"Stop the massacre": this has been Donald Trump's defining objective whenever he speaks about the war in Ukraine, first as a candidate and now as president, promising to end the conflict. Stopping the massacre is what a ceasefire is for. But as all historians and diplomats will say, ceasing hostilities and establishing peace are two very different things. A ceasefire does not prevent the massacre from resuming if nothing is planned for the day after.
The problem is that Trump never talks about establishing peace in Ukraine. "He doesn't have a plan," confided the Europeans who have been fishing for information in Washington in recent weeks. Their great fear, and that of Ukrainians, is that Russians and Americans engaged in negotiations without them in Saudi Arabia since Tuesday, February 18, will initiate a ceasefire that will solve nothing – and for which they will pay the price.
Initial reactions on Tuesday, after four hours of talks in Riyadh between the heads of the two diplomatic services – Marco Rubio, for the United States, and Sergeï Lavrov, for Russia – unfortunately proved them right: the talks were "positive and constructive," a Russian official praised. "The American side has started to better understand our position," added Lavrov, an old hand at this type of exercise. He has been a minister for 20 years, the only person capable of rivaling Andreï Gromyko, his Soviet predecessor who was foreign minister for 28 years, from 1957 to 1985. Two teams will now be formed to conduct the real negotiations.
Of course, Trump's national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is reassuring and describes things more finely than his president: "This needs to be a permanent end to the war and not a temporary end as we've seen in the past. The practical reality is that there's going to be some discussion of territory and there's going to be discussion of security guarantees, those are just fundamental basics." But if there's one thing Europeans are beginning to understand, a month after the Republican's return to the White House, it's that in this hyper-personalized presidency, only the leader's word counts. And the leader's priority is a ceasefire.
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