Positive signs for peace — but pressure Putin if – Latest News
President Donald Trump declared Monday a success, posting round 6 p.m. that he’d “had a very good meeting with distinguished guests,” then “a further meeting in the Oval Office.”
After which he phoned Russia’s Vladimir Putin to begin arranging a Putin sitdown with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, then “we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself.”
Crucially, he was caught on a scorching mic earlier saying he believes Putin really desires to succeed in a peace deal: “I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”
The day sure provided grounds for hope, beginning with an Oval Office love-in as Trump, Zelensky and a pack of European leaders cooed at one another.
Finland’s President Alexander Stubb most likely best summed up the gang’s reward for Trump: “I think in the past two weeks, we’ve probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past 3½ years.”
And: “The fact that we’re around this table today is very much symbolic in the sense that it’s team Europe and team United States helping Ukraine.”
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Up within the air: Can the West give Kyiv enough exhausting security ensures that it’d give Putin half of what he desires as his price for peace?
And: When if ever will Trump ever flip the screws on Putin to make him cut back that price?
Those long-discussed secondary sanctions are an apparent cudgel that would depart the Kremlin no alternative but to bend.
Vlad’s demanding a lot, together with give up of Ukraine’s “fortress cities” in Donetsk: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka — which have held out not simply since Russia’s 2022 invasion, but for the reason that 2014 offensive.
In exchange, he’s offering to return some of the different Ukrainian land he’s now occupying, plus he’ll deign to just accept the truth that the West is making these security ensures.
We say “hard” ensures, by the way in which, as a result of Washington and Moscow each promised to guard Ukraine’s territorial integrity many years in the past, as half of the deal the place Kyiv gave up the nukes it inherited from the USSR — but when Putin broke Russia’s phrase with that 2014 invasion, President Barack Obama refused to make good on America’s commitments.
Hence the need for one thing like deployment of precise European and even US troops to secure a peace.
In Alaska on Friday, Putin apparently instructed Trump he might settle for one thing like that — but Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday was calling it fully unacceptable.
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It seems like Trump and the Europeans are all on the identical web page; they’re backing Trump’s plan for a Putin-Zelensky assembly that would settle issues.
Which places the ball in Putin’s court docket: For years, he’s refused any such such sitdown with out preconditions that quantity to Zelensky’s give up.
If he desires to make a deal, he’ll bend now; if not, Trump has to show up the heat with secondary sanctions.
