We need to re-imagine Donald Trump’s approach to ending Russia’s war in Ukraine by turning that proposition on its head. What he’s negotiating is a reset with Russia, making Kyiv and its future just the most valuable card that the U.S. president has in his hand to trade.
Viewed from this perspective, there’s no reason to be shocked by the fact that Ukraine and Europe were absent at Tuesday’s high-level meeting between Putin and Trump administration officials, for this was about the relationship between America and Russia, not Ukraine. Nor by the otherwise disgraceful way in which Trump is now trying to tar Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the obstacle to a settlement.
It also begins to make more sense that the master of "the art of the deal” would have begun — rather than ended — his campaign with phone calls to President Vladimir Putin and promptly concede to most of Moscow’s Ukraine demands before talks on the war have even begun. Those concessions already run from "no” to Ukraine joining NATO or getting its occupied territory back, to a call for wartime elections to get rid of Zelenskyy — a first step in the Kremlin’s demands for Kyiv’s so-called "denazification.”
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