IN WASHINGTON, DC – Follow that, Volodymyr Zelensky!
With the cadences of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s charm offensive still echoing through Donald Trump’s West Wing, it now falls to the Ukrainian leader to see whether he can make similar progress wooing and flattering the American President….or any progress at all.
One week after Trump insisted that Zelensky is a “dictator”, the US leader pretended on Thursday not even to remember having said it.
But amid all the transatlantic bonhomie displayed at the White House during Starmer’s visit, one gnawing reality remains: Trump is still unwilling to offer Ukraine any real, tangible security guarantees as he inveighs Zelensky to sue for peace with Russia.
And Ukraine has no royal family in situ, capable of inviting Trump and the First Lady to visit Kyiv with the flourish of a surprise letter.
Trump’s dissembling on security guarantees remains the Achilles’ heel of his desire to end the war in Ukraine.
“We have to make a deal first,” he told reporters at the White House during the Oval Office photo opportunity that preceded his talks with Starmer, insisting again that security guarantees can only be discussed after a cessation of hostilities is in place.
Zelensky and many of his European supporters disagree, and argue security guarantees for Ukraine must be inherent in any ceasefire negotiation, in order to provide Kyiv with confidence that there will be repercussions if Russia continues to bombard the country.
At their later press conference, Trump and Starmer clashed – ever so politely – over the issue of the US military “backstop” that the Prime Minister is demanding as a condition for putting British “boots on the ground and planes in the air” to keep the peace between the warring nations.
Trump claimed that the UK’s Armed Forces “don’t need very much help. They can take care of themselves”. He then turned to Starmer to ask whether “you think you could take on Russia by yourselves?”
Starmer warned of the risk of “Putin coming back for more” Ukrainian territory in the absence of US security guarantees.
Trump argued that the American geologists and construction personnel who will be “dig, dig digging” for lithium and the other rare earths that Zelensky is about to sign over to the United States will themselves constitute what he calls an “automatic” backstop.
By that he appears to mean that Putin will not dare attack Ukraine for fear of killing American citizens who are exploiting the country’s mineral riches, a position that is unlikely to satisfy those nations contributing to any peacekeeping operation.
Like French president Emmanuel Macron on Monday, the Prime Minister gently suggested that Trump had not understood the nature of a conflict that was started by the Kremlin, not – as the US leader claimed last week – by Ukraine.
“We have to win the peace,” Starmer noted during the joint press conference that followed his summit with Trump.
“It can’t be a peace that rewards the aggressor, or that gives encouragement to regimes like Iran… history must be on the side of the peacemaker, not the invader”.
There is no evidence that Trump buys that argument. He claimed several times this week that he will do what he can to “get Ukraine some of its territory back”, but repeated at the press conference that Nato membership for Kyiv “is not going to happen”. During Monday’s meeting with Macron, he put it even more succinctly. “Nato,” he said, “you can forget about.”
After Starmer bade farewell to the President, he took his carefully calibrated message to Trump’s favourite cable news channel.
Sitting for an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, the Prime Minister further pushed his case for a US military commitment to support future European peacekeeping operations in Ukraine.
In fresh language designed to flatter the US leader, the Prime Minister told the Fox audience that any agreement that ends the war will be an “incredible achievement by President Trump”.
But, he cautioned, “we need to defend the line and protect the deal, and therefore we’ve got to have a discussion about what that looks like”.
Trump’s attention is now turning to Friday morning’s White House meeting with Zelensky at which the US side expects the minerals deal – “extortion”, its critics call it – to be signed.
Unlike Macron, Starmer made no public effort to correct Trump’s entirely false assertions about the amount of aid Washington has sent to Ukraine, or the terms under which that assistance was provided.
Zelensky must now fight his own corner, and can only hope that Trump’s sunny disposition following several hours of English-accented flattery will carry over into one more day.
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