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Boston Globe
17 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Zelenskyy brings backup to the White House as Trump aligns more closely with Putin
By most accounts, the European officials want to ensure that Trump has not pivoted too close to the Russian side and does not try to strong-arm Zelenskyy into a deal that will ultimately sow the seeds of Ukraine's dissolution. And they want to safeguard against the risk of the United States, the linchpin of European security since NATO's creation in 1949, undermining that interest. In a call with Zelenskyy on Saturday, Trump offered support for U.S. security assurance for Ukraine after the war, a shift from his stance that Europe should bear the burden of protecting the country, though the specifics were unclear. Advertisement At a news conference Sunday in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union's executive arm, stressed the importance of security guarantees for Ukraine and respect for its territory. But she also said it was paramount to 'stop the killing' and urged talks among the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the United States 'as soon as possible.' Advertisement One senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering Trump, described a sense of panic among European allies. The diplomat had not seen a meeting like the one set for Monday come together so quickly since just before the Iraq War. The foremost concern, the diplomat said, was to avoid another scene like the one that took place in February when Zelenskyy met with Trump in front of the television cameras at the White House. At that meeting, Trump berated the Ukrainian president, saying 'you don't have the cards' in the war -- essentially telling a weak foreign power to bend to the demands of a far more powerful one. The president did so again Friday night, after Putin flew back to the Russian Far East, telling a Fox News interviewer that Ukraine was going to have to realize that Russia was a more 'powerful' country, and that power meant Zelenskyy was going to have to make concessions. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who sat in on the meetings with Putin at the U.S. air base outside Anchorage, Alaska, disputed the idea that the Europeans were coming as a posse to protect Zelenskyy from a repeat of the February shouting match. 'They're not coming here to keep Zelenskyy from getting bullied,' Rubio insisted to Margaret Brennan on CBS' 'Face the Nation.' 'They are coming here tomorrow because we've been working with the Europeans,' he said, listing the many meetings the United States had engaged in before and after the Putin visit. 'We invited them to come.' European officials said Saturday that Trump told Zelenskyy he was free to bring guests to the meeting, and later the White House extended invitations to several European leaders. Advertisement Whatever the motive for the leaders to upend their schedules on short notice, there is little question that elements of the negotiation will test the cohesiveness of the Atlantic alliance. Putin's agenda is larger than just seizing part or all of Ukraine. For nearly a quarter-century, his grandest ambition has been to split NATO, dividing European allies from the United States. As Europe and Ukraine struggle to navigate Trump's sudden reversal of strategy for ending a war that has stretched well past three years, Putin has a renewed opportunity to realize his dream. The United States and its European allies now appear to be pursuing different negotiating strategies. The differences have been long brewing. But in the weeks before the Putin meeting, they broke out into the open. 'We're done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,' Vice President JD Vance said flatly a week ago. The Europeans, however, have promised continued support, through a grouping of countries operating outside of the NATO alliance. They got Trump to promise to supply weapons, as long as the United States was paid for them from European coffers. The message was clear: Defending Ukraine was Europe's problem, not Washington's. That was a wedge that Putin sought to exploit in Anchorage, and he did it skillfully. Trump has adopted many of Putin's talking points, and few of the West's. Even before he met face to face with Putin, he assured the Russian leader that Ukraine's application to join NATO would be put on long-term hold -- a position that his predecessor, Joe Biden, also took. At various moments, he hinted that Ukraine invited invasion by applying to the alliance and to membership in the European Union. Advertisement After the Friday summit with Putin, he went another step. Trump and European allies had agreed last week that a ceasefire must precede a peace accord, but he abandoned that view and sided with the Russian leader. 'With Trump abandoning the ceasefire, but making no reference to the 'severe consequences' he threatened, we are at a dangerous moment for the alliance,' said James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who served as NATO's supreme allied commander from 2009-13, when the United States still viewed Russia as a NATO partner, if a difficult one. This is exactly the kind of split that European leaders were trying to avoid after Trump's return to power in January. NATO's new secretary-general, Mark Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, visited Washington frequently for quiet meetings with Trump. He was determined to avoid the kind of public breach that took place in the first term, when Trump came to the edge of withdrawing the United States from what he called an 'obsolete' alliance. Rutte helped engineer the announcement in June, at a NATO summit, that nearly all members of the alliance had committed to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense. (Of that, 1.5% is infrastructure spending only tangentially related to military spending.) That gave Trump an early win -- and demonstrated that, even if a decade late, Europe was getting serious about taking responsibility for its own defense. Trump took credit, and left the summit praising NATO's reforms. Then European leaders designed the program to buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine, recognizing its appeal to the president. The United States could remain Ukraine's arms supplier, but at no cost to American taxpayers. Advertisement The strategy seemed to be paying off a few weeks ago, when Trump castigated Putin for holding friendly conversations while continuing to kill civilians. He set deadlines and threatened to impose secondary sanctions on countries that were buying oil from Russia. For the first time since Trump's inauguration, Washington's approach, including the threat of new sanctions on Russian oil and gas if there was no ceasefire, and Europe's continued military and economic pressure seemed roughly aligned. Last Wednesday, European leaders talked with Trump, and he agreed to hold firm with Putin that a ceasefire must precede a longer peace negotiation. That alignment is what blew up in Anchorage. 'It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement,' Trump wrote on his social media site early Saturday. Trump's flip-flops stand in contrast to Putin's determination to stay the course with the war, even as the body count of Russians killed has soared. 'Peace will come when we achieve our goals,' he proclaimed in late 2023. Even then, Putin privately was sending signals that he was open to discussing a ceasefire, but only if it froze existing battle lines -- meaning Ukraine would have to cede control over roughly 20% of its territory. His overtures were rebuffed at the time. But now the Russian military is making considerable gains, so Putin no longer has interest in a ceasefire. 'They feel like they've got momentum in the battlefield,' Rubio said, 'and frankly, don't care, don't seem to care very much about how many Russian soldiers die in this endeavor.' Advertisement 'It's a meat grinder,'' he added, 'and they just have more meat to grind.' That reality would seem to suggest that the timing is hardly right for a peace agreement. Putin may calculate his best strategy is to drag out the talks. But when European and U.S. officials gather at the White House on Monday, they will have more to discuss than just boundaries. The Europeans have to find a way to bring Trump on board for concrete security guarantees for Ukraine -- which could include a peacekeeping force that would deter Putin from restarting the war in a few years. In his conversation with European leaders after the Putin summit, Trump suggested for the first time that he might be willing to join that effort -- though the assumption is that he would contribute U.S. intelligence, not troops. In London on Sunday, after a virtual meeting of European countries that call themselves a 'coalition of the willing' -- a phrase used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- British Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued a statement that commended Trump for his 'commitment to providing security guarantees for Ukraine.' That phrasing seemed intended to lock him into the effort. The statement reiterated that the United Kingdom and other European nations were ready to 'deploy a reassurance force once hostilities have ceased, and to help secure Ukraine's skies and seas and regenerate Ukraine's armed forces.' The United States has never been that specific. This article originally appeared in .
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump Rates Putin Ceasefire Flop as 10 Out of 10
President Donald Trump has rated his meeting with Vladimir Putin as a 10 out of 10, despite leaving Alaska without a ceasefire deal and providing little detail on what he achieved from the summit. Speaking after his high-stakes meeting with Putin, Trump also put the onus on Ukraine to end the war that Russia started, declaring, 'It's really up to Zelensky to get it done.' 'It's still not a done deal at all,' Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Friday. 'And Ukraine has to agree. But it's a terrible war and they're losing a lot—both of them are—and hopefully it can get completed.' What exactly Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would have to agree to is not yet clear, as Trump refused to tell even Hannity, one of his most loyal, high-profile cheerleaders. But ahead of the meeting, the president had said that any progress would probably involve Ukraine giving up territory to Russia as well as its ambitions to enter NATO. Asked how he would grade the summit on a scale of one to 10, the president replied, 'I think the meeting was a 10 in the sense that we got along great. And it's good when, you know, two big powers get along—especially when they're nuclear powers.' Friday's summit at Alaska's Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson was Putin's first time on U.S. soil in 10 years. After years of being frozen out by the West, the Russian president had been invited by Trump to Alaska in the hope of brokering a deal to end the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022 when Putin tried to claim the country as his own. 'It's interesting because someone said if I get this settled, I'll get the Nobel Peace Prize,' said Trump, who has also helped to broker peace agreements in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. 'But what about the other six wars or whatever? I mean those are big.' He also shared two of the things the pair discussed during their three-hour meeting: the 2020 election, which they both agreed was 'rigged,' and the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. 'Putin said one of the most interesting things,' Trump recalled. 'He said 'your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting… And he said that to me because we talked about 2020. He said, 'You won that election by so much.'' The president also used the interview to heap praise on his Russian counterpart, whom the U.S government has previously sanctioned and who also faces arrest warrants for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court. 'He's a strong guy, tough as hell,' Trump said. He also offered advice to Zelensky: 'Make a deal.' 'Russia is a very big power, and they're not,' the president said of Ukraine.
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Fox News Calls Out Trump for No-Question ‘Press Conference'
Fox News' Jacqui Heinrich, who witnessed Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin ignore reporters' questions after their summit Friday, said everyone in the room was 'surprised' by the president's silence. Heinrich, the network's senior White House correspondent—whom Trump has previously targeted—spoke about the summit's conclusion with anchor Brian Kilmeade, who also said he hadn't expected things to wrap up with the usually talkative Trump walking away without taking questions. 'I was surprised no questions,' Kilmeade said, after Trump and Putin were vague about what—if anything—was accomplished at the Alaska meeting, which began with Trump clapping and rolling out the red carpet for the Russian leader, who is accused of war crimes. 'I was surprised no details on what progress was made,' Kilmeade continued. 'You and me and everyone else in this room was surprised,' Heinrich replied. 'We were told we would have an opportunity to put questions to both leaders after a joint press conference in the event that meeting went well enough that they could set the stage for a second meeting. And President Trump said if that didn't happen, he was likely to call off the joint presser and just address the media solo and send people home. Neither of those things happened,' she said. 'And what was really stunning to me, as someone who has been in a lot of these press conferences, a few things were very unusual,' she continued. Heinrich noted how Putin spoke first and in his native language, despite the U.S. being the host country. 'Putin started right off in Russian, and we all had to get our headsets on and listen to him rattle off this diatribe about the history of the U.S.-Russia relationship,' she said, adding that the Russian leader repeated phrasing about Ukraine that put the onus on them to end the war that Russia started. Heinrich went on to say that the joint appearance was 'unusual' and 'atypical.' 'The way that it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left,' she said. 'Of course,' she noted, 'that is only the piece of the picture that we have right now, and certainly President Trump, who is the host and the president, would not want to, I think, enable something that would make him look weak. We are eagerly awaiting to hear the background on that.' When reached for comment, the White House did not answer the Daily Beast's question about why neither Trump nor Putin took reporters' questions. As for Heinrich's report, a press aide directed the Daily Beast to White House Communications Director Steven Cheung's brief post on X in reply to the tail end of her comments to Kilmeade. 'Total fake news,' was the response from Cheung, who just yesterday tried to criticize California Gov. Gavin Newsom for avoiding questions after a speech—except Newsom answered nine questions, nine more than Trump did Friday.
