Donald Trump met on Friday with Vladimir Putin, and he seems to think he got somewhere with respect to the three-year Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Reality check: what he got was his marching orders.
Putin, speaking at a press conference with no questions after the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, said he is “sincerely interested in putting an end” to the war in Ukraine, but only after “all the root causes of the crisis” have been “eliminated.”
It’s hard to figure that Team Trump didn’t leave the summit without an understanding of what Putin means there.
To Putin, “the root causes” that led to him ordering the invasion in 2022 are, he wants the world to believe he thinks Ukraine is rightly part of Russia, and that any resolution to the war that he started, and has cost his side hundreds of thousands of lives, and billions in rubles, will have to include a reunification.
Not just Russia maintaining territories it has already illegally seized in the war; the whole shebang.
If the “peace deal” that is ultimately achieved stops short of giving Ukraine to Putin, we should more consider it a ceasefire, because Putin, as long as he is living and breathing, will continue to have his eyes on Ukraine, as a first step toward reunifying Russia with former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.
Trump, from his public statements following the summit, isn’t betraying that he has any sense of this.
“We agreed on a lot of points, I mean, a lot of points, we’re agreed on,” Trump told Fox News water-carrier Sean Hannity in an interview post-summit, adding that “there’s not that much, there’s one or two pretty significant items, but I think they can be reached.”
“Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done, and I would also say the European nations. They have to get involved a little bit. But it’s up to President Zelensky,” Trump said.
You have to be able to see what he means there.
Trump, who seems to think that Ukraine launched the Russian invasion on Ukraine, famously dressed down Zelensky in the Oval Office earlier this year, telling Zelenksy that he is “gambling with World War III” by not being willing to accept Putin’s terms.
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post overnight that Zelensky is flying to DC for a meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, which he hopes is a prelude to a joint meeting with Trump, Zelensky and Putin at some point after, “if it all works out.”
It feels to me that what is happening here is, Putin gave Trump his marching orders yesterday in Anchorage, and now it’s Trump’s job to create another Oval Office spectacle to badger Zelensky into relenting.
Zelensky, for his part in this, isn’t bending.
In a lengthy statement posted on the socials, the Ukraine president stressed that “real peace must be achieved, one that will be lasting, not just another pause between Russian invasions,” buttressing the point that I made earlier, that anything less than a full Russian troop withdrawal from Ukraine’s February 2022 borders is a non-starter.
“In my conversation with President Trump, I said that sanctions should be strengthened if there is no trilateral meeting, or if Russia tries to evade an honest end to the war. Sanctions are an effective tool,” Zelensky said.
“Security must be guaranteed reliably and in the long term, with the involvement of both Europe and the U.S. All issues important to Ukraine must be discussed with Ukraine’s participation, and no issue, particularly territorial ones, can be decided without Ukraine,” Zelensky said.
Observers are still reeling from the contrast to how Trump treated Zelensky in the Oval Office and the prostrated greeting that he gave to Putin upon the Russian dictator’s arrival in Alaska on Friday – Trump, standing at the end of a red carpet, visibly applauding for Putin, a war criminal, and later conferring superpower status upon a country with the world’s 11th-biggest GDP, its $2.1 trillion annual economic output in 2024 barely half that of California.
Of course this is why Putin invaded Ukraine – not so much to reunify with Ukraine, but to reassert Russia as a world power, nearly 40 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The photo-op on U.S. soil was among the end goals with the Ukraine invasion for Putin, who no doubt could hardly contain his glee that the unsophisticated Trump somehow wormed his way back into office last fall, knowing that he can play Trump like a fiddle.
All he had to do Friday was tell Trump that Trump’s long-claimed assertion that Russia would have never invaded Ukraine if Trump had won re-election in 2020 was true, knowing that flattery gets you everywhere with the narcissist-in-chief.
Those magic words having been uttered, Trump is almost certainly now putty in the former KGB agent’s hands.
European leaders, to their credit, are trying to play the flattery game with Trump.
A joint statement by leaders from the France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Finland, Poland and the European Commission and EU fluffed Trump, thanking him for bringing Putin to the table, before getting to the point.
“We are clear that Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement read. “We welcome President Trump’s statement that the U.S. is prepared to give security guarantees. The Coalition of the Willing is ready to play an active role. No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries. Russia cannot have a veto against Ukraine‘s pathway to EU and NATO. It will be up to Ukraine to make decisions on its territory. International borders must not be changed by force.”
That’s the whole of Europe there signaling to Trump, we’re not going to let you cave to Putin.
Will it work?
“President Trump and I have established a strong, trusting and practical relationship. I would like to hope that the understanding we have reached will allow us to get closer to that goal and open the way to peace in Ukraine,” Putin said at the press conference that wasn’t on Friday, without elaborating, because he didn’t need to.
Trump, speaking after Putin, told reporters that he’s “always had a fantastic relationship” with Putin, then went on to add that “some great progress” had been made during “an extremely productive meeting,” that “many points were agreed to” and that “just a very few” issues were left to resolve.
That comes on Monday, when he dresses down Zelensky in front of the world a second time, at which point we very well could get World War III.
Support AFP
Share
Chris Graham
