Trump’s discussion with Putin to focus on what Ukraine will lose

Hear President Trump describes her, he and President Vladimir in.

It did not explicitly refer to the 1945 meeting, where Churchill, Stalin and a fatal Franklin d. Roosevelt the continent in the West is the American alignment and the east dominated by the Soviet, which created the areas of influence that became the battlefield in the Cold War.

But talking to Air Force One correspondents as he returned from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump explained that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday will focus on the lands and assets that Russia will keep in any ceasefire with Ukraine.

In its essence, it will negotiate the size of the reward that Russia will receive for 11 years of aggression against Ukraine, from the seizure of the Crimea in 2014 and extends during the full war that Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will definitely retain the Crimea – in one of those strange transformations of history, and the Yalta Conference, which lasted in February 1945 – and has strongly suggested that it get all the lands it maintains almost.

Although the administration officials have confirmed that they had kept their Ukrainian counterparts and European leaders who were fully briefed on their interactions with Russia, Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will only be on the call, and the assistants are supposed to hear. It is not clear that either Ukraine or the major European powers will agree with everything that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin may agree on.

Mr. Trump and his assistants were careful about the details of the deal discussed with the Russian leader. Steve Whitchov, the real estate developer in New York and his old friend of Mr. Trump, who is now a special envoy to the Middle East, spent hours with Mr. Putin in Moscow recently preparing for the call.

“We are doing a very good job, with Russia,” said Mr. Trump, adding, “I think we have a very good chance,” to reach a ceasefire. After that, he turned to the issue of what Ukraine might have to abandon.

“I think we will talk about the land, it’s a lot of land,” he said. “It is very different from what it was before the war, as you know. We will talk about the ground. We will talk about power plants,” referring to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, the largest nuclear site in Europe. “This is a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed a lot by both sides.”

Mr. Trump was keen not to say much about the parts of the Ukrainian lands he was discussing, or whether he would try to reduce the aspirations of Mr. Putin. The Trump administration has already made it clear that it expects Russia to control the land of its forces already, that is, nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. But President Folodimir Zelinski from Ukraine said last month that they were concerned that Mr. Trump may enjoy other desires of Mr. Putin for parts of Ukraine, including the critical port of Odessa.

The National Security Adviser, Trump, Michael Waltz, said at “Meet The Press” on NBC during the weekend, that he expects the talks with Russia to be realistic, and any discussion has deviated from whether Russia has been rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Walz He was the audio defender of Ukraine And his sovereignty. As the head of the National Security Council of Mr. Trump, avoid mentioning what is clear, that Russia has started the war.)

“Will we stop every Russian inch of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including the Crimea?” Mr. Waltz asked in an NBC interview.

In his television appearance in recent weeks, Mr. Waltz has taken a position that the most important results of the conversations should be the end of the killing after three years of the evil trench and the drone warfare.

He and other Trump assistants say little about the circumstances associated with the ceasefire, but they point out that they are second to that biggest task. Mr. Waltz suggested that the alternative was a policy closer to the strategy of former President Joseph R. Biden Junior: Ensure that the United States and its allies were with them “as long as it took it.”

This is a prescription. On Sunday, Mr. Waltz insisted on “an endless war in an environment that has literally lost hundreds of thousands of people within months.”

He warned that the conflict is still “rising to World War III,” he said that Mr. Trump was making it for Mr. Zellinski in a hot public argument in the Oval Office last month. “We can talk about what is right and wrong, and we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground.”

There are other issues that may become essential for negotiation. France and Britain offered the situation of forces inside Ukraine, perhaps with other European powers. But it is not clear that Mr. Putin will agree to the power of peacekeeping or “journey wire”. These forces will be part of a security guarantee for Ukraine, although it is unclear how effective European forces are without a backup copy of Washington.

The administration reduces the work carried out by the Ministry of Justice War crime accounting teamThe, which was established in 2022 by Merrick B. Garland, the Prosecutor during the era of Mr. Biden, to hold the Russians accountable for the atrocities that were committed in the aftermath of the full invasion three years ago.

Combined, these measures are a significant decline in effort The then President Kamala Harris announced in 2023 After the United States concluded that Russia committed “crimes against humanity”. The steps seem to be part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to facilitate compatibility with Mr. Putin.

There is no historical analogy of an accurate previous era, of course, and negotiating the end of the war in Ukraine has many differences from conditions in the depths of the winter of 1945, when it was clear that Nazi Germany would lose soon.

But, as Monica Duffy, I died, a professor of international politics at the University of Tafs, recently in foreign affairs, “The geopolitical scene in particular is in particular the end of World War II” because “the major powers seek to negotiate a new global matter in the first place with each other, as did the leaders who are having when they repeat the world’s blast” in Yalta.

In an interview, Professor said that the land expansion “is what Putin wants, and it is clear that Trump wants – just a look at Greenland, Panama and Canada.”

“This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their country great again.”

“The big question mark is China,” she added. The results of the negotiations – especially the issue of whether Mr. Putin is rewarded for what was an expensive war, “may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides that he wants to take Taiwan.”