Wednesday, July 09, 2025

America's betrayal of Ukraine won't help against China at all

From the Telegraph:

"Beijing is rejoicing at Trump’s Ukraine surrender 

Lisa Haseldine,  24 April 2025

“He can have peace or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country.” Venting his anger with Volodymyr Zelensky on his platform Truth Social on Wednesday night, Donald Trump has threatened to walk away from his attempt to broker a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia.

More than anything, the American President famously prides himself on having perfected the “Art of the Deal”. Finally, though, it seems that Trump has revealed once and for all exactly how he likes to negotiate – which is terribly.

Yet again the American President accused Zelensky of prolonging the war in Ukraine. A peace deal with Russia was “very close”, Trump claimed, “but the man with “no cards to play” should now, finally, GET IT DONE.”

But since when is forcing the loser of a conflict – as Trump so obviously sees Zelensky – to his knees the way for its supposedly neutral mediator to bring about a just end to a negotiation?

The reality is that Trump has blown it on securing a just, lasting peace deal for Ukraine – that is if he ever truly cared about achieving this in the first place.

The US President has a lot of leverage over Russia at his disposal to eke meaningful concessions for Ukraine out of Putin. At the start of the month, for example, there had been rumours that if the Russian President continued to drag his heels on meaningfully negotiating, Trump would crack down hard on Moscow’s shadow fleet of oil tankers, until now so vital for funding the war in Ukraine. It’s not too late for Trump to do it, but all talk of further sanctions has evaporated in Washington.

Trump wants an end to the war now, at any cost. In his book, the quickest way to do that is simply to offer Putin everything he wants – often before he’s even asked for it at the negotiating table.

Last week, the details of the deal Trump is proposing began to emerge. Included among the terms are US recognition of Crimea as Russian territory (something Trump promised America would never do during his first term); granting Moscow control of all Ukrainian territories occupied since February 2022; lifting all sanctions on Russia and improving relations with the US. Some of the terms don’t even mention Ukraine at all. Zelensky and the country he has fought so hard to defend have been reduced to an irritating afterthought.

If the terms of Trump’s deal sound familiar, that is because they are: these terms echo the maximalist demands made by Putin over the past three years almost word for word. Yet before the American President or his team had even started speaking to their Russian counterparts, they publicly stated just how many of Russia’s demands they’d be willing to concede to. Having shown Putin his hand before he’d even got him to the table, the only route Trump has left himself to achieving this deal is to strong-arm Ukraine into accepting it.

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