International Editor
ReutersAmerica is under new management. Ukraine President Volodimir Zelinski joins a growing list of US allies who find that the world according to Donald Trump is a more cold and more lacking place and perhaps more dangerous for them.
It must be bad for Zelinski to hear Trump’s sudden announcement that he welcomed Russia President Vladimir Putin to international diplomacy through a 90 -minute phone call, to be followed by a face meeting, perhaps in Saudi Arabia.
After Putin, the White House was asking for Zelinski. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine the next morning, Zelinski accepted the fact that Putin received the first call, “although you are honest, it is not very enjoyable.”
What seemed to have appeared to be Trump, who had spoken to Putin, he seemed, at best, as a young assistant for any peace talks. One of Zelinski’s many nightmares should be the possibility of Trump and Putin attempted to try the future of Ukraine without anyone else to negotiate.
Journalists told that Ukraine “will not be able to accept any agreements” without its involvement.
He said it was very important that “everything is not going according to Putin’s plan, as he wants to do everything to make his negotiations bilateral.”
EPAPresident Zelinski will go to the Munich Security Conference, starting from Friday, where he will try to mobilize Ukraine allies. He faces a difficult meeting with Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who was one of the most important critics of Joe Biden to Ukraine.
The argument that Zelinski will hear from the Americans is that Ukraine is losing and must get what is happening after that. It will argue that Ukraine can win – with right support.
The European Union is also concerned. After interviewing the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Rustum Umerov, the head of the European Union Foreign Policy, Kaja Kallas, published that Europe should have a major role in any negotiations. “Our priority now should strengthen Ukraine and provide strong security guarantees,” said Calis.
Zelinski pains painfully that although his European allies seem more stable than Americans, the United States is still the most powerful military power in the world. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he told the Guardian newspaper last week.
Collectively, European allies granted Ukraine more money than the United States. But Americans have arms and air defense systems – such as Patriot missile batteries that protect Kiev – that Europeans cannot simply provide.
Putin will be happy because he gets a journey much easier than he was from Biden. Former US President Putin described, among other things, a “pure thug”, “brutal tyrant” and “a deadly dictator” and cut off after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Just to drive home until everything has changed, Trump continued the positive evaluation of his conversation with Putin with an early morning post, optimistic about his platform, and the science of truth, which reflects “wonderful talks with Russia and Ukraine yesterday.” There was now “a good possibility to end that terrible and very bloody war !!!”
Putin is no longer a conversation with the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he may now see himself as a ruling at the end of the game in the war he started when he broke international law with the comprehensive invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.
In the White House, Trump seemed to indicate that the huge numbers of dead and wounded in the Russian army gave a kind of legitimacy to demand Putin to preserve the lands that were captured by Russia.
“They took a lot of lands and fought for that land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “some of them will return.”
Defense Minister Beit Higseth’s statements at NATO meeting in Brussels were more directly. He wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous.” But “we must start by realizing that returning to the borders of Ukraine before 2014 is an unrealistic goal.”
“The pursuit of this imaginary goal will only lead to the prolongation of the war and cause more suffering.”
Trump is still easy to become a difficult diplomatic challenge. The boasting that it has a key to ending the war of Roussean Ukraine is one thing. Achieving this is another thing.
His announcement before any talks with Russia began that Ukraine will not join NATO, and all its occupied territory have been widely exposed as a bad start by a man who claims to be the best maker in the world.
The Swedish diplomat, veteran and politician Karl Bilde, has published a mockery of X.
“Certainly it is an innovative approach to negotiating to make very big concessions even before it begins. Even so Chamberlain decreased in 1938. Munich ended very bad anyway.”
Bilde posted a picture of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the time when he returned from Munich in 1938, waving the famous agreement that had no value with Adolf Hitler – and his price was surrender and the fragmentation of Czechoslovakia and faster slices towards World War II.
After the complete invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely filmed in the West as the new threat to European peace. Trump’s approach is very different.
He will have to try to bridge the gap between the positions of Putin and Zelinski, the polar opposites.
EPAZelinski’s announced goal is to restore the lost lands of Ukraine, which reaches about five of the total Earth’s mass. It also wants Ukraine to become a full member of NATO.
Putin insists that any peace deal will require Ukraine to abandon the land that Russia has seized, as well as the areas it did not occupy, including the city of Zaporesia, with a population of more than half a million. Ukraine will also become neutral and fake and will never join NATO.
Ukraine’s demands will not be acceptable in Moscow, and Trump has indicated that he does not like it either.
But Russia reaches a warning, not a dangerous peace proposal. Trump, who was previously developed, loves the deals that involve concrete real estate. But Putin wants more than the ground. He wants Ukraine to return to the relationship it had with the Kremlin during the days when it was part of the Soviet Union. In order for this to happen, Ukraine will have to lose independence and sovereignty.
Biden Ukraine offered enough to lose, because he took Putin’s threats using nuclear weapons if NATO enters seriously. Trump should be aware of the nuclear threat, but he also believes that Ukraine’s support indefinitely is bad for the United States, and can do what is better.
As for the Europeans, it may compel them to face the serious contrast between their military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Poland countries and the Baltic Movement only support their general statements about the threat of Russia to qualitatively increased defense spending.
With Russia grinding forward in the battlefields in eastern Ukraine, this is the most difficult moment that Zelinski will face since the first dark and desperate months of war, when Ukraine fought Russia’s attack on Kiev.
It is also the moment of a decision for its Western allies. They face difficult options that cannot be postponed for a longer period.