Martin Jay
Team Trump now knows that the Europeans are more transfixed with keeping the war going than finding a solution.
The Ukraine war continues to be a kaleidoscope of half-truths and deception with, in particular, the West doing more than its fair share to stir the pot and fan the flames of more smokescreens each day. Trump is perhaps the biggest bluffer here with his recent role of playing chief negotiator with both his Alaska meeting with Putin followed by his 'round table' of EU leaders. The former was logical, rational and productive as it was a starter's pistol for a closer dialogue with Russia, acknowledging Moscow's power and prestige; the latter was really a charade carried out by Trump to continue to pretend to be the most powerful person in the whole circus, demonstrating to the whole world what a pathetic new low Europe has become in the shake-up of the new multipolar world order. Was Trump playing the Europeans like a fiddle? More than most can understand. He masterly creates a forum of dialogue with his Oscar-winning performance of a mediator who listens earnestly to their views. But the objective from Trump was clear: make it look like a real process of discussion and diplomacy is underway while all along the bigger plan is for Trump to do absolutely nothing to get a peace deal - or at least one which he can take the credit for.
Trump does want a peace deal, but he is rapidly becoming wiser to the realities that the two sides are so far apart on the key issues, that the chances of it happening are even more remote than in April 2022. Since the Alaska meeting, Team Trump has shifted. It now knows that the Europeans are more transfixed with keeping the war going than finding a solution to break the cycle of conflict which, without a shadow of doubt, is going Russia's way. There may be some division within the camp of EU leaders but ultimately, the Europeans still believe they have a chance to turn the tables around and gain ground on the battlefield. They are banking on nothing major happening in the next 7 or 8 weeks when the rain comes and tanks and armoured trucks cannot move so easily. Of course they are anxious to buy time which is why the German chancellor pushed for the ceasefire option, which is not fooling the Kremlin one bit.
The interesting thing is that Trump is humouring them. It's as though he believes the outcome for peace will come much faster when the battlefield landscape has changed once again in Russia's favour (when Pokrovsk falls) and that it is better to position himself closer to Putin than to America's traditional allies. He has told them that security guaranties that they would insist upon which need to be there from the U.S. could be provided, but in reality this is just an illusion as Trump knows full well it is unlikely that Putin would agree to this and even more unlikely that Trump would put U.S. boots on the ground given the problems he is having with his MAGA base - who voted for him to do precisely the opposite with U.S. soldiers around the world. His advisors might well have even told him that U.S. soldiers in Ukraine could be a liability and too dangerous an option. They might go from being a tripwire to actually being a catalyst to start a war with Russian forces and the idea that Trump would gamble with this is far-fetched at best.
Trump put the motions in place for a sit-down meeting between Putin and Zelensky but in reality most knew this would never happen as quite apart from Putin worrying that the Ukrainian president's signature won't be worth anything on any peace treaty he signs, the subject of Crimea is pulled out of the hat to derail any possibility of talks. It's important to Zelensky that he is able to portray Putin as the one who is impossible to deal with, but in reality the opposite is the case as any idea of peace in Ukraine comes with a high price for the caretaker President of the country. Just as the British rejected Churchill as a peacetime Prime Minister in the months after the Second World War, the Ukrainians are likely to do the same but for different reasons.
Unlike Churchill, Zelensky has become a multibillionaire from being at the vortex of a massive money laundering scheme involving western aid and arms while his own close cabal of advisers and military leaders fill their pockets from numerous corrupt scams. And the Ukrainians know this.
In my own investigations over the reselling of arms, which end up in Libya before they are resold to African warlords and South American drug cartels, it is interesting if not revealing how the most protected and cherished piece of information which must be guarded at all costs by Zelensky is the real number of his own people are dead or missing.
This is not so much because Ukrainians would rise against him but more about a multibillion dollar scam which his own generals are involved in whereby dead or missing Ukrainian soldiers' salaries are diverted to their pockets.
Russian hackers however have breached the Ukrainian General Staff's database, revealing losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine which might even shock the Ukrainians. According to the compromised digital registry, if the data is correct, Ukraine, they are claiming lost 1,721,000 troops killed or missing over three years of the conflict, with the last year (2024) being the heaviest with 600,000 lost. 1.7 million Ukrainians lost to a war with Russia which the U.S. entirely created the pretext for, is alarming and gives us a clue to how desperate Zelensky is to get any men - even 60 year olds - to fight in the war.
How will the history books write this up for Zelensky?
"If these numbers are true - and they are likely to be - Zelensky and NATO will go down in history as the greatest disaster ever to befall Ukraine" writes Italian journalist and author Thomas Fazi.
"Virtually all these deaths could have been avoided if NATO hadn't deliberately provoked this war by bringing to power its proxies through violent regime change, proceeding to transform Ukraine into a Western military outpost on Russia's border - and then sabotaging every chance of ending the war, including in the early days of the invasion" he adds.
Another "fog of war" half-truth may well be that the Europeans are so desperate to keep Zelensky in power (as he knows where all the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking, in relation to their own threatened legacies) that the talk of European and U.S. soldiers to be deployed to Ukraine is not as part of a grandiose peace deal, but more of a bigger, valiant act of aggression to halt Russia's advance. We are now entering a new level of desperation from the EU side which we have never seen before and so this inevitably means more fake news, false allegations and acts of rank stupidity among them.