Trump kauft mehr Zeit für Putin

The meeting at the White House yesterday between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky yielded little progress toward peace—but it could have been far worse, Tom Nichols argues.

Following his meeting with Vladimir Putin last week, Trump “tried to put a happy face on the failure in Alaska,” Nichols continues. On Friday night, Trump had quietly told Sean Hannity that Zelensky has “got to take” Putin’s deal, “implying that the United States was endorsing Putin’s demand to freeze the front lines and partition Ukraine,” Nichols writes. “Such an arrangement would give Russia some breathing space while leaving it free to attack again in the future.”

But Trump’s attempt to spin the outcome of the U.S.-Russia summit has not swayed “Zelensky or several European leaders, who in an extraordinary show of diplomatic concern all rushed to Washington two days after Trump’s return,” Nichols continues. “The Alaska summit was never a good idea, especially without some signal from Putin that he was actually ready to stop the killing, but the response from European leaders is the clearest evidence yet that Trump was on a path to selling out Ukraine to the Kremlin.”

Fortunately, Nichols argues, someone at yesterday’s meeting “appears to have talked Trump out of the idea of trading land for a temporary peace, an especially encouraging change because the White House already had a map of Ukraine in the room that seemed to be color coded almost perfectly in line with Putin’s wishes.” Now Trump has said that he wants to put Zelensky and his team in a room with Putin. But this “makes little sense,” Nichols argues. “Trump believes that he can arrange a one-on-one meeting, with no mediators, between Putin and the man Putin is trying to kill every day.”

“Meetings require some level of basic agreement among the principals in order to produce results,” Nichols writes. “Without the pressure of further U.S. sanctions or more arms to Ukraine, Putin is likely to meet Zelensky only to renew his demands that Kyiv surrender and certify Putin’s gains, an ultimatum to which Zelensky cannot agree.”

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/4x9dHqyV](https://theatln.tc/4x9dHqyV)

— Grace Buono, assistant editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*