President Trump’s meetings with Russia’s President Putin last Friday, and his multilateral meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and seven allied European leaders, including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, went better than feared. That was a low bar to get over, given his last meeting with President Zelenskyy resulted in an argument between the Ukrainian President and US Vice President J.D. Vance, and ended early.

But they did not go as well as hoped. The bilateral meeting with President Putin was unequivocally a win for the Russian side, granting President Putin the legitimacy conveyed by being hosted by an American President on American soil despite being an indicted war criminal. President Putin gave away nothing, but by Monday’s multilateral meeting, President Trump appeared to have dropped a ceasefire as a prerequisite of ongoing negotiations, potentially prolonging the killing.

That said, we did get an outline of what a peace deal might look like at this stage of the conflict. Ukraine and its European allies are demanding security guarantees to ensure that Russia does not reignite the conflict in future. The language used by European leaders on Monday compared those guarantees to NATO’s Article 5, requiring allied states to treat an attack on one of them as an attack on all. The prospect that this might mean deploying American troops in Ukraine in future resulted in a backlash among Republicans, leading President Trump to rule out such a deployment later.

Read More:

President Putin’s demands centre on three key pillars. The first is a Ukrainian commitment not to join NATO or the EU. Unsurprisingly, given Russia’s justification for its........

© Herald Scotland