If Trump is as smart as advertised, he had to know that his promise to end the Ukraine-Russia war in one day was pure bullshit. However, he still seems genuinely interested in peace in that part of the world, and let’s hope he gets it. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
There is still reason for optimism that the Trump administration can bring the war in Ukraine to a diplomatic end. But insubstantial promises of a fast, smooth sailing solution have splintered against the solidity of reality. Campaign promises of a day became goals of a hundred. As the hundredth day appears on the horizon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the U.S. is still far from securing a diplomatic solution and that there is no guarantee that there will be one.
Though Western politicians and media are quick with the claim that the war was unprovoked and that it is simply the expression of Putin’s imperial ambitions, the real causes were always different, deeper, more real and more historically entrenched. They were always going to be harder to solve, and they were always going to take longer than a hundred days.
Dizzying talk of Trump simply calling Putin and Zelensky on the phone, and the three presidents agreeing to end the war has yielded to the sober reality that there are substantial issues that led to the war and that need to be resolved. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov explained in an early April interview that Russia takes Washington’s diplomatic efforts seriously, but that they cannot accept them “as they are” because they have not yet addressed “Russia’s core demand, that is, the need to resolve the issues stemming from the root causes of this conflict.”
Western commentators and advisers are quick to point out that Washington needs to exert leverage on Moscow or to complain that Washington has less leverage against Moskow than against Kiev, but both miss the point. There is little that leverage can accomplish in the Kremlin. Russia went to war, in large part, to make NATO keep its promise not to expand to Ukraine and to make Ukraine keep its founding promise not to join NATO. Both NATO and Ukraine have said as much. The Russian armed forces are decidedly winning on the battlefield. Russia is not going to agree to withdraw from Ukraine until NATO guarantees that it will not expand into Ukraine. Putin will not surrender Russia’s core demand at the negotiating table when he can impose it on the battlefield.
