Gas for peace? Europe already tried that

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff want to sweeten a Ukraine peace deal by offering up Europe’s gas market to Vladimir Putin. Trouble is, it’s not Washington’s to give – and ‘gas-for-peace’ is a bitter pill that Europe swallowed decades ago and has regretted ever since.

Donald Trump’s envoys raised restarting Russian pipeline flows with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv in September, then with European officials, according to a New York Times report this weekend.

Unencumbered by even a rudimentary grasp of European history, Kushner and Witkoff think they have devised a genius plan to secure peace. It goes like this:

Ukraine would collect transit fees from Russia. European voters would get ‘cheaper’ energy. Russia would get its best customers back. And everybody lives happily ever after.

Sadly, this deeply existential, ideological conflict cannot be fixed as if it were a real estate transaction. Russia was already selling gas to Europe at record volumes when Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Returning to the status quo ante bellum is hardly going to convince the Kremlin to abandon its maximalist military objectives.

The architects of the proposal must know this, which suggests there are ulterior motives at play.