Professor Radu Albu Comănescu has warned that major powers could reach understandings that shift Europe’s geopolitical balance without giving states in the region a decisive say. In an interview with Adevărul, he said the real danger for Romania and Eastern Europe may be subtler than a fresh division of the world.
He said the White House would have high expectations of a trilateral involving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, which might bring peace closer even if it did not deliver it. The United States, he argued, still has the widest set of tools over the war in Ukraine: toward Russia, financial sanctions, trade restrictions, limits on technology and access to international markets, plus selective incentives such as easing some economic measures or facilitating specific trade deals; toward Ukraine, military aid, intelligence sharing, financial support and security guarantees. Those levers make Washington the outside actor best placed to speed or block a settlement.
He stressed that tools are not the same as an outcome. A durable peace needs a formula both sides can accept, and the gap is wide. Russia seeks recognition of territorial gains and a broad redesign of Europe’s security architecture, while Ukraine insists on its sovereignty and credible future security guarantees. No mix of pressure and rewards, he said, can fully remove that contradiction. If trilateral talks happen, they would probably also cover US-China competition, nuclear arms control, Middle East stability after the events of the spring, and energy markets. Recent statements by President Trump suggest a summit could focus heavily on nuclear weapons and relations among the major powers, not only on Ukraine.
Looking at history, Comănescu said diplomatic and economic pressure can produce armistices, ceasefires or temporary deals, but not real reconciliation. A peace that one side sees as imposed from outside risks becoming only a pause between rounds of fighting: short-term violence falls without the deeper causes being settled. There is also a legitimacy limit. The more the parties directly involved feel that great powers are deciding for them, the more likely they are to contest the result. Kyiv, and the European Union, which feels pushed to the margins, have reacted critically to the idea of discussing Ukraine without Ukraine, and President Zelensky has insisted that any negotiation on his country’s future must include Ukrainian representatives. Economic pressure works best when the political will to compromise already exists; otherwise sanctions or financial incentives can change the pace of the war, not its underlying logic. A stable peace needs a minimum of trust between adversaries and a shared sense that war is not the better option.
On whether a Putin-Xi-Trump axis could produce spheres of influence or even a new Yalta, he said the risk is real even if it would not take a classic Yalta form, which is why the mere idea of a three-way summit unsettles many European capitals. History is full of cases in which heavily armed powers tried to stabilise the system by marking out zones of mutual interest. The summit idea fed that worry because Ukraine would not take part directly, and the sphere in which it would be placed would bring Russia into Romania’s immediate neighbourhood. In practice, he does not believe this is a classic new Yalta, because today’s world is far more fragmented than that of 1945.
Even informal understandings among Washington, Moscow and Beijing would depend on many intermediate actors: the European Union, NATO states, Ukraine itself, an ambivalent Turkey, an India more present internationally than in 1945, when it did not yet exist as a state, and others. The three leaders’ ability to redraw the international order alone is much smaller than commentary suggests. The subtler and more realistic risk, he said, is not a formal partition of the world but tacit deals on strategic priorities. Washington might be tempted to put competition with China first. Beijing would seek economic stability and access to markets, with priority on the market most dependent on Chinese trade, the European one. Moscow would try to win implicit recognition of zones of influence on its borders. In that scenario Europe and Ukraine would need to be extremely careful: when the great powers meet, those absent from the table risk discovering that they are on the menu.
Asked whether the G20 could host a bilateral or multilateral deal of that scale, he said the group is by nature a forum for consultation among the world’s major economies, not a classic mechanism for negotiating and guaranteeing peace. An agreement on Ukraine would more likely be prepared earlier in restricted talks and only announced or politically consecrated on the margins of a G20 summit. Recent talk of a possible meeting between Trump, Putin and Xi points in that direction. The G20 does offer wider international legitimacy: a deal presented in a setting that includes both Western states and emerging powers would gain broader political validation than a purely bilateral one. At the same time, China, Europe, India, the United States and Russia have sharply different interests, so the summit could serve more as a stage for an agreement than as the place where it is actually made.
On Kyiv’s red lines, he said the fundamental line for Ukraine’s leadership is the survival of the state in a viable and sustainable territorial form. A peace can involve de facto territorial compromises, but formal and definitive recognition of territorial losses would be very difficult. There is a difference between saying those territories cannot be recovered now and saying they are given up forever. Kyiv could accept a freeze of the existing lines of contact, a long armistice and even a postponement of territorial claims, while asking for security guarantees, continued access to Western weapons, European economic integration and the principle that annexations by force are not legally recognised. What would turn a compromise into a capitulation at home is less the loss of territory than the impression that Ukraine has been abandoned, including by its own leadership, and left without a strategic outlook. If a deal can be presented as a stage of consolidation and state reconstruction, it could be accepted; if it is seen as a simple concession imposed from outside, its political stability will be fragile.
For the Kremlin, he said, any agreement must be presentable to the Russian public as proof that Russia imposed its strategic will. Moscow would probably pursue at least three aims: keeping control of a significant part of the occupied territories, limiting Ukraine’s Western military integration, including access to Western weapons, and recognition of Russia as an indispensable interlocutor on European security. The victory the Kremlin seeks may be more symbolic, because military failure is monstrously humiliating for a state that claims not only superpower status — the United States has also lost plenty of wars — but the role of reshaping Europe’s security system through pressure. The Russian narrative aims to show that Western pressure has not changed its strategic behaviour and that its great-power status must be accepted. History of Russian-Western relations suggests Moscow keeps agreements when the cost of breaking them exceeds the benefit. Diplomatic wording does not guarantee stability; the net balance of power does. If Russia judges a return to fighting advantageous and cheap, no text will suffice. If the price of returning to conflict becomes prohibitive, the deal has a chance to last. Romania, he said, has a great deal to learn from that.
Eastern Europe, he noted, trembles at the thought that the great powers might decide over Europeans’ heads, including in a restricted US-China-Russia format. That is one of Europe’s major strategic anxieties now. Europeans have invested heavily in supporting Ukraine, yet there is a fear that final decisions could be discussed in a format from which Europe is absent, or in which, with strongly pro-Russian forces in power, it stops pressing its own positions. Even if Washington, Moscow and Beijing talk among themselves, putting any agreement into practice depends significantly on the European Union and NATO. Rebuilding Ukraine, economic sanctions, trade, financial assistance, border security and the military presence on the eastern flank remain largely European and Euro-Atlantic instruments, so long as Brussels and the associated capitals understand them and choose to use them.