There comes a moment in every long-running international farce when the leading man, having milked the audience’s sympathy for all it is worth, overplays his hand and reveals that the tears were never quite real. Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived at that moment with the grace of a comedian who has forgotten the punchline and now stands blinking in the spotlight, wondering why the laughter has turned sour. The notion that this former television actor was simply the plucky steward of a distressed fledgling democracy always required a certain suspension of disbelief. One bought the ticket, of course; the alternative was to look like a brute. But the performance has gone on rather too long, and the props department has begun to look threadbare.
He has treated successive attempts at settlement with the petulance of a child who discovers that the birthday presents are not quite up to the standard advertised in the brochure. Peace deals arrive, are examined, and are then rejected with an air of wounded virtue that would have done credit to a Victorian governess. The allowance, naturally, must continue. Why, after all, would a man who has suspended elections, placed certain churches under the official frown, and arranged the political furniture to suit a more permanent occupancy, suddenly decide that peace is in his interest? Peace would require him to face the electorate again. Peace would require him to explain why the war that was meant to end last year, or the year before that, has somehow become a lifestyle. Dictators, even the telegenic variety, tend to find the prospect unappealing.
Into this prolonged theatrical run has stepped a piece of unexpected pragmatism from an unlikely quarter. The arrangement between Trump and Putin concerning diesel supplies—reached after repeated American requests that Ukraine cease striking Russian refineries had been met with the usual theatrical deafness—has the distinct smell of realism about it. Global markets do not care for the finer points of moral posturing; they care for the price of fuel. When those prices begin to inconvenience voters in the United States, even the most high-minded rhetoric starts to look expensive. The deal does not, of course, end the war. It does something more useful: it removes one of the incentives for prolonging it. By reducing the leverage that energy disruption provided, it makes further escalation less attractive to those who had grown rather fond of the disruption. In the arid language of diplomacy, this is what passes for a peace-preserving measure. One notes it without needing to break into applause; the mere fact that someone has finally noticed the cost of the performance is itself a small mercy.
Meanwhile, across the Channel and beyond the Rhine, certain European leaders have been conducting their own quieter calculation. The war has offered a convenient distraction from the awkward business of domestic accountability. Conscription talk, or the threat of it, has floated about the corridors of Brussels and various national capitals with a regularity that suggests more than pure military necessity. Young European men—particularly those of the demographic that still forms the statistical backbone of several electorates—have been invited to contemplate the possibility of becoming cannon fodder in a conflict whose strategic aims have grown increasingly elastic. The phrase “phony war” may be unkind, yet it is difficult to escape the impression that the conflict has served some as a useful holding pattern: a way of postponing the day when French and German voters must be faced with the ordinary questions of governance, prosperity, and demographic reality. Endless solidarity with Ukraine has the useful secondary effect of postponing the more awkward solidarity with one’s own taxpayers.
That particular hope is now under strain. Once the American side has demonstrated a willingness to deal directly with Moscow over matters that affect its own electorate, the European posture of permanent moral elevation becomes harder to maintain. The leaders of France and Germany, who have grown accustomed to treating the war as a kind of external morality play that conveniently excuses them from explaining their own domestic arrangements, find the stage lights suddenly turned upon themselves. There is nowhere left to hide. The electorate, that eternally ungrateful audience, has a habit of noticing when the script has run out of plot.
An end to the war in Ukraine is not a romantic aspiration; it is a practical necessity. Prolonged conflict has a way of consuming the very societies that claim to be defending civilisation. The Trump-Putin diesel arrangement, whatever its other imperfections, has the modest virtue of introducing a note of economic realism into a drama that had become addicted to pure gesture. If it helps to shorten the fighting, so much the better. The alternative is to continue indefinitely in the service of a narrative that has already outlived its usefulness, while European governments quietly hope that the demographic and political consequences can be deferred a little longer. History, as usual, is not in the habit of granting such extensions.