By N Chandra Mohan

Prospects for peace in Ukraine, which is fighting Russia on its own territory since February 2022, appear to recede by the day. Look no further than the humiliation suffered by its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he recently met US President Donald Trump. The latter earlier claimed that he can stop the war in a day and blindsided Europe, if not Ukraine, by talking directly to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to “immediately” end this conflict. Zelenskyy sought to sign a minerals deal in return for US security guarantees to deter further Russian aggression. No such deal was signed as the meeting swiftly unravelled, with Trump lashing out at Zelenskyy and issuing an ultimatum, saying that he would “make a deal (on the war) or we’re out”.

This ill-fated meeting took place against the backdrop of Washington and Moscow already having talks in Riyadh — attended by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security advisor Mike Waltz, and special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov — without Ukraine and Europe at the table. At the Munich Security Conference, US officials dismissed Ukraine’s demands for a return of all seized territories and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership as “unrealistic”; that Ukraine’s security guarantees would henceforth be provided by Europe and not the US. Ukraine’s interests appear to have secondary importance to the US President’s primary........

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