For three years, it was the center of the room, but now may not be sure to be in the right room.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been a twin figure of the Western unified position against a looting and autocratic Russia. An ecclesiastical presence that forced Europe to adopt a moral position against a Kremlin chief who for years sought to divide and bribe with such success.
However, Zelensky had a reduced figure on stage alongside US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this Wednesday in Kiev. Zelensky hoped to meet personally with US President Donald Trump to discuss a comprehensive view of peace after the US president suggested last week they could soon find themselves, and his team immediately started trying mark the meeting. Instead, Zelenkry was confronted with what he called “serious people” and a financial agreement delivered by Bessent, the US billionaire who became the money man in the US, who has not signed.
It was during Bessent’s brief visit that the news came that Trump had been in another place: perhaps to perform his second telephone call in recent days with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump had said on Saturday that they had spoken before, but Kremlin refused to confirm.
This time, the exchange of impressions had been sweetened by the unexpected liberation on Tuesday, by American prisoner Marc Fogel of Russian custody. Trump greeted the 61 -year -old liberated wrapped in stars and stripes, providing a perfect television moment of Kremlin rehabilitation in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Why not make a decent agreement with Moscow, if they are just good boys sending ours home?
It was 48 hours of feverish dreams, nightly night sweats and tremors for Zelensky. European leaders used to travel a day of fragile train to a photo shoot by their side. It is now the second on Trump’s list of contacts, after Putin, a man accused by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes against Ukraine, who poison his own people.
We just don’t know the details of what Trump and Putin said. But we can be sure that the Kremlin chief waited for this moment for three years – longing for his grotesque tolerance compared to hundreds of dead Russian diaries can be converted into a slit in the western unit, or in which members NATO Europeans are informed by its American guarantee that they are on their own.
Trump and Putin gave the tone, it seems, and Zelensky stayed with the Post-Brief. Trump even rejoiced at the fact that Putin used his “common sense” campaign slogan, suggesting that Kremlin’s head continues to study his opponent carefully to flattering him. Trump ended his second publication on the call with Zelensky with the remarkable phrase “God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!”
Hours earlier, Zelensky’s hopes for the fundamental principles of a peace agreement had been destroyed by the new US Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. Ukraine will not be part of the NATO. Ukraine will never return to its 2014 borders. Any peace maintenance forces between Russia and Ukraine will not be American but European or non -European. Europe has to take care of itself. The first two points we already knew – Ukraine has not been able to regain territory in its 2023 countereofensive and will probably be too chaotic in the next decade to become a member of the world’s most sophisticated military alliance.
But the composition of any future peacekeeping forces was crucial. Zelensky had openly demanded – in a series of interviews the previous week that had begun to seem a negotiation of a media peace agreement – that Americans were involved in maintaining peace, as security guarantees without America were “useless.” Hegseth was quick to burst this bubble, however fanciful that it was the notion that the US would insert their men and women as main targets in the world’s most brutal battlefield.
Instead, we are seeing the bones of a peace plan in public that approaches a plan proposed by the retired general Keith Kellogg in April, when he was a private citizen and not a presidential envoy to Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg suggested a man maintenance force manned by Europeans. He said that Ukraine should give up adherence to the NATO. He proposed a ceasefire (and since then, in interviews, suggested the holding of elections in Ukraine). And, most importantly, he said that Ukrainian aid should be transformed into loans that Kiev would one day reimburse. Perhaps this would be part of Bessent’s proposal to Zelensky on Wednesday.
Rare land minerals were also discussed in Kiev this Wednesday, although this is not necessarily good news based on precedents. When Trump was briefly seduced to support Afghanistan in 2017 because of his supposed value of billions of dollars in minerals, he signed an agreement with the Taliban to let them take the country just over two years later.
There are reasons to expect Trump’s approach to be based on more unchanging principles and sophisticated base work. He and his team clearly had confidential discussions and seem to be articulating a plan Kellogg formulated some time ago. This requires some discipline. But it also takes application, cunning and patience to take you to good port. Putin has this mass, and the victory in Ukraine will dictate his personal survival, his legacy and the balance of powers worldwide for decades. For Trump, the war in Ukraine is the thing he thought he could solve in 24 hours after reaching power, that he would never have started if he was in office in 2022.
It is not your priority. Zelensky is not. The man who is at the top of his contact list is Putin. It is with him that he seeks to make peace, although the United States is not technically at war in Ukraine. And that is, for now, everything we need to know.
