We expect Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his top minions to soon regret their decision to make a fool of President Donald Trump.
At their Alaska summit, Putin gave Trump renewed hope for a peace deal on the Ukraine war — but that’s now looking like Lucy setting up Charlie Brown for another football humiliation.
After initially signaling openness to a meet, Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s foreign secretary, just dumped yet more cold water on any chance for a Putin sitdown with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Bloviating on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Lavrov announced, “There is no meeting planned,” and none will happen without advance agreement that fits Putin’s “presidential agenda.”
And that agenda is “not ready at all”: Ukraine must publicly agree it will never join NATO, Zelensky must repeal laws that Lavrov claims ban “the Russian language” and concede in advance on “territorial issues” Lavrov wouldn’t specify.
Oh, and he reiterated the Russians’ believe that Zelensky isn’t Ukraine’s “legitimate” president, though “we recognize him as the de facto head of the regime.”
This follows a full week of Lavrov & Co. insisting, for example, that no European troops can be deployed in Ukraine to secure the peace, and indeed demanding a veto over any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv.
The Russians are also pushing hard for Ukraine to agree in advance that it will cede the half of Donbas that Putin’s been trying to conquer since 2014.
All of it clearly contradicts the gist of what Vice President JD Vance says Putin agreed to in Anchorage: “They’ve recognized that they’re not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv, and importantly, they’ve acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Vance said on the same NBC show.
Yes, Putin from the start of his invasion has claimed he means to oust a supposed “neo-Nazi” regime in Kyiv (though Zelensky is Jewish!), and generally insists that Ukraine is really just a part of Russia that never should’ve been independent. So what?
If Vlad were genuinely willing to discuss a lasting peace deal, he’d have been willing to set those delusions aside, and to order Lavrov and his fellow toadies to quit it.
Instead, Putin has his minions outright trolling not just Zelensky, but Trump himself.
The American president’s been slowly signaling his displeasure, posting days ago of this war that “it is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking” the invader’s country — a blatant warning that Washington might give Kyiv added ability to strike deep inside Russia.
That’s on top of the threats Trump has conspicuously so far left on the table, including secondary sanctions that would cripple Russia’s economy and so its whole war machine.
Trump was beyond clear after Alaska that Putin only had another two weeks to publicly move toward a face-to-face with Zelensky as a key step in reaching a peace accord.
One week’s already done, and Russia’s done nothing but signal that no sitdown is in sight unless Ukraine basically surrenders in advance on every issue up for discussion.
That is, Putin’s displaying “the art of the no-deal” — and treating Trump like a sucker for believing everything he said to the contrary in Anchorage.
The Russian plainly thinks he’ll get away with humiliating the leader of the Free World; it won’t be pretty when Trump finally moves to dispel that delusion.