Let’s be brutally honest about recent events. Donald Trump is – and is behaving like – an unpredictable, selfish ignoramus. He is constantly mollycoddled by a group of sycophants – whether domestic or international – to prevent him from crashing the car.
To recap, he pronounced solemnly that unless there was an immediate ceasefire, Vladimir Putin’s Russia would itself face severe sanctions. He threatened India with sanctions for continued purchase of Russian oil. He stated that there had to be a ceasefire ahead of any meaningful negotiations. All this was done to show that he was squaring up to Putin. All a pretence.
He rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for Putin and within hours withdrew publicly any demand for a ceasefire. Putin was freed to continue his murderous barrage of Ukrainian civilian targets. But the meeting was described as “productive”. The body language was very friendly. Strangely, it now became up to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to do a deal with Putin. The deal would involve a “land swap”. The war, apparently, could go on until Zelenskiy offered Putin unspecified slices of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he and Putin had discussed land swaps and security guarantees for Ukraine and had ”largely agreed”.
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He invited Zelenskiy to Washington to outline these new US positions. Because of their collective fear that Trump was about to impose a Putin-designed peace on Ukraine, European allies of Zelenskiy engaged in feverish diplomacy and statement-making. They insisted that Ukraine had to be party to any negotiations leading to any deal to end Putin’s murderous war.
Eventually, the European leaders came up with the idea that they would physically accompany Zelenskiy to the White House to prevent any repetition of the disgraceful and cowardly Oval Office mauling to which he was subjected by Trump and JD Vance 5½ months earlier.
The result was a nervous, contrived engagement with the media in which the Europeans and Zelenskiy all engaged in sycophantic head-nodding and dressed up all their comments as being endorsements of carefully chosen shards of Trump’s shifting opinions. The scene was vaguely resonant of medieval courtiers dealing with an unpredictable, irascible king. It had to pass off with no hint of disagreement of any kind.
Now Trump has apparently settled on a process that Putin and Zelenskiy must meet on a bilateral basis – presumably without a prior ceasefire – and exchange incompatible demands. This will be done in the absence of the idiot-king.
Then there should be what Trump refers to as a “trilat” – a meeting which might end the war, with Trump preparing to accept the Nobel peace prize for which he has already been nominated by the great international pacifist, Binyamin Netanyahu. That appears to be the “deal” in Trump’s mind.
Frankly, all this is a sick charade. Zelenskiy is constitutionally prohibited from agreeing to a land swap or surrender of Ukraine’s territory. He cannot do so. The most that could be done is some agreement to put a peace deal to the people of Ukraine in some form of referendum or plebiscite.
Ukraine cannot agree to Russian demands that it abandon the portion of Donetsk which it still holds and has heavily fortified as a defensive bulwark against renewed Russian aggression. Nor can Zelenskiy credibly demand that his army continue to bravely defend those lands against the ongoing murderous Russian onslaught if they sense that their sacrifices will be thrown away at a conference table presided over by Trump. Any negotiations along those lines would simply destroy the eminently expendable Ukrainian president.
Zelenskiy, for his part, must face up to the reality that Ukraine does not have the resources, capacity or the allies to win back the lands Russia has seized. Crimea is not going to revert to Ukrainian control. Crimea, Russia’s window on the Black Sea, was Russian territory until 1954 when it was assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for purely internal USSR political convenience.
All now depends on the extent, depth and credibility of the security guarantees that the West can deliver for Ukraine if a deal is done on the basis of the current potential ceasefire line.
Putin probably calculates that he may be able to do a deal that still allows the Kremlin to manipulate Ukrainian democratic politics and elections into the future, as it has done in the past. It has also meddled in a similar way in countries such as Moldova and Romania. While Ukraine will not join Nato, the West owes it security guarantees similar to Article 5 of the Nato treaty and the arms to defend itself. The EU must be willing to give Ukraine European Economic Area status as soon as possible.
Trump simply cannot be trusted. He despises Zelenskiy and is in thrall to Putin. The summit in Washington had all the substance of a late-night game of charades at the court of King Donald.
