Three visions of starting peace talks for Ukraine are clashing in the public sphere. For Europeans, peace is the desired outcome of a process with well-defined stages (like an elevator going from the lowest floor - war, to the highest - peace); Russians, on the other hand, see peace as a transitional moment in a dynamic where the balance of power is constantly changing (like a roundabout that several participants can enter at the same time, before heading either in the same direction or in opposite directions); Finally, the Trump administration, after initially advocating for an unattainable "deal", is now opting for a "duel", namely direct negotiations between the two heads of state, which, in its opinion, should result in a new deal.
Only the European method can guarantee lasting peace in the country and on the continent. This is what Cyril Brett, a geopolitician and lecturer at the Paris Institute of Political Studies Sciences Po, writes in an article for the online publication The Conversation.
The stalled talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul last week ran into a classic obstacle: the ceasefire. For Europeans and Ukrainians, the ceasefire is a prerequisite for negotiations. For the Russians, on the contrary, a ceasefire should be part of the negotiations.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, hostilities and negotiations are not mutually exclusive: they are taking place in parallel, as the head of the Russian delegation in Istanbul, Vladimir Medinsky, recalled, referring - without caring about the historical truth - to the figure of Napoleon I, who is nevertheless hated in Russia. This stumbling block is far from accidental or insignificant: it is a key issue for the progress of the negotiations in Ukraine and a problem that should attract the attention of Ukrainians, Europeans... and Americans.
At this beginning of the negotiations, what is at stake is not only the balance of power (war or negotiations/war and negotiations), but also the vision of peace and the method of achieving it.
The Russian (and before them, the Soviet) state authorities have developed a specific concept of war, peace and the process leading from conflict to the cessation of military operations. While for Europeans the peace process is like a constant climb - up a staircase or an elevator - for Russians the relationship between war and peace is much more permeable. In their opinion, peace negotiations are not like a very steep staircase, but rather like a crossroads or a roundabout, where a reorientation between war and peace is possible at any moment.
As for Trump's United States, which initially promised to reach an agreement within 24 hours, it seems to have abandoned the European paradigm of a gradual march towards peace. But do they accept the Russian vision of peace processes? In Trump's book "The Art of the Deal" what method of peace negotiations is proposed?
The peace process according to Europeans: an elevator that can be unblocked
Europeans have built a gradual and linear vision of the peace process. They borrowed it from the practice of the great negotiations that ended the continental and global conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries. And they theorized this, notably through Kant, for whom war is the expression of a dispute through physical violence, while peace is the resolution of that dispute through treaty. They therefore believe that peace is the result of a long upward process that begins at the bottom (the armed conflict) and reaches the top (the peace treaty).
The path to peace is undoubtedly full of pitfalls, collisions, and pitfalls - avoiding them is the aim of the articles in Kant's project for perpetual peace. This route passes through defined and even codified stages: a ceasefire agreement; a freezing of the front line; an armistice agreement; diplomatic negotiations; the drafting of a peace treaty; then signature, ratification, and entry into force. This path to peace is the path historically outlined by the Congress of Vienna (1815) and continued in particular by the Peace Conference that led to the signing of the Treaties of Versailles (1919), Sèvres (1920) and Trianon (1921).
This paradigm of peace is deeply binary and contractual: either the enemies end up in the "hell of war" (Michael Walzer, paraphrasing General Sherman), or they conclude a true peace that legally settles all disputes in order to organize coexistence and ultimately cooperation between the enemies.
That is why for Europeans a ceasefire is a necessary condition for negotiations on Ukraine. For European governments the very profession of diplomacy is at stake: the whole difficulty lies in going through all the stages. And mutual concessions are intended to facilitate the process: prisoner exchanges, air bans, cessation of hostilities at sea, withdrawal of heavy artillery, control of the front line, security measures, prohibition of strikes on infrastructure, etc.
All these discussions are essential because they allow us to test the good faith of the adversary and make him a partner in the discussion. The art of diplomacy is to transfer the dispute from its military form to its legal form. In short, the "European" peace process is like an elevator blocked by war: diplomats lock themselves in it in order to raise their general staff, governments and public opinion up the stairs to peace. The elevator shaft has only one direction, although the cabin can remain permanently stuck on the first floor or even descend to the basement of war. Since war is an unresolved dispute, a peace treaty ends it.
Peace negotiations - a set of roundabouts, always open to Russia
Last week in Istanbul, the Russians again took a different approach to peace negotiations: a ceasefire is a matter of negotiation, not a prerequisite for negotiations. In a broader sense, the fighting with Ukraine is just one part of a multifaceted relationship of forces that has other expressions, such as "hybrid war", "asymmetric" operations, a struggle for influence, and so on.
Peace itself can express the balance of power - this is what Kant would call a simple truce. The concept of war and peace that emerges here is no longer binary: war and peace are not mutually exclusive, but constantly intertwined. This is the idea propagated by the famous - at least in Russia - appendix given by Tolstoy to his novel "War and Peace".
By comparing war and peace to phases of the same historical-biological process, Tolstoy rejects all contractual and rationalist philosophies of international relations in an indictment that characterizes Russian strategic thought: the enemy is not an adversary who can become a party to a future treaty, namely the peace treaty. This is the force with which the balance of power is constant, passing through phases of cooperation and phases of tension. He has a decidedly vitalist approach to peace processes... and the spirals of war.
The heaven of ideas is clearly far from the land of conflict, and it is clear that the Russian presidency is seeking to gain time, territory, and advantage by including a ceasefire on the agenda of negotiations. But we must also consider the vision of conflict and peace processes that is regularly expressed in Russian thought. Alliances are necessarily temporary and precarious, like those that brought together Napoleon and Alexander I in the "Tilsit Peace" (1807), Stalin and the allies against Nazi Germany (from 1941), or the Russian Federation and NATO in the 2000s in the form of the NATO-Russia Council. These alliances are reversible, as shown, for example, by the rapprochement with the People's Republic of China in the 1990s after three decades of local, regional, and even global confrontations.
The traditional Russian vacillation between the Westernization of Berdyaev, the Eurasianism of Chaadaev and Dugin, and the Sino-Russian alliance advocated by the current nationalist ideologist Nikolai Starikov, expresses a strategic and conceptual fluidity about the nature of alliances that are in a permanent configuration. Wars never end definitively with peace, as is evident from the very dynamics of the Cold War during the USSR and the "frozen conflicts" after its collapse: coexistence and tension, cooperation and confrontation, combine in a changing balance of power.
The Cold War organized a real but not direct military confrontation with the West: peripheral fronts, the use of intermediaries, subversion, etc. are methods of waging war in peacetime. As for the frozen conflicts (which, according to Florent Parmentier, should be described as rotten) in Moldova, Georgia, etc., they are due to the establishment of a real but diffuse conflict at the military level, but also at the political, ethnic, linguistic, etc.
According to this concept, conflicts are not only military in nature: relations with the West are played out not only on the Ukrainian battlefields, but also in the UN Security Council, in the media, in Africa, in the Orthodox cathedrals of the Balkans, in Syria... Therefore, the peace talks in Istanbul should be seen only as one of the evolving expressions of a continuing and lasting balance of power.
Let us recall that Vladimir Putin delivered his most offensive speech against Europe and NATO in 2007 in Munich, in the midst of a decade of strategic partnership with them within the framework of the Russia-NATO Council and the G8. According to this vision, peace negotiations do not inherently contradict the logic of war, and a ceasefire is a matter of balance of power. Peace negotiations are not simply an elevator shaft, but one of the roundabouts of international relations, where enemies come together for a while, then separate and move again along different, even opposing, trajectories.
Two paradigms of peace are clearly opposed here. If he wants to succeed, President Trump II must now choose his own paradigm, especially with regard to the preliminary obstacle to a ceasefire.
The New World Order: "The Art of the Deal" against "The Art of War"
While deploying his vision of "peace in 24 hours" in Ukraine, the American candidate and subsequently president always seemed to prefer a transactional approach to the conflict, quite close in brief to the European paradigm. In his campaign speeches, Trump claimed that peace in Ukraine was easy to achieve because it would be the result of mutual concessions by opponents under pressure from Washington, in order to obtain significant benefits.
The main mechanism of this vision of negotiations is to identify the specific interests of each side and force it to accept these basic interests. The "deal" with Ukraine, proposed by the mediator Trump, is less a peace treaty than a simple truce. It is a barter. The Ukrainians would withdraw from territories (Crimea and the eastern regions) in exchange for an end to the invasion. The Russians, in turn, would receive economic benefits in exchange for refusing to expand Russia to include all of Ukraine. And in this 24-hour peace, the ceasefire had to come very quickly to clear the way for deals.
For Russia, Trump wanted to present the end of hostilities as more advantageous than continuing the fighting. The huge concessions granted to Moscow even before the negotiations began had only one goal: to change the price-benefit ratio for the Russian side. The suspension of the export of American military equipment to Ukraine, the suspension of the provision of military intelligence to it, the open offer to lift sanctions against Russia, the settlement of Ukraine's fate between the superpowers without the participation of Kiev, etc.: all these processes were aimed at making peace attractive in the eyes of the Russian presidency, which was considered blocked in its military efforts. In short, Donald Trump wanted to offer the "peace dividend" to Russia to force it to abandon its belligerent stance, which Moscow considered profitable.
Conversely, with regard to Ukraine, the American president wanted to discourage the continuation of the war by making it costly - in human, political and economic terms. All the harassment, humiliation, unequal rare earth contracts, etc., imposed on Ukraine were intended to signal the end of the "American blank check" for the Ukrainian war effort. It was as if the country had fallen victim to a moral hazard that would lead it to "total war" because it would not be able to bear the real costs of the war due to American subsidies.
This transactional model of the peace process is based on a change in the calculation of costs and benefits for the enemies. If the expected profit from war is less than the profit promised by peace, then the enemies can become partners in negotiations and make peace.
In this vision, peace is neither at the top of an elevator shaft nor at one of the temporary exits of a roundabout; it is the result of economic calculation. Hence the need to exclude professional diplomats from the process: they are regularly accused by the White House of bureaucratizing international relations in general and the peace process in Ukraine in particular. Hence the need to quickly cease hostilities in order to stabilize the calculations of each of the enemies.
In fact, if Russia had continued to gain ground during the negotiations, the cost/benefit ratio of peace would have changed for Moscow. As we see, the Ukrainian "deal" for Trump is not just a contract. It is pure barter trade, with all the risks that this entails.
The peace "treaty", inspired by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, goes beyond the dispute by expressing it in legal form. The "barter" organizes a deal that reflects the balance of military power. It can therefore be called into question when the balance of power changes structurally. The limitations of this vision are becoming apparent to its own supporters: Donald Trump is returning to the "Western" vision of the peace process, calling for direct negotiations between the two heads of state.
In short, given the impossibility of concluding a "deal", we seem to be heading for a "duel" where the bosses of the opposing camps settle their differences. From this perspective, the peace negotiations are only a matter of preparation for the two leaders: the intense and rapid meeting between the "strong men" would resolve the situation for the entire continent.
Peace would not ride the European elevator, nor would it travel along the Russian roundabout; it would arise, like a spark, from direct friction between "great men".
Different GPSs
Forewarned is armed. In the long-term power struggle with Russia, the United States cannot rely on a common grammar of international relations.
The elevator can only go up. The roundabout leads to multiple destinations. As for the duel followed by a deal, in it the fragility of power relations is temporarily stabilized by the will of the strong men.
What the countries lack today is a common path for negotiations; but their respective GPS devices are not tuned to the same algorithms.