Expect Putin to pay big-time for trolling Trump – Latest News
We count on Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his high minions to quickly remorse their resolution to make a idiot of President Donald Trump.
At their Alaska summit, Putin gave Trump renewed hope for a peace deal on the Ukraine conflict — however that’s now trying like Lucy setting up Charlie Brown for one other soccer humiliation.
After initially signaling openness to a meet, Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s international secretary, simply dumped but more cold water on any likelihood for a Putin sitdown with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Bloviating on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Lavrov introduced, “There is no meeting planned,” and none will occur with out advance settlement that matches Putin’s “presidential agenda.”
And that agenda is “not ready at all”: Ukraine should publicly agree it can by no means be part of NATO, Zelensky should repeal legal guidelines that Lavrov claims ban “the Russian language” and concede prematurely on “territorial issues” Lavrov wouldn’t specify.
Oh, and he reiterated the Russians’ imagine that Zelensky isn’t Ukraine’s “legitimate” president, although “we recognize him as the de facto head of the regime.”
This follows a full week of Lavrov & Co. insisting, for instance, that no European troops could be deployed in Ukraine to secure the peace, and certainly demanding a veto over any post-war security ensures for Kyiv.
The Russians are additionally pushing laborious for Ukraine to agree prematurely that it’ll cede the half of Donbas that Putin’s been making an attempt to conquer since 2014.
All of it clearly contradicts the gist of what Vice President JD Vance says Putin agreed to in Anchorage: “They’ve recognized that they’re not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv, and importantly, they’ve acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Vance stated on the identical NBC show.
Yes, Putin from the beginning of his invasion has claimed he means to oust a supposed “neo-Nazi” regime in Kyiv (although Zelensky is Jewish!), and customarily insists that Ukraine is de facto simply a half of Russia that by no means ought to’ve been unbiased. So what?
If Vlad had been genuinely prepared to focus on a lasting peace deal, he’d have been prepared to set these delusions apart, and to order Lavrov and his fellow toadies to give up it.
Instead, Putin has his minions outright trolling not simply Zelensky, however Trump himself.
The American president’s been slowly signaling his displeasure, posting days ago of this war that “it is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking” the invader’s nation — a blatant warning that Washington may give Kyiv added means to strike deep inside Russia.
That’s on high of the threats Trump has conspicuously to this point left on the desk, together with secondary sanctions that will cripple Russia’s economic system and so its entire conflict machine.
Trump was past clear after Alaska that Putin solely had one other two weeks to publicly transfer towards a face-to-face with Zelensky as a key step in reaching a peace accord.
One week’s already completed, and Russia’s completed nothing however signal that no sitdown is in sight until Ukraine principally surrenders prematurely on each concern up for dialogue.
That is, Putin’s displaying “the art of the no-deal” — and treating Trump like a sucker for believing every thing he stated to the opposite in Anchorage.
The Russian plainly thinks he’ll get away with humiliating the chief of the Free World; it gained’t be fairly when Trump lastly strikes to dispel that delusion.
