Can Zelensky negotiate a peace deal and stay in power?

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in Brussels last week. Picture: AFP

With the Trump administration using all its powers to force President Volodymyr Zelensky to the negotiating table, the Ukrainian leader faces the toughest dilemma of his political life.

Feted as a hero in war, he must now decide how far to go in seeking a solution with Vladimir Putin, a man he despises and does not trust.

Last week ended with upbeat statements from US officials about Mr Zelensky’s apparent change of heart on peace talks. The change had, the US envoy Keith Kellogg said, been brought about by cutting off vital US intelligence, “sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose”.

But Mr Zelensky’s shift does not equal a surrender of his core values when it comes to ending the war. There has been a distinct “sorry-but-not-sorry” feeling about his fence-mending with US President Donald Trump. “Ukrainians truly want peace but not at the cost of giving up Ukraine,” Mr Zelensky wrote to the White House last week. “The real question for any negotiations is whether Russia is capable of giving up the war.”

His emphasis on Mr Putin is not just a tactic to limit his own concessions but derives from an implacable distrust of the Russian.

In part, the Ukrainian president is simply giving voice to his nation’s trauma, involving a scale of loss and hatred for the invader that makes it hard for him to agree to anything that looks like a muddled compromise, let alone defeat. But by expressing this sense of national grievance, even some allies who admire Mr Zelensky believe his political survival could be at stake.

Last autumn a British minister described Mr Zelensky to me as “an obstacle to peace”. That such a thing was said on background, rather than for quotation, and is not an isolated opinion in European capitals, speaks to the gap between public pronouncements and private thoughts about the war.

While the minister praised him as a peerless war leader, the issue was that Mr Zelensky had refused to engage diplomatically with the Russians since talks collapsed several weeks into the war.

Another British official, while rejecting the idea that Mr Zelensky was incapable of making peace with Putin, spoke to me about the effects of more than three years of brutal conflict. “He must be so profoundly exhausted,” the Russia specialist said. “He’s in danger of making bad decisions.”

Given the Ukrainian president’s personal popularity in western countries, and the widespread loathing of Mr Putin expressed in opinion polls, these doubts about Mr Zelensky tend to be expressed sotto voce and behind closed doors. Evidently though, Mr Trump shared such views and brought them spectacularly into the open during their disastrous meeting in the Oval Office.

Some of Mr Trump’s Maga allies have suggested that Mr Zelensky should go, also a Russian demand, or called for fresh elections in Ukraine.

By posting on social media that “none of us wants an endless war”, saying he was ready to sign the minerals deal with the US, and then following up with his letter to the president, Mr Zelensky has kept any immediate threat at bay.

But Mr Trump’s frequently shifting positions mean that the leadership in Kyiv can hardly relax. On Friday, perhaps mindful of the need to appear more even handed, Mr Trump scolded Russia for its relentless “pounding” of Ukraine, and threatened further trade and banking sanctions, but then later said: “It’s harder for me to deal with Ukraine than with Russia.” Underlying this diplomatic back and forth are two hard realities: the possibility of Russia and Ukraine agreeing when serious negotiations begin remains small; and Mr Zelensky may be banking on failure because he cannot agree to anything that looks like capitulation.

Hemmed in militarily and diplomatically, he has learnt the value of making offers that he will not be required to honour. A recent example was saying that he would step down as president in return for Ukrainian membership of NATO as part of a peace deal, something he knows is about as likely as Mr Putin waking up tomorrow and ordering all his troops to go home.

Mr Zelensky has also mastered the art of suggesting to Russia things that they are loathe to do such as agreeing to the release of all remaining prisoners or halting attacks on his country’s infrastructure. By saying that such steps will show whether Mr Putin is serious about peace, he hopes to keep the initiative as pressure from Mr Trump increases. So far, these manoeuvres have keptMr Zelensky safe at home. His defiant attitude towards the US president has sent him back up in the opinion polls.

For Mr Zelensky the restriction on American intelligence sharing will hurt, particularly as operations in the Kursk salient, launched by the Ukrainians last August, are not going well.

The risks are there that a big reverse on the battlefield will bring underlying political divisions in Ukraine into the open, triggering more open defiance of Mr Zelensky and his policies. But if his army can hold the line while the talking goes on, and Ukrainians stomach rising casualties from missile strikes as American weapon supplies taper, he will hope to expose Russian demands that are too great even for Mr Trump to accept.

And if the war continues, perhaps with the American taps turned on again out of frustration with Mr Putin, what would the objective be? Hope is not a strategy, as the US vice-president, JD Vance, is fond of saying. But for Mr Zelensky, fearing ignominy if he signs a capitulation, the last remaining chance is that rising losses and economic difficulties will eventually undercut Mr Putin’s negotiating position.

THE SUNDAY TIMES