Trump gets his deal, but what does Zelensky get in return?

After two months on tenterhooks following the bust-up in the Oval Office, President Zelensky’s team will have sighed with relief as US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, announced the reconstruction and investment deal with Kyiv.

The good news for Zelensky is that this deal is vastly less humiliating for Ukraine than what he refused to sign in February, leading to Donald Trump’s harsh comment: “You don’t have the cards.”

The idea that past US military aid was a “debt” owed by Ukraine has been dropped, as have terms that would contradict Ukraine’s obligations to its EU partners.

But future US involvement in reconstruction implies peace first. Who is going to pour cash into new plants or operations when Shahed drones are buzzing overhead? So how do we get there? Nothing about security guarantees for Kyiv has been announced.

Even when celebrating the minerals deal, Donald Trump emphasised: “This was Biden’s war… I’m trying to end it.” Still blaming his predecessor, not Putin, for the war, means Trump still dangles hopes of a deal before the Russians.

Lying in a prison hospital bed in his native Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, the ex-governor of Ukraine’s embattled port, Odesa, could be forgiven for ruefully remembering his own conflict with Russia in 2008. Like Zelensky, Saakashvili had put his hopes for Georgia’s security in the deterrent effect of a US commitment to back his country’s eventual entry into Nato. But when the crisis came, France’s then-president Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Tbilisi to tell Saakashvili to sign up for a humiliating ceasefire deal because, as he put it, “The Americans aren’t coming to save you.”

Putin got de facto control of two regions of Georgia. The country refused to recognise its loss, but Saakashvili’s presidency was fatally tarnished and his successors have imprisoned him and flirted with Russia while drifting away from the West.

This is an ominous precedent for Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has already conceded Crimea to Russia. What of Russian-occupied southeast Ukraine as a price for peace and US economic aid? Already, radical nationalists – not least in the military – are denouncing any concessions to Russia and threatening politicians who agree to them.

Many of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are backing extensive secondary sanctions designed to kill off Russia’s energy and natural resources exports if Putin doesn’t accept a deal that is hard for Ukrainians to swallow. Tightening economic pressure on the Kremlin might push Putin into making concessions. Certainly, he reacted to Trump’s initial soft-ball approach since January by intensifying his bombardments of Ukraine’s cities and making harsh demands for Ukraine to concede territory (not only Crimea) and accept disarmament in rump Ukraine.

A false dawn of hopes for renewed US support for Ukraine could turn out to be a body blow to its forces’ morale, but Russian troops, too, must be wondering whether their supreme commander is quite the master of the battlefield and diplomacy that pro-Putin media have been trumpeting since Trump’s return to the White House.

Many analysts emphasise that the current war is not so much postmodern as a throwback to the slug-fest of the First World War. Despite Russia’s hyper-sonic missiles and each side’s deployment of drones over the fighting below, in practice, today’s frontlines move slowly, if at all.

Back in the spring of 1918, the Germans had the initiative and Field Marshal Haig admitted his troops were fighting “with their backs to the wall”, but six months later it was German morale that collapsed as losses mounted without an end to the war in sight.

More war is the only certainty at the moment. But how much more war is either side willing to endure? This conflict remains a mind game as much as a ground game. Donald Trump is still the wild card.