US President Donald Trump’s deal-with-the-devil spivery is trampling all over decades of diplomacy that has kept Europe largely protected from Russian ambition.
His lightning quick real-estate dealer talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine are blundering, they are an outrage, and defy all of the rules in deal-making. It has already been said repeatedly that World War III is already underway, albeit in the grey zone, the shadows, fought by Putin’s sabotage, espionage and kill squads throughout the west. Trump has ignored that and appears to be riding roughshod over his NATO allies and crucially the centre of resistance towards Putin’s ambition in Kyiv.
Quite deliberately, he telegraphed to Putin that it is now okay to cast a power-hungry eye on another country’s territory with his idiotic mumblings about wanting to expand. His ambition to own Canada, Greenland, to own Gaza, to retake the Panama Canal and now even to inflict “change” on Cuba told Russia and China their expansion wishes are okay. All of this has tipped the nod to Putin that he will go easy on him over Ukraine and even to China’s President Xi Jinping, who wants to invade Taiwan.
Instead of being strong and closing down Moscow and Beijing’s greed he has opened the door, waved them in and told them and their allies “you’re welcome – help yourself”. Whatever conversation he had with Putin, he had already given him a massive hint that the Moscow gangster despot is going to get away with a slice of Ukraine. More than a million Russian and Ukrainian troops have died on the altar of Putin’s lying ambition to expand and it will not stop with Crimea and the Donbas.
The damage from Moscow’s relentless bombing of civilian targets will cost at least £500 billion to repair and to make liveable huge swathes of territory again. Putin’s military vandalism will take decades to mend, well beyond the lifespan of him and Trump in a legacy that will leave current and future generations sickened. Trump has gone over Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky ’s head, ignored the warnings from NATO defence chiefs and politicians and appears to have given Putin an off-ramp.
Domestically Putin has been holding on for dear life for Trump to enter the arena and do a silly deal with the US over the future of Ukraine and nobody believes it will end there. In the years between the western leaning Maidan Revolution of 2014 Putin flooded eastern Urkaine with his GRU spooks, spreading anti-Kyiv propaganda and arms. Within years his preparations for the full scale invasion of 2023 were so blatant the civil war in east Ukraine had settled into brutal trench warfare.
And all the time he denied a full-scale invasion was on the cards. Now, if Ukraine is forced into capitulating the land, some 20% of Ukrainian territory that it already dominates, Putin will be given cartel blanche to do whatever he likes. Nobody in their right mind believes for a second that Putin will stick to any agreement settled with Trump as he has repeatedly lied about his intentions.
This is an immense power blow to the brave Ukrainian troops who have effectively become our NATO allies, incredibly holding back Russian expansion into their country. It is said that Trump spoke with Putin for an hour and then Zelensky, the latter being put in an appalling position, saying: “We have paid the highest price for our existence.”
This has caused a storm in Ukraine, a catastrophic diplomacy blunder that threatens the very part of Europe and beyond that his troops have been defending for almost three years. And it will take an immense diplomacy effort to mend. NATO chief Mark Rutte had this to day: “It is crucial that whatever comes out of these talks is durable. “We cannot have Putin trying to capture more kilometres of Ukrainian territory in the future.”
It is almost as if he has seen into the future. Because that is exactly what Putin will already be planning.
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