Trump’s phone chat with Putin may bring peace to Ukraine, but what then?
On Wednesday this week, US President Donald Trump sent shockwaves rippling across Europe when he announced that he’d shared a 90-minute phone call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, which he said has marked the start of a process of negotiating an end to the bitter Ukraine war.
On the one hand this claim is typical of Donald Trump’s dramatic rhetoric, and it might have been tempting to dismiss it as mere bluster and political showmanship, but the announcement has many world leaders rattled profoundly. The fear is that any form of quick fix solution might benefit both Trump and Putin politically, but would be a “dirty deal” that would cost Ukraine dearly.
What makes this response most remarkable is the fact that anyone actually thought there might have been an alternative way to end this catastrophic conflict. Like most wars, Ukraine was the culmination of multiple layers of poor diplomacy and the failure of aggrieved parties to talk, resulting in the protagonists being pushed to extreme and ill-judged actions. Thereafter comes grinding war and slaughter, until economic realities force the protagonists back to the negotiating table and the prospect of renewing almost exactly the same lucrative trade and economic contracts that were in place before warfare broke out.
In the case of Trump and Putin this will be a relatively simple and quick process. The Trump administration has already this week signalled the key elements of this new peace mandate – which will include keeping Ukraine out of NATO and handing back to Russia some of the land it has lost during the war – almost certainly the Russian Kursk region. In fact, in a lengthy interview with The Guardian on Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quite candid about his willingness to offer Russia a straight territory exchange if things do get to the negotiating table.
“We will swap one territory for another,” he said, but was unsure what exactly Russia might ask for. “I don’t know, we will see. But all our territories are important, there’s no priority.”
It was no coincidence that the Trump-Putin phone call came at exactly the same time that European defence ministers were meeting in Brussels to discuss the future security of the EU pact. The attendees also seemed rather shocked that the new US Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth – on his first international trip – had no hesitation in warning EU leaders that they could no longer rely on the USA underwriting European security and that Europe will have to take over funding and co-ordinating future support for Ukraine. He even went so far as to suggest that the 75-year-old NATO alliance, created after the second world war to protect western Europe from the Soviet bloc – may have to be reimagined.
Given that President Trump was voted in for a second term on the basis of putting “America first” and deterring China, it was always going to be optimistic that he would continue to support Europe to levels committed by the Obama and Biden administrations. Unfortunately for Europe and the UK, there has been a long, easy reliance on high levels of American aid, money and logistical support which has meant that spending has declined relentlessly in areas such as defence in particular. Few are under any illusion that the UK and the NATO pact are woefully inadequate, depleted and now largely incapable of defending against any threats to European sovereignties.
US Secretary Hegseth reiterated Donald Trump’s call for European nations to spend 5% of the GDP on defence – and for the UK that would be a doubling of its current level of spending of 2.33% of GDP. It’s a position that is actually supported by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who said during the European Political Community summit in Budapest last month: “It is time to shift to a wartime mindset … we will have to spend more … I’m clear about that.” However his stated aim of NATO countries achieving a spend of 3% of their GDP by 2030 falls a long way short of Mr Trump’s expectations. In an NBC interview last December Mr Trump said Washington would “absolutely” stay in NATO “if they [allies] pay their bills” – but he warned that the USA would have no trouble leaving the alliance if this wasn’t the case.
All of this posturing and bullish rhetoric is pointing towards an inevitable peace settlement that will undoubtedly benefit political leaders, arms manufacturers and global corporations, but will leave very little for those civilian populations who have been decimated – both physically and emotionally – by conflict and displacement. It’s all a very long way from the “peace dividend” that former US President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were so jubilant about in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end.
It was argued at the time that after a major conflict or threat to peace, the scaling down of military spending freed up more cash for social and development programmes and decreases in taxation. Not surprisingly, some commentators argued that the “peace dividend” was a myth created by governments to justify peremptory investment in defence corporations and arms manufacturers. The fact that governments seem to benefit curiously and substantially from cycles of warfare and subsequent peace, has even led to suspicions that some countries, not least the US, actively seeks engagement with conflict in order to boost not only its global influence but its actual wealth from cycles of conflict and peace.
It could well be argued that this is precisely what the US has done in Gaza, being both a substantial supplier of arms to Israel ($17.9 billion’s worth in 2024), whilst at the same time providing billions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians. With global demands for peace in Gaza reaching fever pitch, and the killing and atrocities reaching inhuman levels, the new US administration is now offering to ‘step in’ and resolve both the killing created by its supplied weaponry and the critical aid crisis in Gaza by converting Gaza into what Mr Trump has promised will be “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Needless to say the total rebuilding of what has now become a vast bomb site will fall to US and other global investors and corporations who will benefit from constructing a new peace in exactly the same manner as they benefited from promulgating the current war.
Back in the Ukraine theatre, all is set for exactly the same template – devastated landscapes will need rebuilding; towns, communities and infrastructures will need to be recreated, and a Russian economy obliterated by the cost of the war and global sanctions will need reviving. No doubt soon Bentleys will be on sale again in Moscow and queues will be forming at burger bars across the Federation; lucrative construction and defence contracts will be exchanged and there will even be state funding for elegant cemeteries to enable the good citizens of Ukraine and Russia to commemorate the thousands killed so needlessly. Oligarchs will go back to their day jobs and legislators will busy themselves building new utopias whilst little or nothing is done to address in any meaningful way the social and moral injustices that such philosophies create.
Pope St John Paul II often used to refer to such injustices as “structures of Sin”, because in a very fundamental way they conflicted profoundly with God’s intentions for the planet and for the good of humanity. In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliation and Penance (2nd Dec,1984) John Paul spoke of “a world shattered to its very foundations”, not least by what he described as “social sins”, which “by their very matter constitute a direct attack on one’s neighbor and more exactly, in the language of the Gospel, against one’s brother or sister.” In this context John Paul made very specific reference to legislators and leaders who “though in a position to do so, do not work diligently and wisely for the improvement and transformation of society according to the requirements and potential of the given historic moment.”
Seen from this perspective, the human inclination to accumulate personal wealth and power from the systemic exploitation of populations and the manipulation of conflicts for territorial or fiscal gain represents a profoundly unique and reprehensible category of “social sin” that in many ways is at the root of almost all human misery. Sadly, such deep human injustice is hardly likely to be resolved by appealing to the better nature of the protagonists, who clearly act with little consideration or concern for the moral or social consequences of their actions.
As Christians of course we must always speak out for God’s love and for the goodness of human nature, but profound cultural and structural changes are needed to surmount this current crisis of indifference and human exploitation.
One of primary claims of global protagonists is that they invariable claim to represent the voice of their citizens, when most often this isn’t the case at all. In his Message for the 2025 World Day of Peace on 1st of January this year Pope Francis began by speaking about the ancient roots of the word ‘jubilee’, which evokes the sound of the characteristic piercing horn of the ram or ram’s horn, the shofar, which in biblical tradition marks the beginning of some sacred Jewish festivals such as Rosh haShanah, the Jewish New Year, or Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
“This solemn proclamation was meant to echo throughout the land (cf. Lev 25:9) and to restore God’s justice in every aspect of life: in the use of the land, in the possession of goods and in relationships with others, above all the poor and the dispossessed,” said Pope Francis.
“The blowing of the horn reminded the entire people, rich and poor alike, that no one comes into this world doomed to oppression: all of us are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the same Father, born to live in freedom, in accordance with the Lord’s will (cf. Lev 25:17, 25, 43, 46, 55).”
Ever since he was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last July, Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that, at that moment, “it changed something within me” and he’s not been shy in saying that he was saved by divine intervention for what he at least sees as some very definite purpose: ‘I’d like to think God thinks I’m going to straighten out our country,” he told Fox News in a September 2024 interview.
Unfortunately Mr Trump has previously been a firm believer in the “Art of the Deal”, a philosophy that believes money is the ultimate tool with which to resolve any difference, and that everyone has their price. In this theory, peace-making is merely a cash flow problem, and not in any way an obligation to change moral or social behaviour patterns. Thus it’s highly likely that the Ukraine war, and even the Gaza genocide, will resolve quite quickly and the principle protagonists will then busy themselves making new fortunes out of the regeneration and renewal of what they destroyed.
Sadly, unless there’s a fundamental reordering of human ambitions and power structures it’s also very likely that such individuals will continue to lead us into further endless, futile and destructive conflicts. This makes it critically important that all of us who would prefer the world to run to God’s rather than mammon’s commandments continue to state categorically and repeatedly that such things are never being done in our name.
Joseph Kelly is a writer and public theologian