With the phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the quest for a peace deal for Ukraine is off to a troubling start. The conversation hinted at an eventual normalisation of United States-Russia relations and signalled that negotiations are likely to be led over the heads of Europeans – and Ukrainians – and possibly without input from Trump’s own Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg. ‘As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine’, Donald Trump wrote after his conversation with the Russian leader. ‘President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’ We both believe very strongly in it.’
Signalling in advance what the US is not willing to do projects weakness to Putin and sets Ukraine up for failure
At the Nato ministerial meeting on Wednesday, meanwhile, the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that, as part of a future peace deal, Ukraine would not be admitted into Nato, that US troops would not serve in a peacekeeping role, and that any European peacekeepers would not be covered by the alliance’s Article 5.
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