By Harsh V Pant

The much- vaunted Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska yielded results little of substance, especially as it was being billed as the summit that will lead to a ceasefire pact in the Russia-Ukraine war. Instead, in a strange turn of events, Donald Trump is now questioning the need for an immediate ceasefire and backing the long-held Russian position that a full settlement of the issue is needed before any ceasefire can come about. Trump will now be meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy to urge him to agree to a peace deal. But as the latter has said, “We see that Russia rebuffs numerous calls for a ceasefire and has not yet determined when it will stop the killing. This complicates the situation.”

It was always complicated. Only Trump had a grandiose notion about his deal-making prowess that allowed him to conjure up the possibility of a quick pact with Vladimir Putin to end the war. In the end, it was Putin who got the better of Trump. He even used Trump’s words that the conflict in Ukraine would have never started had Trump been in power to good effect. The once-shunned Russian leader is now back in American good books, being feted with a red carpet and driven in Trump’s armoured limousine. The contrast with the way Zelenskyy was treated in the White House just a few months back couldn’t have been starker. No wonder Putin has described the summit as “very useful”,........

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