Aug. 17 – Saturday was a day of reactions to the Alaska meeting, to the images it left behind, and to its implications, as the various actors tried to adapt to the new situation created by Donald Trump’s latest change of position, which was observed on Friday night and confirmed on Saturday in his call to European partners and his post on social media.
Russia had arrived at the meeting in a position that was assumed to be vulnerable, especially after the United States’ apparent adoption of European postulates and red lines. Donald Trump adhered, at least judging by what has transpired from the meeting, to the idea of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” although not necessarily “nothing about Europe without Europe.”
This is suggested by Vladimir Putin’s comment in his appearance alongside his U.S. counterpart, in which the Russian president referred to an “understanding” with the White House — and not an agreement, as several media outlets erroneously translated, causing significant confusion — and warned European countries against attempting to sabotage or manipulate the terms.
It’s not difficult to see in this statement a reminder of the Minsk process, in which both France and Germany protected Ukraine so it could afford not to comply with the terms it had signed.
Despite this supposed understanding, the absence of questions at the press conference, the brief intervention of the U.S. president, and his lack of enthusiasm reflected what Trump confirmed in a subsequent interview with Sean Hannity, a sympathetic journalist who gave him the opportunity to present his message.
According to Trump, an agreement with Russia is close, although there are some issues, especially one that the president did not specify, but that is easy to deduce — security — that have not yet been reached.
On the European continent, editorials and opinion pieces reflected disappointment in both the substance and the manner in which the Alaska summit was held. “Once again, Trump threatens but doesn’t deliver. When the opponent is stronger, of course. If they’re weaker, then he puffs out his chest and becomes a force to be reckoned with.
“Just compare the more than deferential treatment of Putin at the Anchorage summit with the shameful and humiliating ambush he organized for Zelensky at the White House. Red carpet, flyover, applause and smiles, a shared seat in the presidential armored limousine, and not a single rebuke for the dictator, who faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes and who has once again rejected the essential ceasefire prior to balanced peace negotiations,” wrote Lluis Bassets in El País, an example of the tone taken yesterday by the European press, which focused only on the most negative aspects and failed to note, for example, that the planned lunch between the delegations didn’t take place or that Trump made it clear that there will be no economic agreements with Russia until a ceasefire is reached.
Throughout yesterday, analysts, leaders, and lobbyists tried to analyze every gesture and every word to reach the conclusion that neither the most negative scenario, that of the announcement of a firm agreement between two superpowers, nor the one desired by Kiev and its European allies, that of the application of the ultimatum to Russia, had occurred. However, positions softened over the hours toward much more pessimistic positions following Donald Trump’s post on his personal social media platform.
“Everyone decided that the best way to end the terrible war between Russia and Ukraine is to directly reach a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a simple Ceasefire Agreement, which often does not hold up. President Zelensky will come to Washington, D.C., to the Oval Office on Monday afternoon. If all goes well, we will schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of lives will be saved,” he wrote.
Root causes of the war
At the meeting, Russia failed to secure, if that was its objective, an agreement from the White House to accept its conditions for ending the war, but it may have achieved something more important, something that has greatly worried Kiev’s European allies.
The nervousness caused by Vladimir Putin’s mention of the “root causes” of the war — a comment interpreted by media outlets such as the BBC as a rejection of Ukraine’s existence and a Russian desire to end the Ukrainian state, despite actually referring to NATO expansion and the policies implemented since the victory of Maidan — was compounded in the afternoon by information about the “complicated call” with European partners, who found themselves once again in the same situation as a week ago.
Confident that last week’s collective conference call had made Trump understand the need for a ceasefire as a prerequisite for future negotiations, the Russian president was able to give his U.S. counterpart arguments to believe that a truce is not enough and a definitive agreement is necessary. What Trump may not understand is that this option, which would involve a binding document much more difficult to breach or manipulate, is the most detrimental for European countries, second only to a direct agreement between Russia and the United States. That option would mean, for continental capitals, the strategic defeat of the way they have approached war as a way to transform the European security structure to their advantage.
“We are clear that Ukraine must have unwavering security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the United States is ready to offer security guarantees. The Coalition of the Willing is ready to play an active role. No limitations should be imposed on Ukraine’s armed forces or its cooperation with third countries. Russia cannot veto Ukraine’s path to the EU and NATO,” stated the most relevant part of the European Commission’s statement, which, contrary to all realism, insists on Ukraine’s territorial integrity, a goal that has proven impossible, and on Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic path, one of the root causes of the current war.
Without the slightest ability to present a political path to end the war and with no proposals other than the eternal continuation of arms supplies to Ukraine until the final defeat of the Russian Federation, European countries persist in the same recipe that has failed for three years.
“After meeting with the Russian president, President Trump told European leaders that he now favors ceding unoccupied Ukrainian territory to Russia to end the fighting, a concession Ukraine has long opposed. This breaks with a strategy that Trump, his European allies, and Zelensky had agreed upon before the U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska,” the New York Times lamented yesterday.
Without any certainty, the New York Times, like most of the Western press, assumes that Donald Trump has once again abandoned his pro-Ukrainian stance to adopt a pro-Russian one and has adopted Moscow’s postulates as his own — at least until Zelensky convinces him otherwise on Monday.
As with the Ukrainian counterproposal, the same ideas have been repeated throughout this war, both at times when Ukraine was on the attack and when it was struggling to maintain its defense.
There is nothing new in the Russian proposal. As already known from the leaks following the meeting with Witkoff, Russia proposes freezing the front in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, admitting that it will not capture all of these Ukrainian regions, returning the territories of Sumi and Kharkov, and demanding that Ukraine hand over the part of Donetsk currently under its control. As with Istanbul in 2022, Moscow is also demanding linguistic rights and religious freedom for the Ukrainian population whose language, culture, or religion is Russian, and the withdrawal from NATO membership, with the consolidation of neutrality.
The position of European countries, which, after the Witkoff meeting, believed they heard from the U.S. president that Russia was willing to withdraw from Kherson and Zaporozhye, but demanded to receive all of Donbass, is fraught with a curious paradox.
Much less concerned about the fate of Donetsk, European capitals are willing to offer security guarantees to Ukraine, something Russia offered and Western countries denied in 2022, and demand a Russian withdrawal from those regions beyond Donbass.
In other words, Brussels, London, Paris, and Berlin are demanding something very similar to what Moscow believed it had agreed with Ukraine in Istanbul in April 2022, before much of the death and destruction of the war had occurred — a proposal the European powers considered unacceptable at the time and which led to their commitment to war as the only possible path to resolving the conflict.
Translated by Melinda Butterfield
Source: Slavyangrad.es
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