After much speculation, US president Donald Trump has finally opened the negotiations that he promised would end the war in Ukraine. Following a phone call between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and a presentation in Brussels by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, it’s clear that the US expects Ukraine to make significant concessions, at least by the standards of previous Western rhetoric. There will be no NATO membership, no US troops to keep the peace in Ukraine and no return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. Pointedly, the US is also insisting that Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) security will now be a European problem.

The reaction from Western commentators to these initial US plans has been predictable. They claim that Trump is selling Ukraine down the river. But that misses the bigger picture. The key problem for Ukraine is that it has been fighting a war without any future security guarantee – a guarantee its nominal partners have long promised they would provide, while never actually doing so.

Indeed, the US and its European allies have made lots of noise about supporting and defending Ukrainian sovereignty throughout the conflict. Yet they have shown no genuine intention to provide any real, NATO-style promise of protection – something which would consider a future attack against Ukraine as an attack against all its allies.