Major questions remain over what both sides might accept after Trump held successive talks with Putin and Zelensky.
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If Trump gets his way, on the other side of the bargaining table would be a Russian leader who has offered no indication he’s willing to make even the slightest shift in the strategies he’s pursued since he launched his invasion three years ago. He left Fairbanks having made no concessions while receiving several in return.
Putin pines for the glory days of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the man in the White House is no Ronald Reagan
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We have only Trump’s assurance that Putin is willing to meet with Zelenskyy, with no confirmation from Moscow that such is the case. “We don’t know whether the Russian president will have the courage to attend such a summit,” Germany’s Merz
noted frankly.
Putin makes no bones that he despises the Ukraine president. He’s
denounced him as “a disgrace to the Jewish people,” dismissed his leadership as illegitimate and derided Ukraine’s government as a “neo-Nazi regime.” He
justifies Russia’s invasion as a necessary evil to “finally eradicate Nazism.”
An agreement as Washington envisions it thus would require Ukraine to trust in Donald Trump, and Trump to depend on the reliability of Vladimir Putin.
We know from experience what would likely happen if the two combatants got together and emerged with nothing to show for it: rather than accept his grand plan had failed, Trump would wash his hands of it and fix on a scapegoat, probably Ukraine as the weaker of the two. Without the prospect for personal glory, his interest would quickly fade.
Even if Ukraine does receive a pledge of security guarantees, Europe would do well to gird for the worst
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