ON UKRAINE, TRUMP CHANGED THE CONVERSATION. “Thank you for changing the conversation,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said to President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday before the two went into meetings on ending the war in Ukraine.
Just the day before, at his Cabinet meeting, Trump said of Ukraine, “I’ve had very good conversations with President Putin. I’ve had very good conversations with President Zelensky. And until four weeks ago, nobody had conversations with anybody.”
What both Trump and Starmer mean is: The president’s arrival in the White House marked the real beginning of a real effort to end the war in Ukraine. Under President Joe Biden, it was going nowhere. Now it’s racing forward. After a flurry of newsmaking statements and meetings by administration officials in Europe two weeks ago, this week in Washington there have been visits from French President Emmanuel Macron, Starmer, and, tomorrow, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It is impossible to imagine Biden mustering the energy, or having the imagination, to do something like that. He simply couldn’t. By the way, the longer version of Starmer’s quote was: “Thank you for changing the conversation to bring about the possibility that we can have a peace deal.” Trump brought about that possibility by arriving. Biden helped bring about that possibility by leaving.
We still don’t know much about the details of a Ukraine peace agreement. We know that Russia holds about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, seized after President Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded in 2022. With Starmer at the White House on Thursday, Trump discouraged Ukrainians when he said Russia “fought long and hard for the land” — that’s the Russian position — and then tempered his comments by adding, “We’re going to certainly try to get as much as we can back.” How much? Where? We don’t know, which pretty much sums up the state of our knowledge at the moment on the key question of land and borders: Russia will likely keep some of the land it captured, while Ukraine will likely get some of the land it lost back. Beyond that, no one on the outside knows.
Another issue is the idea of post-war “security guarantees” for Ukraine. We know a little more about that. Trump has made clear that the United States will not be a party to “security guarantees” and will not provide military forces to back up such guarantees. “I’m not going to make security guarantees,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re going to have Europe do that, because … we’re talking about Europe is their next-door neighbor. But we’re going to make sure everything goes well.”
It would be wrong to stop there, as Trump’s critics do. Listen longer to Trump, and the much-discussed minerals agreement is sure to come up. In the deal, which could be signed during Zelensky’s visit, U.S. companies would play a big, and likely very lucrative, role in extracting highly valuable minerals from Ukraine, which would amount to a massive foreign investment from the U.S.
The key point is that Trump thinks of a minerals deal as a security guarantee. He made that clear at the White House on Wednesday. “It’s a great deal for Ukraine,” he said, “because they get us over there, and we’re going to be working over there. We’ll be on the land. And you know, in that way, it’s — there’s sort of automatic security because nobody is going to be messing around with our people when we’re there. And so we’ll be there in that way.”
Like the rest of what is known about a possible peace agreement, maybe you think that will work and maybe you don’t. But little by little, Trump’s plan is coming into view. And it is becoming clearer every day that he has truly changed the conversation.