“Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?” That question, according to US vice president J.D. Vance, was the essence of yesterday’s phone call between his boss Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. What Vance meant was to question whether Putin was serious about peace. But turning the question on its head would actually be far more revealing. Is Putin serious about winning the war? Absolutely. Is he real about fighting on until he achieves his goal of subjugating Ukraine? Also very much yes.
Is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war?
There’s a second way to flip the question, and that’s to ask: is Trump serious about pressuring Russia into ending the war? And the answer to that, sadly for the Ukrainians, seems to be resoundingly negative.
The most obvious sign that the two-hour phone call had not gone well for Kyiv was that Putin himself professed that the peace process was “generally on the right track,” according to a readout on RIA Novosti.
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