Putin is satisfied with the failure of Trump's peace plan for Ukraine: how the negotiation impasse arose - media

Trump's ambitious diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have faced serious difficulties, CNN reporter Stephen Collinson writes. The leader of the White House said that he does not intend to waste time on "unnecessary meetings", abandoning the idea of ​​a second summit with President Putin.

Telephone talks between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to prepare for a summit meeting have not yielded any results, as the new summit will reflect the impasse in Alaska. "Trump's critics may take some satisfaction in the fact that his grandiose plans are at risk of stalling. But rooting against him only to deprive him of his victories would be cruel, given that global stability and thousands of lives may depend on Trump's success," Collinson notes.

According to him, if Trump needed to make sure that the Kremlin is not ready to stop the war, then the Russians' continuous attacks on Ukraine's energy sector helped him in this, turning winter into a kind of weapon against civilians. In addition, Moscow continues to demand concessions from Kyiv regarding the Luhansk and Donetsk regions — conditions that Ukraine considers unacceptable and a threat to its security.

Sources in the administration report that the head of the White House considered the possibility of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, but abandoned this idea after a conversation with Putin. Instead, he focused on putting pressure on Kyiv, which irritated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyi. As a result, the process again ended up in a dead end.

Putin, Collinson points out, could use this time to continue a war of attrition, seeking to expand control over the territories before any negotiations begin. Trump, in turn, returned to the position of "freezing the conflict" - calling on the parties to stop hostilities along the current front lines. However, this approach, according to experts, risks only fixing the status quo and strengthening Moscow's strategic position. "The melodrama repeated the well-worn scenario.

Putin reacted when Trump seemed to be about to impose sanctions for Russia's intransigence. Then the US president, after talking with Putin, put pressure on Ukraine to give up the territory. Then the process again reached a dead end, which caused Trump's disappointment," the analyst emphasized. Earlier it was reported that the EU countries are developing a peace plan with Ukraine, which consists of 12 points and is designed to end the Russian-Ukrainian war.