His advisers might disagree, but Donald Trump could reap rewards from another summit with Vladimir Putin

The leaders’ meeting in Helsinki was disastrous, but a more focused conference, which sought to agree a plan for peace in Ukraine, might suit all parties – not least the Ukrainians, as Alexei Sobchenko explains

Putin and Trump both need to bolster domestic support (Getty)

President Trump finds himself under intense pressure at home, as allegations intensify over the extent to which his officials seek to prevent him from making disastrous policy decisions.

Many examples have been given. Among them might be included the president’s performance at his recent summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, which managed to achieve something unfathomable: he united Democratic and Republican elites against his Russian policy.

Given his previously positive words about President Putin, it is an irony that the announcement of a possible follow-up summit between the two leaders was received among Washington advocates of US-Russian rapprochement with horror. Dimitri Simes, a leading proponent of improving relations with Russia and head of the America-based Centre for the National Interest said: “If he wants to create new difficulties in US-Russia relations… if he wants to have another setback in the relations and a new round of sanctions, then the summit is a way to go. Absolutely a bad idea.”

His like-minded namesake in the Carnegie Moscow Centre, Dmitri Trenin, also expressed regret at the way the summit in Helsinki unfolded: “Perhaps the safest approach for Russia in its relations with the United States would have been strategic patience,” he noted. “But,” he went on, “that’s not how things turned out. The active approach prevailed. Right when relations between the Kremlin and the White House were seeing a turn towards dialogue and occasional cooperation, the Hybrid War between the United States and Russia has reached a new level.” Simes and Trenin’s forebodings quickly materialised: soon after the Helsinki summit and way before the next one, the Trump administration (apparently against the president’s inclinations) introduced new sanctions against Russia.

Trump’s advisers are also concerned about a future summit, but for very different reasons. What national security adviser John Bolton defined as “the Russia witch hunt” would surely get more vicious as a consequence of a further meeting, and the president’s closest allies naturally want to protect their boss from a disaster that could exceed Helsinki. As things stand, the next Trump-Putin summit has been postponed until “after the first of the year”.

I doubt that the passage of a few months will create a more mellow mood in Washington DC. Indeed, as things stand, each new week seems to bring with a new revelation or a new criticism of the president. It is quite plausible that by the time that 2019 comes around, the Russian issue might have unite everybody who has a reason not to be happy with President Trump.

As far as it can be judged it appears that Trump made his decision to invite Putin to America on a whim, as a knee-jerk reaction to the sharp criticism of the Helsinki summit. If my presumption on that score is correct, the danger is that – just as in Helsinki – Trump has no particular agenda for his next meeting with Putin. That would certainly help to ensure another disastrous conference.

However, I have a suggestion how to fill the void. In the event that the summit takes places, Trump should use the opportunity explicitly to seek a resolution to the Russo-Ukrainian war, the second largest war in Europe since 1945.

Back in 2014, when the war started with the annexation of Crimea and creation of two self-proclaimed separatist entities in the Ukrainian region of Donbas, President Obama’s response was rather meek. He was too busy with the Middle East, where, contrary to his expectations, the Arab Spring evolved into Isis’s astonishing (if, in the end, temporary) march to power across Syria and Iraq. Though US-Russian relations at the time did not look good; Obama seemed not to be eager to make them worse.

As a result, he refused to provide Ukraine with the weapons it required and, basically, outsourced a solution to the Donbas conflict to France and Germany. The latter two created the Minsk negotiation process, and did what the Europeans are the best at doing: they procrastinated. This, indeed, is exactly what Putin was counting on. He made pledges he didn’t intend to keep as the war rumbled on taking thousands of Ukrainian lives. Meanwhile, the spurt of Russian nationalism generated by the so-called Russian Spring of 2014 boosted Putin’s domestic popularity.

Four years on, Putin took the opportunity of the Helsinki summit to suggest all of a sudden that the conflict could be resolved by having a referendum regarding the territories controlled by the separatists. We don’t know the details of his proposal, but we do know that earlier this year, Ambassador Kurt Volker, US special representative for Ukraine, outlined a plan for settling this conflict.

It included the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces (from non-NATO countries), and an international police and administration for the separatist controlled territories. “What we have proposed,” said Volker, “is for a UN mandated peacekeeping force to go in and replace Russian forces and the separatist entities and create a secure space for a period of time where you can have local elections, where amnesty would be granted, where special status is granted.”

One imagines that President Putin’s plan is quite different from the one Ambassador Volker has proposed, but I am almost certain that it also contains the words “local elections” and “special status”. In other words, it offers an opportunity to start discussion on this complex issue.

There is one important caveat, however. The destiny of Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukrainians. Along with Putin, therefore, President Trump should also invite Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Washington. The benefits all three could derive from a trilateral Camp David-style meeting are much greater than anything with Putin and Trump could achieve alone.

Most obviously, if such a conference proved successful, Trump could claim credit for stopping the only ongoing war in Europe – maybe its last? It would definitely make him look better against the backdrop of his predecessor’s inactivity on this issue.

He would also make himself look good in the context of his favourite frenemies, France and Germany, and their fruitless efforts to end a war on their own continent. What’s more, it would allow the president to disarm the “Russia witch-hunters”, who would find much less to criticise about a summit with Putin if it could stop the bloody conflict in Ukraine.

What should also not be overlooked is that in the event of success, the United States would acquire a loyal ally in eastern Europe with a strong, battle-hardened military.

Let’s be clear, it was not by chance that Putin mentioned eastern Ukraine in Helsinki. The Russian Spring is a spent force, and has ceased to be a source of Putin’s popularity at home. Today Russians are much more concerned with the recent announcement about a raising of the retirement age. Furthermore, ravaged as they have been by the war, the two separatist entities in Donbas have become a heavy burden on the Russian budget, and a hotbed of crime. An unknown number of Russian soldiers, mercenaries and volunteers have died there, while surviving veterans returning home to Russia represent a problem for local authorities. It would be in Russia’s interest to get rid of this load.

Putin may also feel he could end – or at least reduce – the affect of sanctions against Russia, some of which he would expect to be lifted in the event of peace in Donbas. Of course it would not happen overnight, but no matter how long it would take, the cessation of hostilities in eastern Ukraine would be the first step towards repealing sanctions, which have painfully hurt the Russian economy and generated a split among Russian elites. It is also unlikely that the British authorities will be able to maintain unity among allies in respect of the sanctions which have been imposed in response to the novichok incident: peace in Ukraine might hurry the weakening of that resolve.

Moreover, a cessation of hostilities could open the door to Russia’s readmission to the G7/8, from which it was ejected in 2014. It is widely believed that the Russian president was personally hurt when he lost his place at the G8 table: just remember how lonely he looked at the G20 summit at Brisbane, Australia in 2014, or how he “invited himself” to the D-Day commemoration in Normandy later that year. No Soviet or Russian leader had ever deigned that event with his presence, but Putin choose to take part to get back into the company of Western leaders.

What about Ukraine’s role in a three-way summit? Ukrainian president Poroshenko has a mixed record. He came to power on the wave of the 2014 revolution. However, four years later corruption remains rampant in Ukraine, many key market reforms were not implemented, and critics argue that Poroshenko has not done enough to root out wrongdoing. Many in Washington have no illusions about Poroshenko, though so far there is no viable replacement for him among opposition candidates running for presidential office.

In any event, it cannot be denied that under Poroshenko’s rule the Ukrainian economy has started to grow (in 2017 it grew by 20.5 per cent), and it would arguably be highly inopportune if this process were interrupted by a new populist leader (for instance, Poroshenko’s main rival Yulia Timoshenko). The next presidential elections in Ukraine are scheduled for 31 March 2019. A trip to Washington DC which brought an end to a war in Donbas that has cost so many Ukrainian lives would certainly boost Poroshenko’s chances.

That said, we should assume that securing peace in Ukraine will not be an easy task. Though US and Russian plans for a peaceful settlement in Donbas might share common terminology, the devil is in the detail: the Russians would be tough negotiators, challenging every provision of the plan suggested by Americans. The issues of border control, the degree of autonomy and a possible amnesty for war criminals, could – among others – easily derail the peace process.

Another serious challenge for a peaceful solution would be the issue of Crimea. Its seizure by Russia set a very dangerous precedent as the first successful annexation of foreign territory since the end of the Second World War (the two other obvious annexation attempts: the Falklands in 1982, and Kuwait in 1990, were expediently interdicted). However, putting Crimea on the summit agenda would make the peace challenge insurmountable. Ukraine must be assured that a peace deal would not mean a swap of Donbas for Crimea. Nonetheless, the future of the peninsula should be discussed at another venue and at a different time.

Even if the summit participants fail to secure peace in Ukraine, nobody would blame Trump for lack of good intentions. No matter what the outcome would be, therefore, he would look better in the eyes of the international and domestic audiences than after his last summit with Vladimir Putin.

Alexei Sobchenko is a former US Department of State employee and was a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty