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The Independent
14 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump's critics say Putin ‘flattered' Trump at the Alaska summit. Europe's leaders aim to do the same
His summit with Vladimir Putin is over, though the fallout continues. On Friday, the U.S. literally rolled out the red carpet for the Russian leader and accused war criminal as he arrived in Anchorage for Ukraine peace talks -- though no Ukrainians were invited to the meeting. Trump flew back to Washington having publicly walked back his own call for a ceasefire and having reportedly endorsed a Russian demand for Ukraine to cede the entirety of the Donbas region, including territory currently controlled by Ukrainian forces. Having completed one of his characteristically chummy conversations with Putin, Trump now faces the so-called 'coalition of the willing': a group of European leaders united behind the defense of Ukraine and adamant that no agreement can be made without the support of Kyiv. The president's guests could strike a very different tone, given how Trump's last face-to-face meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office devolved into a near-shouting match. But there are indications that Zelensky's allies want to avoid that spectacle and instead lean on figures with whom Trump enjoys warmer relations as they seek to perform damage control: including, chiefly, walking back Trump from his support for any agreement that would cede Ukrainian territory not already occupied by Russian forces. And European leaders are also insistent that Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, be directly involved in peace talks with Russia — something which it had appeared U.S. officials had successfully pushed Putin towards in May, only for Russia to delay and demur. The sheer size of the delegation heading to Washington on Monday seems to suggest that a show of force is Zelensky's aim. Besides the Ukrainian leader, joining Trump at the White House will be British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Finnish president Alexander Stubb, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the EU's Ursula von der Leyen along with Nato's secretary-general Mark Rutte. Though large, the choice of members was not random. Each member of the posse has, in their own dealings with Trump, cultivated friendly relations with the U.S. president — save for Zelensky, who clashed with Trump when he visited in February. Publicly, those headed to the White House were positive on the effects of Trump's summit. "President Trump's efforts have brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia's illegal war in Ukraine,' Starmer said. The British prime minister and his counterparts could be relying on Trump's tendency to rapidly change his position as he and other European leaders launch a charm offensive. Though none of Trump's European counterparts will say it, critics of the Republican president in the U.S. called Friday's summit a 'setback' for Ukrainians and Europe at large. 'Vladimir Putin got the red carpet treatment on American soil. But we got no ceasefire, no imminent meeting between Putin and Zelensky,' Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, said Sunday on ABC's This Week. He added Trump was 'flattered' by the Russian president. U.S. officials are likely to walk into Monday's meeting eager to portray news of Putin's openness to a U.S.-backed security agreement as a win for the Ukrainian side. But there's a sense that a major gulf still exists between what Putin and Ukraine's government are willing to accept, and that little progress was made towards bridging it largely as a result of Trump's hesitance to use any kind of leverage against Putin. Even that development may be met with skepticism. It's no secret to European leaders that support among Republicans and even progressives for direct U.S. military intervention in Ukraine is strikingly low. On Saturday, Zelensky himself responded to the news, writing in a post to Twitter/X: 'Security must be guaranteed reliably and in the long term, with the involvement of both Europe and the U.S.' The inclusion of the word 'reliably' suggests that Zelensky won't accept anything short of a concrete regional security agreement in exchange for dropping Ukraine's ambitions of joining the Nato alliance, which would grant Article 5 protections. Under Article 5 of the Nato charter, member-states must come to the aid of any member-state that is attacked individually. The provision has been activated only once, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 'All issues important to Ukraine must be discussed with Ukraine's participation, and no issue, particularly territorial ones, can be decided without Ukraine,' Zelensky added. Some had been optimistic that the use of leverage was imminent after Trump's statements ahead of the summit indicated that he no longer believed Putin's claims of wanting an end to the conflict. In social media posts and public statements, the U.S. president appeared to be moving closer to levying sanctions against the Russian government. European leaders hoped they were successful in driving that point home, in talks with Trump ahead of the Anchorage summit, but that progress seems to have evaporated. It may fall on Starmer and others like Stubb, who is known as a 'Trump whisperer', to re-convince the president that Putin's demand for a full seizure of the Donbas region is a poison pill aimed at driving Ukraine away from the table. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied that Trump's position on whether Putin was serious had changed 'at all', potentially giving the delegation a reason to hope that the U.S. president could be made to understand that Ukraine wouldn't consider ceding further territorial gains to Russia. "I don't think his mind has changed at all. I think ultimately, if this whole effort doesn't work out, then there is going to have to be additional consequences to Russia. But we're trying to avoid that by reaching a peace agreement," Rubio said.
Daily Mail
14 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro's brutal snub to Kash Patel before joining Trump administration
Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro refused a job working under Kash Patel as Deputy Director of the FBI before she landed the role of Attorney for Washington D.C. The firebrand judge risked drawing President Trump's ire late last year when she snubbed the role because she had 'no interest' in working for Patel, two administration sources told The New York Times. Patel was appointed to the top job despite his limited legal experience and outspoken distrust of the FBI, drawing widespread criticism and raising questions about whether he was equipped for the job. The role Pirro turned down ultimately went to Dan Bongino, a podcaster and former Secret Service agent who has been a leading proponent in voicing several MAGA conspiracy theories. Then in May, Pirro was asked to step in as interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia after Trump's first pick for the role - longtime conservative activist, podcast host, and recent defender of January 6th rioters Ed Martin - failed to secure support from enough Senate Republicans to proceed with his confirmation. By August 3 she had been sworn into the role on a permanent basis. In the meantime, Patel and Bongino have been under immense pressure following a decision by Attorney General Pam Bondi to not release the Epstein files and mass departures at the agency. Pirro has worked tirelessly to bring to life Trump's crime crackdown in the capitol. Pirro celebrated Trump's recent decision to deploy the National Guard and federalize D.C. police, noting crime in the city is 'out of control.' 'I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the hell out of you,' Pirro said alongside Trump this week. Trump announced plans to take over D.C. after a young man who was working for DOGE was 'very badly hurt' and 'beat up by a bunch of thugs in D.C.' The identity of the 19-year-old man involved in the reported incident was Edward Coristine, famously nicknamed 'Big Balls' by his peers. 'Here's what the president is going to do. He's going to make a difference. We're going to change the laws,' Pirro told Fox this week. 'We've got liberal judges, we've got liberal laws - everything's gonna change.' Pirro's jurisdiction encompasses the headquarters of most government agencies, which makes her role one of the most influential in the country. Cases brought before her division may include ones of national security and public corruption, as well as violent crimes and drug trafficking. Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, praised Trump's selection for the role, while doing their best to fend off attacks on Pirro from their Democrat counterparts. 'You may hear my Democrat colleagues criticize Ms. Pirro for some of her colorful remarks during her time as a TV personality,' Grassley, stated on the Senate floor ahead of Saturday's vote, adding that 'yes, she has a larger-than-life personality.' However, Grassley added that, 'she has [a] decades [long] distinguished record as a prosecutor and judge. D.C. is fortunate that the president nominated her to serve as its U.S. attorney. Her job in the interim role, where she is stationed now, has been heralded.' Pirro began her career as a fierce young lawyer in New York City, primarily targeting sexual offenses against women and children. She climbed through the ranks as a political moderate and went on to be elected Westchester County district attorney in 1993 as a Republican. From there, she jumped across to Fox News as a commentator and panelist, earning as much as $3million per year on The Five. But in 2019 she was suspended by the network after suggesting politician Ilhan Omar's decision to wear a hijab was un-American.
Times
42 minutes ago
- Times
Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam
In Anchorage on Friday, the president of the United States was confronted with the truth of an old superpower adage: it is easier to bully allies than to bend enemies. Since January, Donald Trump has enjoyed remarkable success in causing formerly friendly countries to submit without retaliation to his tariffs and insults. They have thus far preferred this course to an escalation of hostilities — and hostilities are what tariffs represent — with the most powerful nation on earth. America has become widely disliked and feared, especially in Europe and Canada. Most national leaders nonetheless continue to abase themselves before Trump, though Sir Keir Starmer may already regret his gushingly enthusiastic weekend remarks about the Alaska summit. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, is an utterly different proposition. He is pursuing a nationalist agenda, to the point of obsession. He has no interest in compromise over Ukraine. He is bent upon victory. He seeks to recreate what some would call a sphere of influence but which we should recognise as a sphere of coercion, extending from Georgia through Ukraine and Belarus, and thereafter beyond. • Putin demands Ukraine surrender the Donbas as price of peace He is convinced that he can achieve this because he continues to command support among his own people. Sanctions are porous and his armed forces are slowly grinding down Ukraine. Europe is weak — incapable of arming Volodymyr Zelensky if the US quits. Putin believes that Trump will give him what he wants. The evidence from Friday's summit suggests that he is right. The president cares nothing for Zelensky and his country but respects the master of the Kremlin. He likes dictators and clings to hopes of prising Russia apart from China, which he views as the only adversary that should matter to Americans. Incomprehensible though it seems to us, he is more eager to build a relationship with Putin than to stay friends with Europe. A precedent for Trump's clumsy and cynical attempts to end the war lies in America's diplomatic efforts to disengage from Vietnam, half a century ago. President Lyndon Johnson initiated talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968. These got nowhere, for the same reason that olive branches are wasted on Putin. Hanoi was interested only in victory. Meanwhile, just as Zelensky is cut out of Trump's conversations with the Russians, so during the Indochina wars no South Vietnamese was invited to attend a significant White House policy meeting, nor indeed the Paris peace talks. Trump should never have attempted a bilateral with Putin because he is too verbally incontinent to negotiate rationally with an iceman such as Putin. Henry Kissinger, though incomparably cleverer, suffered constant frustrations when he became US emissary facing the North Vietnamese in Paris. Only in October 1972, weeks before a presidential election in which Richard Nixon faced the Democrat George McGovern, did Kissinger finally agree draft terms with the communist diplomat Le Duc Tho. When he arrived back in Washington, he strode into the White House bursting with excitement. 'The deal we've got, Mr President,' he was taped telling his employer, 'is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean, it will absolutely, totally, wipe out McGovern.' • We are no closer to peace, say Ukrainian refugees in Britain That remark did no service to Kissinger's reputation, because it made explicit that he viewed escape from Vietnam principally as a partisan political coup. He told Nixon that, while the agreement could be billed as 'peace', it would empower Hanoi to seize the South after a decent interval. Eighteen months should be enough, said Kissinger: 'If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.' Nixon was so delighted that at lunch he invited his surrender broker to share a Lafite Rothschild 1957, such as the president customarily indulged alone, serving Californian red to the help. A deal was finally signed in Paris in January 1973. The Americans went home. Two years later I was among the unhappy eyewitnesses as Hanoi's army swept south to Saigon. Vietnam was, of course, a war in which the US had become directly and bloodily involved, unlike Ukraine, where it is merely arming a sovereign, West-leaning state to defend itself. What the two conflicts have in common, however, is that by 1973 Nixon's nation desperately wanted out of Indochina; in 2025, only a minority of Americans care a fig for Ukraine. Trump has not yet borrowed Neville Chamberlain's 1938 line about Czechoslovakia — 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing' — but his vice-president JD Vance has come close. Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, told CNN last week that 'no big chunks' of Ukrainian territory would be 'just given' to Russia 'that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield'. That remark should send a shiver through every advocate of freedom, every opponent of permitting brute force to determine outcomes. The signature on Nixon's Vietnam peace deal was delayed for almost four months, chiefly by the resistance of the South's president, Nguyen Van Thieu. Nixon bullied him into acquiescence at a meeting during which he shouted: 'Without aid, you're finished! Understand?' Yes, the wretched Vietnamese was obliged to understand. That nasty conversation in the Oval Office has a contemporary resonance, does it not? Without American aid Ukraine, too, is finished. Kissinger shamelessly accepted a half-share of a Nobel peace prize which Le Duc Tho, his interlocutor, had the integrity to reject. Trump today makes plain his own ambition to secure this honour, plausibly for a similar shoddy betrayal, though Ukraine is an incomparably worthier cause than was South Vietnam. On Monday the president is expected to tell Zelensky, and the European leaders whom he has also summoned to make complicit in Ukraine's future, that to halt the Russian rape of his country he must surrender the east, renounce hopes of joining Nato or the EU and sign a deal that includes no credible security guarantee. Putin is determined to pull every string of a future puppet government in Kyiv. It is not too late for Donald Trump to change course, and we should cling to hopes that he will do so. The only rightful, statesmanlike response to Putin's murderous obduracy is for the US to boost arms supplies to Ukraine and escalate sanctions against Russia. If, instead, the president demands that Zelensky rolls over, we shall have cause to despair of his ever fulfilling the traditional role of successive US presidents, as the West's principal standard-bearers for freedom and justice. Next month's presidential state visit to London seems an ever more cringe-making prospect. There is malicious gossip in Washington that on the plane to Anchorage a triumphalist Putin and his acolytes ate chicken Kyiv. It will be a historic tragedy if Trump proves to have served it to them.
