rule by giving territory that was formerly part of Austria-Hungary, or the pre-1795 Polish lands, back to the inheritors of those states, along with scores of thousands of people who are ethnically Poles or Hungarians.

It is also an attempt to divide and rule by offering two potentially troublesome European countries, one of which – Poland – is notably hostile to Russia, something by way of an inducement.

It won’t work, and it suggests how desperate the Kremlin really is to stop the war it so recklessly started. One reason it won’t work is that the State Department in Washington is not so stupid as to have it on its list of options for Trump.

Also, he knows he can only serve one more term as president. Authorising a mess such as the wholesale redrawing of the borders of Eastern and Central Europe would almost certainly derail his presidency, with no way back.

The subject of borders can, and should, be looked at another way. One of the many aspects of modern Ukraine that Putin has refused to accept is its growing Europeanism.

There is evidence that many people in Ukraine with Russian ancestry are disgusted by what Putin has done and, like many of those with a more European heritage, look increasingly westwards towards societies that operate through capitalism and not kleptocracy, democracy and not tyranny, and personal liberty instead of repression.

None of those liberal attributes can serve a society run by Putin where control must be absolute for it to survive. The war he is fighting has the medieval aspect of being about territory, but it is also first and foremost about ideology.

Containing Putin

The next United States administration may seek to convene some sort of conference about Ukraine before too long. Exactly how long will depend on the willingness of Putin and President Zelensky to hold such talks, and on an agreement about a chairman, an agenda and a venue.

It may also depend on Russia, especially, not committing outrages that might make such talks impossible in the light of international opinion.

The recent shooting down of an Azerbaijani airliner is precisely the sort of act that seems to confirm Russia as an unscrupulous rogue state.

America, as the world’s leading power and having under the Biden administration supplied Ukraine with many of the means to fight its war, will clearly be central to any talks, whether they are formally suggested by Trump or not. And the likely next secretary of state, Marco Rubio, would seem an obvious chairman, even though Ursula von der Leyen might have pretensions to the role.

Other European leaders would want to weigh in, but most of the principals have overwhelming domestic difficulties distracting them.

In Germany, Olaf Scholz is on borrowed time. In France, President Macron has by a series of mistakes rendered his country almost ungovernable. In Britain we are witnessing the fastest decline in the standing of a newly elected government in living memory, its credibility shattered, and with a foreign secretary few in the diplomatic world feel able to take entirely seriously, and who has an impressive record of insulting Trump.

However, were a peace process to begin, the major Nato governments would use diplomatic channels to seek to influence the direction of the talks, and their emissaries would be present on the margins.

But Europe, for security reasons, has the most to lose from an outcome that emboldens Putin to make further territorial claims. If its representatives have not pressed the State Department to put this fact at the top of Trump’s list of bullet points, it is time they did.

Just before the pandemic, I attended a conference addressed by a leading intelligence expert who specialises in Russia. His fear then was not a further incursion into Ukraine, but Putin’s desire to secure a land corridor to the Baltic port city of Kaliningrad.

That city, which the Germans called Königsberg, was where Prussia crowned its kings from 1701, and was until the independence of the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) contiguous with the Soviet Union.

Now it is a Russian exclave with Poland to its south and Lithuania to its north and east. Russia can access it freely by air and by sea, but not by land. It has invested hugely in the city in recent years, not least in its naval base. It has the strategic significance of being Russia’s effective outpost in the European Union. It is, effectively, one of the leading reasons why Europe should not abandon Ukraine.

To do so would be to invite Putin to send an armoured column from the territory of his satrap and minion Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus through Lithuania (a shorter route than through Poland, which is, in any case, more heavily defended) to secure the land corridor he wants.

In territorial terms, it would be a far more minor offence than he has committed in Ukraine, but in political terms it would constitute an enormity.

It would be an attack on the sovereign territory of a Nato member and, for what it is worth, on a member of the EU. Yet if Putin sees his assault on Ukraine being rewarded by his being allowed to keep a large chunk of territory on which he has no real claim, what is to stop him from securing his access to Kaliningrad?

Would Trump, having presided over a Ukrainian settlement that gave Putin such confidence, endorse Nato retaliation against invading Russians (or North Koreans) in Lithuania?

After all, if he did not, where might things proceed? The annexation of the three Baltic states, with their minority ethnic Russian populations, is often talked up by Russian nationalists loyal to Putin. Could Trump countenance that?

Such a thought is not scaremongering, but a legitimate prospect if Putin’s Ukrainian adventure is rewarded. It is all the more reason why peace talks must be embarked upon with caution and underpinned by a clear sense of justice.

In an ideal world, they would be preceded by further increases in defence spending across Nato’s members.

Our own veterans minister, Alistair Carns, said a month ago that Britain’s diminished Army would, if it suffered a casualty rate similar to the Russians, be “expended” in six to 12 months.

When it comes to public spending we, like many other Nato members, have chosen welfare over warfare, last year’s modest increase in spending notwithstanding.

Not only is the world too dangerous a place for this to go on, but we also need to realise that an immediate increase in defence spending would, as well as making us more secure, give us a louder voice in any peace talks, and enable us to try to ensure that Nato’s influence and future are protected by keeping the alliance united, and avoiding outright and unnecessary capitulation to Putin.

Whatever the carrot may be in such talks, the stick is not just the threat of armed force. The sanctions regime on Putin and his cronies has been entirely inadequate. The standard of living for ordinary Russians may well have dipped because of his aggression, but the kleptocratic elite is doing as well as ever.

It was recently reported that three Danish companies have bought Russian fish worth millions from the oligarch Vitaly Orlov: the taxes levied on such a sale means an estimated 10pc to 20pc of the sums paid end up buying arms.

A so-called shadow fleet of 79 ships is also trafficking Russian oil and other energy products to foreign customers. By keeping the most powerful Russians rich and providing the financial means to buy munitions, the businesses that do this trade keep Putin in power and his friends happy, and allow the war to continue.

The State Department, and indeed many Republicans in Congress, will be alert to all these dangers: not least the risk of the incoming administration alienating nations who are supposedly America’s best friends.

Since Trump is not renowned for observing the niceties of his position, it may well be a hopeful sign that he has played down his earlier rhetoric about an instant solution to the Ukraine problem and become more discreet, by his standards.

The prime function of European diplomats these days is to ensure that their friends in the State Department keep the president-elect in such a sensible frame of mind.

Only a madman could want the war in Ukraine to continue. But only a fool could want it to end by America, and by default the rest of Nato, coercing President Zelensky to get on his knees before Putin.

The aggression of February 2022 and the succeeding three years remains unjust, unwarranted and unforgivable. That should be a simple message for Trump the Peacemaker to understand; as should be the point that making peace and running up the white flag are seldom the same thing.

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