Volodymyr Zelenskyy moves to appease Donald Trump – what happens now?

Donald Trump may have been a bully, but he has “achieved the change of tone he demanded from Ukraine in short order”, says Owen Matthews in The Spectator. His acrimonious public clash with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last Friday, followed by the suspension of military aid to Kyiv, apparently prompted a rapid change of heart.

Just three days after Zelenskyy was defiantly stating that a peace deal was “very, very far away”, he announced that Ukraine was ready to “work fast to end the war”, describing the meeting with Trump as “regrettable” and saying that Ukraine was willing to sign a rare-earths mineral deal “at any time”. Trump has also managed to get Europe to increase its spending on defence, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph.

Zelenskyy has been forced to “swallow his pride” to “salvage as much American help” as Trump is willing to give, says The Economist. But it won’t end well for “Ukraine, Europe or even America”. It will just be “less awful” than what would follow from Zelenskyy's “continued defiance” of a president who “catastrophically miscalculates his country’s interests”.

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America has supplied Ukraine with “money, arms, communications and intelligence” and, without its help, unless Europe fills the breach, Ukraine cannot continue fighting for more than a few months.

When Zelenskyy asks for American security guarantees, Trump argues that he is effectively providing them in the form of mining investments, even though American miners wouldn’t offer Ukraine much extra security.

But the unappealing choice for Zelenskyy is a “bad minerals deal without security guarantees, but with the possibility of at least some American support and with a European military presence; or no deal and no American support”.

A geopolitical turn of the screw

Trump’s logic is that a swift end to the war might “help declutter the stage, enabling a strategic rapprochement with Russia” that could in turn help the US to weaken the so-called “no limits” friendship between Moscow and Beijing, says Roger Boyes in The Times.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has extolled the “extraordinary opportunities” offered by a modernising Russia, and there has been talk of Russia’s return to the G8. Zelenskyy never stood a chance once the new US president “started to yawn about a war that interfered in his plan for historic victories elsewhere. The Ukrainians simply became collateral in a geopolitical turn of the screw.”

Washington’s abandonment of Ukraine won’t strengthen America’s hand against China, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. It will achieve the reverse by demonstrating to Xi Jinping that aggression (Russian, in this case) “ultimately pays”. The betrayal of Ukraine also means the “likely end of Nato”, which is an “invitation to pandemonium”. The idea that the US can’t afford to support Ukraine is “risible”.

In any case, if the US and Europe provided access to Russia’s frozen funds, Ukraine could fund its own war effort. The “more important” question is how much more will we have to spend over decades to defend against an “emboldened” Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis?

After more than a decade of being Russia’s “main boogeyman” (Putin has long described the invasion as a “proxy war against American aggression”), a volte-face is taking place, says Anton Troianovski in The New York Times. In Russia, the US has gone from evil, hegemonic mastermind of the West to “innocent bystander”.

This normalisation of relations between Russia and the US is bad news, particularly if “Western security fails in Ukraine”, says The Economist. If it does, Russia may start threatening other countries. “World War III would be closer, not further away.”

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