I’ll say one thing for Donald Trump: he’s made life for journalists so much easier by holding his international summits in front of the world’s media.
Discussions such as these usually take place behind closed doors, with news folk left either twiddling their thumbs or filling airtime with speculation.
There may be a carefully-crafted press conference at the end, missing out the good bits, or even just a terse written communiqué, missing out even more.
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Putting the meat on the bones of what happened can take days of digging afterwards. The US president’s Monday summit with Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders followed the Trump pattern of inviting newshounds to bark whatever questions they liked, but this time, there were precious few specific answers.
So we are back to the traditional two-day dusting off period while we piece together what the hell might actually be happening.
The Europeans were very excited about Trump’s security guarantee - yet now we know he has no intention of putting American boots on Ukrainian ground. Instead, there’s just a vague promise of air cover.
So this was Trump’s big lie all along. Putin plays for time while we all get conned — Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
The best international summit I ever attended was the one I didn’t attend - with Gordon Brown in Islamabad’s presidential palace as the then PM negotiated with the Pakistanis over Afghanistan.
As it was a Sunday and I worked for a Sunday newspaper, all my work was done the previous day in Kabul. I even had a special forces bodyguard to race me through the mean streets of the Afghan capital in an armoured army land rover.
He was the spit of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, as if one had modelled himself on the other, but I never worked out which. So, there was no need for me to do anything, and I wandered around the palace instead. An official stopped me and invited me to lunch.
My luck was in, and I enjoyed plateful after plateful of the most delicious curries I’ve ever tasted in the presidential dining room.
No curries for the frustrated journalists waiting for morsels of news outside the White House. And the titbits we’ve been fed since have not been filling.
The much-trumpeted bilateral/trilateral between Zelensky and Vladimir Putin with Trump holding their coats now looks less certain.
The Russian leader’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told Russian state media: “Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have spoken out in support of continuing direct negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations.“
The idea was discussed that it would be advisable to explore the possibility of raising the level of representatives of the Ukrainian and Russian sides. Advisable? Explore? Possibility? Is that a yes, an opaque no or a definitely, maybe? Hard to tell from that statement.
And even if it goes ahead, there’s the question of where it should take place. Putin suggests Moscow, which he knows Zelensky could never accept.
Fondue-loving Switzerland is nice, boringly clean and neutral and has offered Geneva, but the country is signed up to the International Criminal Court, which declared Putin a wanted war criminal to be arrested on sight.
The Russian president might be reluctant to go somewhere where he might have his collar felt, no matter how many times Swiss lawyers say they can get around that.
Crimea is clearly lost, and Ukraine’s NATO membership will have to be kicked into the long grass at the very least. But Putin wants more. He wants the Donbas.
That means Kyiv giving up 30 per cent of prize industrial land rich in rare minerals it still controls in Donetsk and Luhansk.
According to British Military Intelligence, it would take Putin four years and two million more casualties to capture it by force. But does Putin care, given that 250,000 Russians have died already? Even so, it would be better to have it handed over on a plate.
He’s already rejected a ceasefire, which is obviously the most workable precursor to land negotiations and an eventual peace settlement. And the drones keep coming.
This leads to the suspicion that Putin is playing Trump to play for time so he can conquer more of Ukraine. And we are all being conned.