The US and Russia are negotiating Ukraine's fate without Ukraine or NATO at the table in "peace talks" in Riyadh.
By Todd Lassa
European leaders held an emergency meeting in Paris Monday over the future of Ukraine, and indeed, NATO itself, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in what The New York Times called a “whistle-stop” tour of the Middle East. Following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks in Brussels and that of Vice President JD Vance and special Ukraine-Russia envoy Gen. Keith Kellog at the Munich Security Conference last week, the European leaders were desperate to exert any sign of leadership and have a role in peace talks, NPR’s Morning Edition reports, that clearly are going to go Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s way.
Trump had “warned” Putin on Truth Social January 23 he would impose “high tariffs and further sanctions” on Russia if the Kremlin resisted US efforts to end the war and he reiterated his plans to negotiate a settlement in a single day. Given the concessions the Trump White House has made to the Kremlin since, this warning seems little more than an effort to simulate distance between the Art of the Deal president and Putin.
Trump reportedly called Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after the call with Putin last week. Zelenskyy Monday was in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, making for a quick trip to Riyadh, though only after the White House and Kremlin spend some time alone together.
As if previewing the sweetheart deal with Putin that Trump discussed in that phone call last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday there would be “no thought of” territorial concessions to Ukraine, The Kyiv Independent reports. Lavrov explicitly named the Crimea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 and Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2022.
In his remarks to European defense ministers at a lunch meeting in Brussels last week, Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, warned NATO not to try to allow Ukraine into the alliance. This is Putin’s greatest concern in the peace talks, and it looks pretty clear that if NATO does try to grant Ukraine membership after Washington and the Kremlin reach a deal it will be the Trump White House’s cue to withdraw from the organization. (All 32 NATO nations must vote in favor of a new country’s membership, and even if the US leaves there’s still Hungary.)
Prior to last week’s security conference in Munich, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a phone call with Zelenskyy “reaffirmed” the UK’s backing of Ukraine’s “irreversible path” to join NATO (per BBC). This stems from a NATO summit in Washington late last year when then-President Biden pledged support for Ukraine’s membership.
Whether the Trump White House holds back funding from NATO, or ultimately pulls out altogether, it will mark the end of a post-World War II deal in which the US guaranteed security for Western Europe in part by assuring there was no room for an extremist politician or political party to take over a potentially powerful military on the continent.
Under the Trump administration, the United States becomes an isolationist country again and will not get into the sort of entanglements that bogged use down for two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Along with US isolationism comes an expansionism already on record: Making the Panama Canal America again, capturing Greenland from Denmark by force if necessary and apparently making Canada from the Yukon Territory on-down the 51st state, giving its 41 million citizens two US senators and perhaps 50 congress members. (What are the chances a few of those districts would vote MAGA-Republican?)
Initially not taken very seriously, taking over Canada and Greenland would place a large chunk of the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico, east of Russia and west of NATO-Europe, under Trump’s rule.