Trump may be right about Ukraine's endgame

If they play their cards well, leaders across Europe can exert leverage on America over how to end the war.

- Alec Russell

It is a millennia-old cliché of soldiering that you spend the majority of your time waiting around, interrupted by brief spasms of action. The same can be true of diplomacy. For a year now, all parties to the war in Ukraine have been awaiting the results of the US election. Donald Trump's commanding victory has ended that limbo – and supercharged thinking about an endgame in Ukraine.

Trump has long insisted that ending the war is a priority. For all the understandable questions about the path to a deal, America's allies are assuming this is a promise he wants to keep. In Brussels there is a growing expectation that there will be a ceasefire, if not some form of a settlement, in 2025. The challenge for Europe's powers is how to guide the process to an acceptable end. America's military pre-eminence gives Trump the dominant say in directing the process, but they do have leverage. They just have to use it.

Some will still nobly argue the only acceptable end involves Russian troops retreating to the borders, as they were at the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Acquiescing in the formal change of frontiers is out of the question for Ukraine and most of its allies. But increasingly in Kyiv, Washington and across Europe, there is a common view of the most likely outcome: a frozen conflict, with the issue of frontiers postponed indefinitely.