US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
This is a hail Mary for Putin. He knows his goose is cooked if Russia doesn’t win, and the only way he can win is if Trump forces Ukrain to surrender.
The bad news for Putin is that everybody already knows this, and also knows that Trump can’t really do much except act like the assclown that he is. The Europeans aren’t going to reward Putin. And they know that Trump’s days are numbered, and each of those days is going to show more cognitive decline and increasingly grotesque displays of megalomania, even if one of his many other crimes and scandals doesn’t render him incapable of further outrages.
And whether it’s Trump or Putin who goes first, the other will soon follow. They are propping each other up, and the whole arrangement is unstable.
Unfortunately the EU is sucking up to Trump nonstop. Now weakening the GDPR for example, and promising billions of investment while receiving nothing in return but a weak promise that there will be no further tariffs.