President Donald Trump has apparently decided that bringing peace to Ukraine is just too hard.
Even giving Russian President Vladimir Putin carte blanche to dictate the terms of any end to his war on a sovereign neighbor hasn’t swayed the Kremlin leader to quit while he’s ahead.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its disruption of the post-World War II order is churning through its fourth year. Battlefield deaths and injuries among Russian troops and their North Korean and Chinese brothers-in-arms have depleted ground forces, compelling Putin to lean on aerial bombardment to continue terrorizing Ukrainian civilians while Trump postures as a savvy negotiator on the brink of closing a peace deal.
But Trump’s famously short attention span has been severely taxed in his self-proclaimed mission to end the war within 24 hours of his inauguration. As his second term nears its 100-day benchmark, the president is distracted by a whirlwind of domestic and global disasters demanding his focus.
On the campaign trail he also promised that inflation would cease the minute he was back in office as U.S. producers and consumers would have confidence in his mastery of economic administration. Trump is now threatening to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates, which economists overwhelmingly believe would raise prices even higher.
Trump is also busy battling federal judges, including his own appointees on the Supreme Court, who are calling out his trampling of constitutional rights by denying due process before deporting undocumented migrants, foreign students who protest against Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, and the occasional “administrative error” sending the wrong person to a hellish gulag in El Salvador along with hundreds of others disappeared on clandestine flights.
As the stock market tumbles and a global trade war looms over his chaotic imposition of tariffs on friendly and hostile nations alike, Trump is forced to pare down his burgeoning to-do list of international crises and constitution-dismantling at home.
Something has to give on an overloaded crisis agenda for the real estate developer who calls himself a very stable genius. That something appears to be further effort to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine. It’s just too hard, Trump says, given the leaders he has to work with.
“If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass,” Trump told an Oval Office media sweep on Friday. The president again blamed Ukraine for starting the war that Russia launched on Feb. 24, 2022, with an invasion of 190,000 troops.
Waving the white flag on U.S. diplomacy in the Russia-Ukraine violence started the previous day with Secretary of State Marco Rubio after a call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov where he learned the Kremlin wasn’t interested in stopping the war right now.
Lavrov, like Putin, claims the war can’t come to an end until its “root causes” are eliminated. That is the Kremlin’s euphemistic reference to the current Russian leadership refusing to abide by the Belovezha Accords, the 1991 agreement declaring the fractured Soviet Union had ceased to exist and that the sovereignty and independence devolved to the 15 constituent republics be respected. The accords were negotiated and signed by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Putin’s demands to unravel a peacefully negotiated resolution of secession movements within the USSR in the 1980s would throw into question the worth of any Russian agreement, as if British Prime Minister Keir Starmer or King Charles III could renounce the outcome of the Revolutionary War and demand to get its U.S. colonies back.
Putin defines the root causes of the Ukraine conflict as NATO expansion into states and regions once part of the Soviet Union or its Eastern European sphere of influence. Ukrainian aspirations to join Western security and economic alliances is also considered a provocation to war.
Rubio, a Russia hawk before being appointed by Trump to the post of the United States’ top diplomat, has been a grave disappointment to foreign policy experts who expected the son of Cuban émigrés to retain their community’s fierce opposition to authoritarian rule.
Rubio became agitated after Lavrov spurned Trump’s latest appeal for some show of commitment to pursuing a peaceful resolution of the war. Trump’s negotiators managed to earn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s agreement to a 30-day ceasefire back in February, but Trump failed to persuade his authoritarian idol in the Kremlin to sign on to the pause.
“We are now reaching a point where we need to decide whether this is even possible or not,” Rubio said Thursday of getting an agreement on ending the war. “Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on.”
“It’s not our war,” Rubio said. “We have other priorities to focus on.”
Putin has refused to join any agreement to halt fighting, even at the personal urging of Trump. Nearly a month after the 30-day ceasefire was spurned, Putin told Trump in a March 18 phone call that he would agree instead not to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Russian attacks over the past month have mostly ceased on nuclear and other major energy facilities but at the expense of round-the-clock deadly drone and missile bombardment of civilian communities across the breadth of Ukraine. At least 37 were killed and more than 100 wounded in aerial barrages in the Sumy province on Palm Sunday.
Putin has made acceptance of a ceasefire on condition Ukraine halt mobilisation of fighters to replace the tens of thousands of troops killed in 38 months since Russia invaded. The Kremlin leader also demands that U.S and other Western states stop supplying military aid to Kyiv.
Trump has put little if any pressure on Putin to make concessions or agree to interim steps like a ceasefire. He has made it clear in his disparaging of Zelensky that he favors Russian objectives in the war over the interests of a just peace and security in Ukraine and the broader European community.
In an Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky on Feb. 28, Trump berated the Ukrainian leader for refusing to negotiate over territory Putin wants, calling the visiting head of state disrespectful and insufficiently grateful for the billions in U.S. aid provided Ukraine since the start of the war. Trump cancelled a scheduled joint press conference and had Zelensky escorted out of the White House.
On Thursday, Trump said during a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has more supportive views toward Ukraine and Zelensky, said he didn’t blame the Ukrainian president for starting the war but noted “I am not a big fan.”
Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told Fox News’ Hannity after his latest visit to the Kremlin that making peace in Ukraine comes down to the five regions of Ukrainian territory Putin wants in exchange for ending his war. Russia annexed the strategic province of Crimea in 2014 after a stealth invasion by Russian paratroopers of the predominantly Russian-populated Ukrainian territory on the Black Sea. The other four regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—are only partially occupied by Russian forces and would reward Putin with more territory than he has managed to take in his decade-long attempt to conquer Ukraine.
European Union and NATO states have rallied to Ukraine’s defense, professing support in its struggle to push back on Putin’s unprovoked invasion. The Europeans are scrambling to provide military aid Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are loathe to continue since President Joe Biden left office. But European NATO states can’t produce the armaments Ukraine needs overnight.
In a CBS 60 Minutes interview aired on April 13, Zelensky called Russia’s invasion a war “against the democracy, against the values, against the whole world.”
“It is not just idle speculation; the threat is real. Putin’s ultimate goal is to revive the Russian empire and reclaim territories currently under NATO protection,” Zelensky said, warning that the Kremlin’s eye on states and territory U.S. forces are obliged to protect could escalate into a world war if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine.
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