International Editor
ReutersAmerica is under new control. The President of Ukraine Volodimir Zelensky joins the growing list of US allies, which reveal that the world according to Donald Trump is more cold, more uncertain and potentially more dangerous for their place.
It was probably bad enough to hear Zelensky to heard Trump’s sharp announcement that he welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to international diplomacy with a 90-minute phone, after which a meeting to face, perhaps in Saudi Arabia, took place.
After Putin, the White House scored Zelensky’s number. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine in the morning after, Zelensky accepted the fact that Putin received the first call, “though, frankly, it is not very nice.”
What Zelensky was hiding was that Trump, who called him after he talked to Putin, seemed to consider him at best as a junior addition to any peace talks. One of the many Nightmares Zelensky should become the prospect of Trump and Putin, who is trying to resolve Ukraine’s future without anyone else.
He told reporters that Ukraine “would not be able to accept any agreements” fulfilled without his participation.
He said he said “everything did not go according to Putin’s plan, in which he wants to do everything to do his talks with bilateral.”
EpaThe President Zelensky goes to the Munich Security Conference, starting from Friday, where he will try to unite the allies of Ukraine. He faces a fierce meeting with Vice President of Trump J. D. Vens, who was one of the most violent critics of Joe Biden’s assistance in Ukraine.
Zelensky’s argument will hear from the Americans what Ukraine is losing, and it needs to be about what happens next. He will say that Ukraine can win – with proper support.
The European Union is also worried. After the meeting and praised the Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Merova, EU Foreign Political Head Kaj Kalas published that Europe should play a central role in any negotiations. “Our priority should now be the strengthening of Ukraine and ensure reliable security guarantees,” Kalas said.
Zelensky is painfully aware that while its European allies sound much more adamant than Americans, the United States remains the strongest military force in the world. Last week, he told The Guardian that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”
Collectively European allies gave Ukraine more money than the US. But Americans have weapons and air defense systems – like Patriot missile batteries that protect Kyiv – which Europeans simply can’t provide.
Putin will be delighted with the fact that he is much easier to ride than Biden. The former US president called Putin, among other things, a “pure bandit”, a “tough tyrant” and a “murderous dictator” and stopped contact after a full -scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Just to return home what everything changed, Trump continued yesterday’s positive assessment of his conversation with Putin with optimistic morning mail on his platform, “the truth of social”, reflecting on “big talks with Russia and Ukraine yesterday”. Now there was “a good opportunity to stop this horrible, very bloody war !!!”
Putin is not only talking to the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he can see himself an arbiter of the endgles in the war he started when he violated international law with invasion of Ukraine almost exactly three years ago.
In the White House, Trump suggested that the huge number of killed and wounded in the Russian military gave some legitimacy of Putin’s demand to keep the land and annexed Russia.
“They took a lot of land and they fought for this land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “some of them will return.”
The remarks of Defense Minister Pitt Hugset at the NATO meeting in Brussels were more straightforward. He wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous”. But “we must start by recognizing that the return to Ukraine’s borders by 2014 is an unreal goal.”
“The pursuit of this illusory purpose will only extend the war and lead to greater suffering.”
Trump is still in the easy end of what can be impossible to a tough diplomatic problem. It is boasting that it has the key to ending the war with Rus-Ukraine, that’s one thing. Do this happens something else.
His declaration before starting negotiations with Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO and will not return, that all its occupied land is widely criticized as a bad start by a person who claims to be the best transaction in the world.
Veteran -Swedish diplomat and politician Carl Bildt posted an ironic reproach on X.
“This is definitely an innovative approach to negotiations to make very serious concessions before they started. Even in 1938, even Chemberlen did not go so low. This Munich still finished.”
Bild posted a photo of British Prime Minister Neville Cherley after returning from Munich in 1938, waving the notorious and insignificant agreement he concluded with Adolf Hitler – the price of which was the surrender and the rupture of Czechoslovakia.
After a full -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely reflected in the West as a new threat to European peace. Trump’s approach to it is very different.
He will have to try to overcome the gap between Putin and Zelensky positions, which are polar opposites.
EpaZelensky’s goal is to restore the lost territory of Ukraine, which is about five of its common land. He also wants Ukraine to become a full member of NATO.
Putin insists that any peaceful transaction will require Ukraine to abandon the land that Russia has captured, as well as the areas it did not occupy, including the city of Zaporechzh, which has more than half a million of the population. Ukraine will also become neutral, demilitarized and never join NATO.
Ukraine’s demands will not be acceptable for Moscow, and Trump said he also does not like.
But Russia makes an ultimatum, not a serious peaceful proposal. Once upon a time, Trump’s developer loves transactions that provide material real estate. But Putin wants more than the earth. He wants Ukraine to return to the relations he had with the Kremlin at the time when it was part of the Soviet Union. For this, Ukraine will have to lose independence and sovereignty.
Biden suggested that Ukraine do not lose, because Putin’s threats were threatening to use nuclear weapons when NATO intervened seriously. Trump should know about the nuclear danger, but he also believes that Ukraine’s support is indefinitely being a bad thing for the US and it can do better.
As for Europeans, he can make them resist a rough inconsistency between his military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Only Poland and the Baltic states support their public statements about Russia’s threat with qualitatively increased cost protection.
When Russia grinds forward in the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine, it is the most difficult moment that Zelensky collided with the dark and desperate first months of the war, when Ukraine reflected from Russia’s attack on Kiev.
It is also a moment of decision for its Western allies. They face a tough choice that cannot be delayed much longer.
