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International editor
The United States is under a new management. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, joins a growing list of American allies who are discovering that the world according to Donald Trump is a colder place, more uncertain and potentially more dangerous for them.
It must have been bad enough for Zelensky to listen time in Saudi Arabia.
After Putin, the White House marked the number of Zelensky. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine the next morning, Zelensky accepted the fact that Putin received the first call: “Although to be honest, it is not very pleasant.”
What Zelensky asked more was that Trump, who called him after talking with Putin, seemed to consider it, in the best case, as a junior attachment of any peace conversation. One of Zelensky’s many nightmares must be the possibility that Trump and Putin try to establish the future of Ukraine without anyone else in negotiation.
He told reporters that Ukraine “will not be able to accept any agreements” made without their participation.
It was vital, he said, “everything does not agree with Putin’s plan, in which he wants to do everything to make his bilateral negotiations.”
President Zelensky goes to the Munich Security Conference, starting Friday, where he will try to bring together the allies of Ukraine. He faces a difficult meeting with Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who was one of the most severe critics of Joe Biden’s help to Ukraine.
The argument that Zelensky will hear from the Americans is that Ukraine is losing and must be real about what happens next. He will argue that Ukraine can win, with the right back.
The European Union is also worried. After gathering and praising the Ukraine Minister of Defense, Rustem Umerov, the EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas, published that Europe must have a central role in any negotiation. “Our priority should now be to strengthen Ukraine and provide solid security guarantees,” Kallas said.
Zelensky is painfully aware that while its European allies are much firmer than Americans, the United States remains the strongest military power in the world. He told The Guardian last week that “security guarantees without the United States are not real security guarantees.”
Collectively, European allies have given Ukraine more money than the US. But Americans have air defense weapons and systems, such as patriot missile batteries that protect kyiv, that Europeans simply cannot provide.
Putin will be delighted that he is getting a much easier trip than Biden. The former president of the United States called Putin, among other things, a “pure thug”, a “brutal tyrant” and a “murderous dictator” and cut the contact after the large -scale invasion of Russia of Ukraine in February in February 2022.
Just to lead home the point that everything had changed, Trump followed the positive evaluation of his talk with Putin with an early optimistic position in the morning on his platform, Truth Social, reflecting on “great conversations with Russia and Ukraine yesterday.” Now there was a “good possibility of finishing that horrible and very bloody war!”
Putin is not only talking with the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he can now see himself as the referee of the end of the game in the war that began when he broke international law with the total invasion of Ukraine almost exactly three years ago.
In the White House, Trump seemed to suggest that the large number of deaths and injured in the Russian army gave some legitimacy to Putin’s demand to maintain the land captured and annexed by Russia.
“They took many lands and fought for that land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “part of that will return.”
The comments of his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at an NATO meeting in Brussels were more direct. I wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous.” But “we must begin by recognizing that returning to the borders prior to 2014 of Ukraine is an unrealistic objective.”
“Pursuing this illusory objective will only prolong war and cause more suffering.”
Trump is still at the end of what could become an impossiblely hard diplomatic challenge. To boast that he has the key to ending the Russo-Ukraine war is one thing. Getting that happens is something else.
His statement before any conversation with Russia begins that Ukraine will not join NATO or recover all its occupied lands has been widely criticized as a bad beginning by a man who claims to be the best merchant in the world.
Swedish diplomatic and political veteran Carl Bildt published an ironic rebuke in X.
“Without a doubt, it is an innovative approach to a negotiation making very important concessions even before they started. Not even Chamberlain was so low in 1938. Munich ended very badly anyway.”
Bildt published a photo of the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, on his return from Munich in 1938, stirring the notorious and worthless value with Adolf Hitler, whose price was the capitulation and rupture of Czechoslovakia and a faster slide Towards a World War II.
After the large -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely portrayed in the West as the new threat to European peace. Trump’s approach for him is very different.
You will have to try to close the gap between the positions of Putin and Zelensky, which are polar opposites.
The declared objective of Zelensky is to recover the lost territory of Ukraine, which is equivalent to about a fifth of its total mass of land. He also wants Ukraine to become a NATO member.
Putin insists that any peace agreement would require Ukraine to renounce the land that Russia has captured, as well as areas that it has not occupied, including the city of Zaporizhzhia, which has a population of more than half a million. Ukraine would also become neutral, demilitarized and would never join NATO.
Ukraine demands will not be acceptable to Moscow, and Trump has indicated that he does not like.
But the amount of Russia to an ultimatum, not a serious peace proposal. Trump, once a developer, likes agreements that involve tangible real estate. But Putin wants more than earth. He wants Ukraine to return to the relationship he had with Kremlin during the days he was part of the Soviet Union. For that to happen, Ukraine would have to lose his independence and sovereignty.
Biden offered Ukraine enough not to lose, because he took Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons if NANAN seriously intervened. Trump must be aware of the nuclear danger, but he also believes that supporting Ukraine indefinitely is a bad business for the United States, and can do better.
As for Europeans, they could force them to face the serious disparity among their military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Only Poland and the Baltic States are supporting their public statements about Russia’s threat with a higher increased increase defense expense.
With Russia advancing in the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, this is the most difficult time that Zelensky will have faced since the first dark and desperate months of the war, when Ukraine fought against Russia’s attack against kyiv.
It is also a moment of decision for its western allies. They face difficult decisions that cannot be discouraged much more.