WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The Trump administration’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have ramifications not only for European security but also for peace-building efforts around the world, experts told OSV News.
The White House said March 25 that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to cease fighting in the Black Sea, and that the U.S. and Ukraine “agreed that the United States remains committed to helping achieve the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of forcibly transferred Ukrainian children,” among other agreements.
Both Ukraine and Russia previously agreed in principle to a limited ceasefire after President Donald Trump spoke with each country’s leader. But the path to getting to such a ceasefire remained murky after Russian President Vladimir Putin rebuffed Trump’s request for a full 30-day ceasefire March 18. The tentative agreement comes after a tumultuous few weeks for the administration’s push to end the war in Ukraine and a fractious, televised Feb. 28 White House meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I don’t think we have enough hard information to really understand what is really happening in high-level U.S.-Russian negotiations,” Michael David-Fox, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University, told OSV News March 19. “It is not yet clear if Ukraine will get any security guarantees at all, which is a crucial issue, and in the end Ukraine is and will have to be involved in any settlement. Europe also will be hard to ignore.”
David-Fox told OSV News that within a few weeks of taking office, “Trump has upended the international order, causing shock, chaos, and uncertainty — an uncertainty that seems now to have extended to Russia after an initial period of jubilation there.”
He acknowledged the view advanced by some that many of the Trump administration’s actions toward Russia are “a tactic and a negotiating tool for getting some sort of deal quickly.”
However, he said, “actions speak louder than words.”
“Negotiating with Russia without Ukraine; marginalizing European and NATO allies; speaking of dividing up resources (in Ukraine); voting with Russia and against Ukraine in the U.N.; and upending the norms and institutions of U.S. foreign policy that have existed since the Cold War do not even encompass the full extent of what has occurred,” he said.
But David-Fox noted the world is in a “very different place” from the 1945 Yalta Conference, when the leaders of the British Empire, the United States and Soviet Union met to decide the fate of the post-war world.
“A Russian-American return to an international order based spheres of influence, in which great powers decide small countries’ fate as in Yalta, if that is what is really in the offing, will not be as easy to accomplish as at the end of WWII,” he said.
The Trump administration’s aggressive methods to conclude the war in Ukraine, with territorial concessions to Putin, is also igniting consternation among European countries that the U.S. could use similar tactics against them due to their reliance on U.S. defense technology.
The decisions have ramifications for peacebuilding as Europeans have accelerated talks on remilitarizing, including proposals to develop their own armaments, nuclear shield and even a standing army for the European Union.
David-Fox said that Putin “clearly wants to make some concessions to Trump’s repeated campaign promises to end the war quickly, but so far Putin continues to push for victory on Russian terms.”
“He will have a hard time ending this war, because he has become dependent if not addicted to it politically and economically,” he said.
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who specializes in international law and conflict resolution, told OSV News — shortly after the tense Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy — that Catholic teaching on legitimate defense by military means, sometimes called just war theory, “aligns with international law on the use of force.”
She added, “Both make clear that Russia has committed one of the most egregious violations a state can perpetrate — the attempt to conquer a fully sovereign state member of the United Nations.”
For its part, she said, “Ukraine has the full moral and legal right to defend itself — so long as defense aims at reestablishing peace.”
O’Connell emphasized there are other approaches that the Trump administration could take to bring about a just resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. One such option, she said, is negotiating with China and India to get these countries to “comply with their obligations under international law to oppose aggression by Russia.”
“These two powerful countries could bring the pressure needed on Russia to negotiate a withdrawal and respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and political independence,” she said.
O’Connell explained a just peace could also negotiate the different security needs of both Ukraine and Russia, which is adamant Ukraine never become the 33rd member of the trans-Atlantic military alliance known as NATO.
“Rather than insist on NATO membership, Ukraine can be part of rebuilding the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,” she said.
“The OSCE was instrumental in bringing about the human rights revolution in the Soviet sphere,” she added. “It can play a decisive role in restoring peace and the authentic rule of international law in the world.”
Father David Hollenbach, a Jesuit theologian and professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, told OSV News that a commitment to human rights is “a very strong commitment of Roman Catholicism” and that goal has often aligned with areas where “the United States has traditionally been very strongly committed to the protection of the freedoms and rights of peoples and other countries against imperial domination.”
Catholic social teaching, Father Hollenbach said, “is committed to both justice for people and also to the pursuit of justice through non-violent means.”
“Both the commitment to peace and the commitment to justice are very fundamental Catholic values, and the problem emerges when the two of them come into tension with each other, or even conflict with each other,” he said. “And one should pursue justice and self-defense, non violently. But if it cannot be done non violently, the resort to armed force can be legitimate.”
Ukraine’s effort to fend off Russia’s invasion, he said, is one such example.
Amid the U.S. government’s push both to end the war in Ukraine, and Europe’s mulling an 800-billion-euro armaments spending plan for its own defense, Pope Francis wrote a letter during his recent illness to an Italian newspaper director, decrying the absurdity of war and calling for communicators to “disarm words, to disarm minds and disarm the Earth.”
“While war only devastates communities and the environment, without offering solutions to conflicts, diplomacy and international organizations are in need of new vitality and credibility,” he said in the March 14 letter the Vatican made public. “Religions, moreover, can draw from the spirituality of peoples to rekindle the desire for fraternity and justice, the hope for peace.”
Jonathan Peri, president of Manor College, a school founded by Ukrainian women religious in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, told OSV News that people in the countries afflicted by war “cry for peace.” He said they “want diplomatic solutions, so that they can enjoy life, liberty, happiness, and the freedom to praise God that their leaders saw the light and ended the hell that was.”
“For peace to occur and the war to end,” he said, “the leaders must move from enmity to accord. They need to look beyond the challenging moments of negotiations and truly see the emotions that lie in the hearts of the people.”
This story was co-authored by Kate Scanlon and Gina Christian. Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News based in Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon. Christian, a multimedia reporter for OSV News, contributed to this report. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina. OSV News national editor Peter Jesserer Smith also contributed to this report.
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