As Ukraine peace talks continue, Putin holds all the cards

By: Mark Almond / The Independent
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Donald Trump's special envoy for negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, Steve Witkoff, has been scorned by veteran Ukraine observers for his ignorance of the terrain he appears to be about to share with Vladimir Putin.

When Russia organized referendums in southeastern Ukraine at gunpoint in 2022, Witkoff called them “legitimate expressions” of the popular will. In reality, the Russian military did not control all of the regions that Putin was formally annexing—it even lost a large part of the Kherson region just days later.

Anyone who remembers Liz Truss’s rather embarrassing visit to Moscow just before the war – when, with her usual attention to detail, she confused Russian territory with Ukrainian – knows that self-confident ignorance is not an American monopoly. But don’t be too quick to mock Witkoff, however factually incorrect he may be. Remember that Witkoff is like a weather vane – showing the global outlook of a powerful group of Trump supporters.

A sympathetic interpretation of Witkoff’s loose approach to Ukrainian reality might be that he is only concerned with reaching an agreement—not with passing a test on the latest conflict studies. And petting President Putin’s chair while repeating Russian arguments is what Americans who support Trump’s foreign policy revolution might call “thinking outside the box.”

Awkward? Yes – but diplomatic? Maybe. There is, after all, a fundamental difference between a superpower’s indifference to inconvenient facts on the ground and the impotence of old-world, learned diplomacy: Washington can shape reality through force and intimidation, while Europeans have little more than the hope that moral persuasion will work wonders.

So, as much as Britons are outraged by Witkoff's disdain for Keir Starmer's meetings with European leaders and military chiefs about a peacekeeping force, we have to ask ourselves: was he really wrong on that point?

Ultimately, while Starmer and Emmanuel Macron have tried to steer European NATO members toward supporting a ceasefire monitoring force, potential big players like Italy and Spain have rejected it. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has no desire to break with Trump, whose domestic “anti-wokeness” agenda mirrors her culture war in Italy, while Spain’s Pedro Sanchez leads a country that is far from the Russian-Ukrainian front line and has a strong center-left pacifist tradition.

Not only are America’s European allies divided by Trump’s Washington: they are also divided among themselves. They may be united in condemning Russian aggression and Trump’s conciliatory approach to mediation, but their disagreements over what to do confirm the US administration’s belief that striking big deals with authoritarians like Putin, or with the Saudi hosts of the Ukraine talks, is the way to go – rather than trying to keep an army of squabbling “allies” in line.

Allies who don't contribute much – even when they agree on policy – ​​can be completely ignored.

Back to Riyadh: behind a smokescreen of “technical details” talks in the Saudi capital, secret talks on the big issues of a peace deal are likely underway. The question is: will Putin accept Trump’s push for peace – or does he think protracted negotiations might better serve the Kremlin’s goal of ultimately weakening Ukraine?

If Russian media are praising Witkoff for appreciating Putin's "sincerity," Ukrainian newspapers are wondering whether their country will end up like South Vietnam - abandoned by Washington 50 years ago.

America is the only superpower that survives – even thrives – even when its allies fall like dominoes. /Telegraph