Emergency Meeting in Europe Underway as Alarm Spreads Over Prospect of a Deal on Ukraine Between Trump and Putin

 Yanks are due to arrive this morning in Saudi Arabia to jump start talks with Russians ahead of holy month of Ramadan.

Alarmed that a Trump-Putin deal could be cut without input from Europe or Ukraine, President Macron is gathering today leaders of Europe’s largest nations for an emergency meeting at Paris. Their parley will coincide with the arrival of President Trump’s negotiating team in Saudi Arabia to jump-start talks with their Russian counterparts ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, starting in ten days.

To build on these preliminary talks, President Trump predicted to reporters yesterday that he could  meet “very soon” with President Putin. The goals of the parley at Paris include forging a common negotiating position on Ukraine, selecting a European envoy to participate in peace talks, advancing a military aid package for Ukraine, and rethinking European defense in the event that, after 75 years, Washington goes wobbly.

European leaders were shaken over the weekend by comments of Trump Administration officials that seemed to suggest that Europe would not have a seat at the negotiating table, but would have to foot the bill for patrolling an armistice. Europe would have to place all the Western boots on the ground to patrol a 600-mile-long demilitarized zone in Eastern Ukraine.

President Zelensky objected that Kyiv would “never accept deals made behind our backs.” Mr. Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general,  justified cutting out Europe by citing the failure of Minsk 2, a Russia-Ukraine peace accord negotiated a decade ago by Germany and France. “When you look at Minsk 2, there were a lot of people at the table that really had no ability to execute some type of peace process, and it failed miserably,” the general told a panel Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. “So we are not gonna go down that path.”

Later, other Trump Administration officials were more conciliatory, saying that Europe and Ukraine will join the talks — at a later stage. This week, General Kellogg travels to Kyiv and is not to join the Trump team in Riyadh. Representing the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia will be the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the national security advisor, Mike Waltz; and Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy. Steve Witkoff.

From the Russian side, there will be three figures with long ties to Mr. Putin: his chief foreign-policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov;his top spymaster,  Sergei Naryshkin; and a Harvard-educated financier who married into the Putin family, Kirill Dmitriev. The Saudi national security adviser, Musaed Al-Aiban, is to convene the talks.

On Saturday, Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, discussed peace proposals for Ukraine, restoring normal functioning of their respective embassies, and, according to Moscow, the removal of “unilateral barriers” set by the Biden administration. Yesterday, normally gloomy Kremlin officials sounded upbeat  about the prospect of peace talks and a Trump-Putin summit.

“This is a powerful signal that we will now try to solve problems through dialogue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state TV. “Now we will talk about peace, not war.” Echoing a foreign ministry statement, Mr. Peskov, who has served as Kremlin spokesman for 12 years, said Western sanctions could be “lifted as quickly as imposed.”

“Hysteria in Munich” trumpeted a Telegram post by Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. He wrote “The collective institutions of the European Union, represented by their leaders, do not understand what is happening in the world and have shown their incompetence and inadequacy.”

In this fast-changing environment, some observers advise against panic and against underestimating Mr. Trump. “Trump is not betraying Ukraine,” Britain’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, said in a selfie video posted at the end of the Munich conference. “He won’t start his presidency with a Western defeat or allow Putin to humiliate NATO … If Putin takes Ukraine, the country will erupt in an insurgency lasting decades, dragging down the global economy. Trump doesn’t want that.”

The current occupant of 10 Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer, writes Sunday in the Telegraph newspaper that he is prepared to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by “putting our own troops on the ground if necessary.” Under the headline, “I am ready and willing to put British troops in Ukraine,” Mr. Starmer, a Laborite, wrote: “We are facing a once-in-a-generation moment for the collective security of our continent. This is not only a question about the future of Ukraine. It is existential for Europe as a whole.”

To patrol a disengagement line four times longer than the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the West would need to station at least 100,000 battle-ready troops — only 167 per linear mile. After years of cuts, the British Army has only 75,000 active-duty soldiers. Poland is building a 1 million-man army, the largest European army in the North Atlantic Treaty

Poland, however, bowed out yesterday of pulling guard duty. Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told state TV that having Polish troops on the ground in Ukraine is “not a consideration, because Poland’s duty to NATO is to protect the eastern flank, i.e. its own territory.”

This would not be a job for United Nations’ “blue hat” peacekeepers, say American and European military officers with the experience of responding to Soviet military testing and probing during the Cold War.

“It has to be a real force so that the Russians know that if they ever tested it, that they would get crushed. And you can be sure that Russia will test it,”  a former commanding general of United States Army Europe, Ben Hodges, told the Brussels-based European Policy Centre last month. “They violate every single agreement. So if we send a force in there, they’ve got to have airpower, large land forces, drones, counter-drones, air and missile defense. All of that.”

Europeans have gotten the message that the Trump Administration will not deploy American soldiers to defend a Ukrainian line of separation. However, Europeans hope that America will continue to supply military aid, logistics help, and intelligence. Europe intends to ask for an American-enforced no fly zone for Russian warplanes over Ukraine.

Europeans were encouraged by a questionnaire distributed by Trump administration officials at the Munich Security Conference. “What, if any, U.S. support requirements would your government consider necessary for its participation in these security arrangements? Specifically, which short-term and long-term resources do you think will be required from the U.S.?,” asks the document, reports Reuters. “What additional capabilities, equipment and maintenance sustainment options is your Government prepared to provide to Ukraine to improve its negotiating hand and increase pressure on Russia?”

Caught between one Trump official demanding “payback” for past American military aid to Ukraine and the Russian threat from the East, Europe and Ukraine are considering breaking the mold to pay for defense. European leaders, desirous of providing guns and butter to their people, are taking a second look at confiscating some $300 billion in Russian reserves that have been frozen in European banks since February 24, 2022, the day Mr. Putin launched his full-scale attack on Ukraine.

Legal precedents are cited by advocates on both sides of the debate. Tipping the scale may be President Trump’s apparent reluctance to approve another multi-billion dollar aid package for Ukraine this year. From the Trump side, the American ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, delivered to Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday a short memorandum reportedly reserving for America half of Ukraine’s rare minerals —  including lithium, graphite, and uranium.

The memo was delivered to the Ukrainian president four hours before he met in Kyiv with the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. On Wednesday and in meetings later with Vice President Vance at Munich, Mr. Zelensky refused to sign. “The American people deserve to be recouped, deserve to have some kind of payback for the billions they have invested in this war,” Mr. Waltz told Fox News Sunday.  “I think that Zelenskiy would be very wise to enter into this agreement with the United States.”

Half of the rare minerals in Kyiv-controlled Ukraine could be worth as much as $2 trillion. Over the last decade, Ukraine has received $135 billion in military aid from America, largely in the form of American-made equipment. With this and European aid, Ukraine destroyed about half of Russia’s inventory of battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces, according to a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. 

The Trump mineral memo reportedly makes no mention of future military aid or security guarantees. Without security guarantees, investments in Ukraine can be worthless. In 2017, Washington’s  Overseas Private Investment Corporation agreed to provide $470 million in loans and insurance guarantees for a southern Ukraine wind farm that was to use 62 GE wind turbines. Since March 2022, the area has been occupied by Russian soldiers.

https://www.nysun.com/article/emergency-meeting-in-europe-underway-as-alarm-spreads-over-prospect-of-a-deal-on-ukraine-between-trump-and-putin