August 19, 2025: Peace as Contract
The language of peace in Ukraine has shifted. It no longer rests primarily on the silencing of weapons but on the design of guarantees. The central dynamic is not whether fighting stops in the short term, but how security is to be underwritten in the years ahead. Where once a ceasefire or armistice might have been imagined as the first step toward resolution, the discussion now circles around packages, contracts, and commitments that extend beyond the war itself.
At the foundation are material forces. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described a proposal to purchase $90bn worth of American systems, “which primarily includes aircraft, air defence systems.” In return, Ukraine expects that once its export trade reopens, the United States will buy Ukrainian drones. Military hardware thus becomes both shield and currency, a condition of survival and a medium of exchange. Territory is treated in similar terms. Donald Trump noted that “possible exchanges of territory” would have to be considered, using the “current line of contact” as a reference. Land becomes negotiable, defined not by communities but by the distribution of force that fixes front lines.
Political mechanisms grow out of this base. Trump placed himself at the centre of negotiations, declaring that after calling Vladimir Putin, he had “begun the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelenskyy.” He positioned himself not as the broker of a ceasefire—indeed ruling that out—but as the arranger of a broader settlement. His rhetoric followed a template drawn from commerce: “I don’t think you’d need a ceasefire. If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war – I didn’t do any ceasefires.” Peace is cast as a transaction, continuity with bargaining rather than a departure from conflict.
European leaders sought to reinsert the expectation of restraint. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that credibility required “at least a ceasefire from the beginning of the serious negotiations.” French President Emmanuel Macron described a truce as a “necessity.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the “precondition of every kind of peace” was certainty that war would not recur. Even as they pressed for a ceasefire, however, they affirmed the same structural emphasis: the heart of any settlement would be security guarantees, shared across Europe, the United States, NATO, and the EU.
Institutions provide the scaffolding that makes these promises appear durable. Zelenskyy said guarantees for Kyiv would be “formalised” within ten days. Trump wrote that the commitments would be divided among European states “with coordination with the United States of America.” NATO and the EU were named as participants in this framework, ensuring that pledges by individuals would be stabilized by organizations that project continuity. The staging of joint meetings at the White House reinforced this, displaying an architecture of order meant to outlast any single leader’s words.
Alongside this scaffolding, a cultural script organizes meaning. Merz cast attendance at a summit as a test of courage for Putin. Macron framed a truce as a moral necessity. Trump drew attention to his record of past “deals,” offering credibility as performance rather than substance. Even moments of banter—an exchange about Zelenskyy’s suit with a sympathetic television reporter, joined by Trump—served to fold personal rapport and symbolic gestures into the diplomatic currency. These performances do not substitute for material arrangements but translate them into forms legible to wider audiences.
The aims of peace are described through the same framing. Macron emphasized that “a credible Ukrainian army for the years and decades to come” would be the first guarantee. Meloni said that certainty against recurrence was the precondition of stability. Zelenskyy himself outlined a two-part vision: a strong army built on weapons sales and training, and a second layer depending on guarantees from Europe, NATO, and the United States. Even when phrased as ethical commitments, the underlying design remains deterrence—security as the balance of force institutionalized over time.
The interaction between layers is clear. Material purchases and territorial lines create leverage. Political actors negotiate these into bargains. Institutions stabilize the bargains into commitments. Cultural scripts dramatize those commitments as credibility, courage, or unity. In turn, public acceptance of this framing sustains demand for guarantees, funding, and weapons, feeding back into the material base. The system locks into a loop where the end of fighting is not an endpoint but a continuation of exchange, negotiation, and deterrence.
Peace here emerges less as resolution than as contract—built on deterrence, stabilized by institutions, and dramatized through the theatre of summitry. The open question is whether such an architecture can secure stability beyond the war, or whether it will merely reproduce the conditions that made security itself into a tradable commodity.