Putin Calls a Yalta Without Winning in Ukraine, He Wants Allies Against Europe

The country on whose soil the war is being fought is not there. Neither are the people paying for its defense. That, in short, is the whole story that The Wall Street Journal broke this week and everyone else has been retelling since. But to understand what Vladimir Putin has actually proposed, do not look at the agenda. There is none, and the Kremlin does not pretend otherwise. Look at the seating plan. Because in this story the seating plan is the deal.

Here are the facts. Putin proposed a November meeting with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Moscow, and he floated the idea during his October 9 phone call with Trump, the same call in which the two agreed on an American purchase of Russian diesel, Reuters reports, citing The Wall Street Journal. The Kremlin suggested holding it on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen on November 18-19. The Journal's source is a former Russian intelligence officer, and that detail is worth keeping in mind: the leak comes from the Russian side. The Kremlin is putting the idea into the open on purpose, because an invitation to a "peace meeting" is harder to reject in public than to leave hanging on a phone line.

And Washington's answer? Nothing definite so far. A senior administration official told the paper that Trump has not agreed to the summit but could, in principle, be open to it. Dmitry Peskov confirmed that discussions are under way, though "there is as yet no clear understanding of the meeting itself or its potential agenda." Whether Xi is on board is not known at all. So there is no meeting yet. There is a proposal. And a proposal, as so often happens, tells you more about the design than the meeting ever would.

Let us begin with why the idea is not new, and why it has resurfaced precisely now. Trump himself was talking about a trio as early as February 2025, the day after his first call with Putin: he said he "would love" to have Russia back in the G7, called its expulsion a mistake, and added that one of his first meetings "once things calm down" should be with Xi and Putin. In that same month, February 2025, Beijing was quietly offering Washington, through intermediaries, a Trump-Putin summit without Volodymyr Zelensky, and the White House answered in two words: "not viable." Remember that phrase. Eighteen months later, the identical proposal, this time from Moscow, gets "could be open to it." What lies between "not viable" and "open" is not a change on the battlefield. It is a diesel contract.

Now to the format itself. Putin is proposing Yalta. Not as a metaphor: a "new Yalta" is his own long-standing dream, he has been spelling it out from podiums for years, and its meaning never changes. Three great powers divide the world among themselves, and every other nation is the thing being divided. But the real Yalta had one feature Putin prefers not to recall. The men at that table were victors. After the victory. They were dividing what they had already taken. Putin is asking to be seated at the victors' table before any victory, because he has none: the front is frozen, Kyiv has not fallen, and the talks Trump keeps trying to run through Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner keep breaking on territory. And here is the key to everything. If he is seated as the third man beside the United States and China, he has already got the main thing. He takes the status of victor not at the front but at the table, by the mere fact of being seated. That is the goal: not to agree on anything at the meeting, but to get the meeting.

Notice how this differs from Munich, the other comparison being made. In Munich in 1938 the fate of a country was likewise decided without that country, and the aggressor likewise sat at the table. But at least Britain and France were there, a side formally bound by obligations to the victim. Putin's design is cleaner. In Shenzhen there is nobody from the other side. Not Ukraine, not the Europe that is paying for its defense today, not even anyone who would be obliged to speak up for them. Munich was the betrayal of an ally. Here the ally simply was not invited.

So who is at the table? Let us call things by their names. Russia is fighting. China is its treasury and its arsenal: the biggest buyer of Russian oil and the supplier of the dual-use components without which this war would have choked long ago. And the United States, since October 9, is a buyer of Russian diesel, which is to say one more payer into the Russian budget, with Trump already explaining aloud that Zelensky "uses Russian diesel refineries as targets, which hurts global fuel markets, including American ones." Think about that sentence. The president of the United States is defending Russian refineries from Ukrainian strikes, because they now supply his fuel. This is the economics of losses in its newest edition: the state does not merely shift the risks of war onto the taxpayer, it becomes a stakeholder in the aggressor's infrastructure and starts guarding it from its own ally. Interest, not position, decides who sides with whom. So the three seats in Shenzhen do not hold three powers. They hold one side of the war: the one who shoots, the one who pays for it, and the one who has just joined the queue for the product.

Which brings us to the question that matters more than any other. Putin is not inviting Trump and Xi as arbiters. You do not invite arbiters to a meeting where it has been announced in advance that the terms will be "favorable to Moscow." He is inviting them as allies. And if he is recruiting allies, he must have something to offer. What?

To Trump he offers what Trump has already started paying for: cheap fuel, a "deal" he can show voters as peace, and the role of the man who closed a European war without spending a single American dollar. To Xi he offers something else, and it matters more. A concert of three powers in which Ukraine's fate is settled without Ukraine is a precedent. It is a model in which any territorial question is resolved inside the trio, not at the Security Council and not on any platform where small countries have a voice. For Beijing, which has a "Ukrainian question" of its own under a different name, that model is worth more than any oil. And to both at once Putin offers the main thing: Europe. Not as a partner. As an object.

Here it is worth stopping to ask a plain question: why, exactly, do all three need Europe in this particular condition, cut into pieces? Because none of them needs it whole. For Moscow a united Europe is an adversary that cannot be taken with gas, with tanks, or by buying one capital. For Beijing a united Europe is the world's second-largest market, able to set common rules, common tariffs, and common sanctions, while a disunited Europe is twenty-seven doors, each of which can be entered with a separate offer. For Washington under Trump a united Europe is a competitor that bargains as an equal, while a divided one is a set of clients, each buying American gas and American weapons on American terms, one at a time. In other words, the three men at the table share no common enemy, but they share a common interest: that Europe should remain what it is today, a problem that is solved on its behalf. And the bitterest part of the picture is that Europe is doing their work for them. A continent whose economy is ten times Russia's and whose population is three times larger, which produces everything from shells to satellites, behaves as though its strength lay somewhere else. Its strength is in unity, and that is the one strength it never uses. Every capital bargains with Trump separately, every capital looks for its own channel to Beijing, every capital quietly calculates its own price for peace with Moscow. Nobody needs to divide Europe: it is already standing before the table one by one, while the table seats three.

I am stating this plainly: this is Putin's war on Europe, and it is already under way. Not the one in which tanks roll toward Warsaw, but the one in which Europe is struck off the list of those who decide. Shenzhen is its first protocol. And Putin is looking for the men who will sign it with him.

Look at where he proposes to sign. This is neither accident nor calendar convenience. Yalta took place on Stalin's territory, in Crimea, and Roosevelt and Churchill traveled to him, not he to them. Shenzhen is Xi's territory. The old hegemon, if he flies there at all, flies to the soil of the new one to settle Europe's affairs on someone else's ground. Giovanni Arrighi described the passage of hegemony exactly this way: not as a war between the old center and the new, but as the moment when the old center starts traveling to the new one for decisions. The map of this meeting is a ready-made illustration for his book. Putin, incidentally, is not the host in this arrangement. He is the petitioner, bringing two masters together in the hope of a cut for brokering it. That is Moscow's eight-hundred-year role, and it has not changed: not to produce power, but to stand between those who have it and charge for the privilege.

Now for the ugliest part, which almost nobody discusses. Why does Putin want an "end to the war" on his terms at all, if the front is frozen and Ukraine is not surrendering? The answer lies in what he needed Ukraine for in the first place. Remember how it all began. He did not come for land, and he did not come for the "Russian world." He came for the Ukrainian army. That is why he fought so hard against NATO membership for Ukraine: not out of fear of NATO missiles outside Kharkiv, but because a country inside NATO drops out of his conscription rolls forever. Ukraine, with its mobilization reserve, its factories, and a military school that since Soviet times had supplied the empire with officers and designers, was never his goal. It was his means. He planned to take it in three days, put it in line, and march it further west. That is how the empire has always fought: not with its own, but with the annexed. First conquer, then mobilize, then send them to conquer the next. So it was with the Cossacks, so with the peoples of the Caucasus, so in 2022 with the residents of Donetsk and Luhansk, who were driven into the trenches before the Russian draft had reached Ryazan. Three days turned into years, and the army he meant to take became the army that stopped him. But the goal has not changed. "Terms favorable to Moscow" do not mean a line on a map. They mean the transfer of millions of people from Ukraine's mobilization base to Russia's. That is the resource Putin wants to carry out of Shenzhen: not the Donbas, but a conscript pool for the next war. The one against Europe. And now the picture is complete. He needs a table without Ukraine so that Ukraine can be handed over at it, and a table without Europe so that Europe never learns against whom that Ukraine will later be deployed.

What follows from all this today, while there is still no meeting? That Putin has filed an application. Not for peace. For status. The price of the first installment is already known: a diesel contract and a pause on the Graham sanctions bill. The decision now belongs to Trump, and it is as simple as a seating plan. If he flies to Shenzhen, he is not flying to end the war in Ukraine. He is flying to change sides in it: Ukraine turns from a country being defended into a resource being divided, and Europe turns from an ally into the next item on the agenda. Yalta ratified a victory. This Yalta is meant to replace one. And the only thing standing between Putin and that table is an answer Washington has not yet given. The second thing, also still missing, is a Europe that speaks with one voice.