NewsX World (India): Trump and Zelensky meet during Pope's funeral
Yesterday afternoon's interview with News X focused on the fake news coming from Kiev: that Zelensky's 15 minutes chat with Donald Trump in Rome signified a change in relations with the American President, who allegedly now is favoring Ukraine over Russia in any peace settlement.
As they say, Zelensky was putting lipstick on a pig. They fail to mention that a second meeting with Trump after the funeral was refused by the White House: They fail to compare the 15 minutes Zelensky was accorded with the 3 hours that Trump's personal emissary Steve Witkoff spent with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow the day before, on Friday.
As of last night, Russian state television remains cautiously optimistic that a full detente with the United States is possible, regardless of whether the Trump-brokered peace talks between Russia and Ukraine succeed or fail.
(
)
I thought international negotiations were conducted between participants of roughly equal rank, president to president, foreign minister to foreign minister, etc. Is it unusual for a head of state, Putin in this case, to meet and negotiate with an envoy who doesn't even have an official rank? (I know Norman Cousins acted as a personal envoy for JFK to Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis but Witkoff seems more than that.) Is this remarkable and if so, what's the meaning?
If we assume, for the sake of discussion, that Donald Trump is sincerely committed to two of the objectives that he has repeatedly announced, namely extricating the US from "project Ukraine" and normalizing relations with Russia (which is the only sane scheme), then he is making a huge mistake in amalgamating the two issues together, which insures that accomplishing them will not succeed. They are, of course, not unrelated, but extricating the US from the Ukraine conflict requires different actions than the normalization of relations. What Trump should do about the US military involvement in Ukraine is to immediately cut off all aid to, and support of, the Ukrainian war effort, including the supply of weapons, financing (the US is paying the salaries of the Ukrainian military, intelligence agencies, and government), intelligence, and supply from without (e.g. through bases serving as depots in Poland)—in other words, basta! There is no need for the US to be trying to mediate a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine or to involve the Europeans in the American withdrawal: these things just serve as hopeless confusions. The US should leave Russia to finish the Special Military Operation as it will and to impose its conditions, announced from the beginning, on Ukraine: de-militarization, neutrality, and de-Nazification. These are all ultimately to Ukraine's advantage. If Trump wants credit for being a real peacemaker in Europe, he should use American "soft power", or what might be left of it, to further the achievement of a unified European Security Architecture, in which no nation strengthens its security at the expense of the security of any other nation. That would be difficult to accomplish with the Euroupeans being the fanatics and Russophobes that they now are, but it would be in fact be a win-win accomplishment for Europe, Russia, and the US. If Trump is the "deal maker" that he brags about being, he could prove himself through that and bask in well-deserved glory. As far as normalization goes, the accomplishment of a unified security architecture would be an essential element. Beyond that, annulling the US sanctions on Russia (including secondary sanctions) would also be necessary, and finally the establishment of cooperative and mutually beneficial trade relations. If the Europeans want to leave themselves out of those, more's the pity for them. What I have described is the fairly obvious route to Trump's accomplishing both of the announced objectives mentioned at the beginning. Of course that Trump is seriously committed to them was introduced as an hypothesis . . . The resistence to these accomplishments would be enormous—from the US military-industrial complex, the bought-and-paid-for US Congress, the US Deep State, the Europeans, and—not least—the Israelis. It's doubtful that Trump is courageous enough, skillful enough, and persistent enough to do it, even assuming that he really is committed; but I think it's the only real hope—a very slim one, indeed. There's NO hope in the present approaches.