A FEW days ago it seemed as though President Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine still had some mileage.
Last Tuesday the Epoch Times reported hopefully that ‘conversations involving Washington, Moscow, and Kyiv have continued since Trump’s proposed plan to end the conflict came to light in November’. Apace, in fact, the article commented.
Helpfully the ET reminded us where the talks began and where they stood (by last Tuesday). First it went through the original plan drafted by the US special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The 28 points covered an array of topics including territory, the military, future international relations, post-war reconstruction funding, and internal politics.
Parts included provisions for Ukraine to cede the regions of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk to Russia, and for Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be frozen along the line of contact, in effect granting de facto recognition.
There was also a provision that Ukraine would enshrine in its constitution a commitment not to join Nato, and that the alliance would add a statute barring Ukraine from future membership. Kyiv would still have the opportunity to join the European Union, should it meet the entry requirements. Some of these points run counter to the previously stated aims of Ukraine and several Nato member states.
The plan to cap the size of Ukraine’s armed forces at 600,000 and allow Russia to rejoin the G8 got Russia to the table.
To say that Ukraine greeted the plans with some discomfort is probably an understatement. Talks between Washington and Kiev held in Geneva and Florida then ‘updated and refined’ the peace plan.
But Zelensky, briefed on the December 8 discussions by Ukraine’s top negotiator Rustem Umerov, didn’t waste a moment. Before the ink was dry on the Epoch Times’s update he had hot-footed it to London to meet Friedrich Merz of Germany, Emmanuel Macron of France and Sir Keir Starmer to plot using £100billion of frozen Russian assets to continue his war against Russia.
The Russian blogger Simplicius could not have put it better: ‘It feels like things have sharply taken a turn for the worse in the unravelling of the doomed “star-crossed-lovers” of Ukraine and its tipsy European maiden.’
Options are running out fast, he went on, with the club of losers’ ‘high-noon piracy attempt, and the Euro-circus-roadshow’s increasingly spastic and humiliatingly empty huddles and desperate pow-wows, virtually no options remain beyond the self-flagellating throes of despair we’re now being made painfully witness to.’
It is a tragedy. Simplicius is right that ‘there remains no vision forward, no workable contingencies’, and that ‘the last few stalwart globalist puppet holdouts of Macron, Merz, and Starmer are merely play-acting chickens with their heads cut off as they gad about from one slumping European capital to another for their endless procession of humiliation rituals’.
Putin had already warned the world that this would constitute theft.
It is reported this ‘plot’ is Starmer’s (or maybe Jonathan Powell’s) baby. Peter Hitchens predicted this week that it will ruin us all and pave the way for a chilling future.
Since he wrote, the EU has signed off on their plan to immobilise 210billion euros worth of Russian sovereign assets for as long as needed ‘to help Ukraine defend itself against Moscow’s invasion‘.
Why? Hitchens asks. Why do ‘the nations of Europe want to buy a used war from Donald Trump?’
He might in my humble opinion have said ‘a used war from Joe Biden’. It was his administration after all that backed the neocons and corrupt Zelensky to the hilt and made no attempt to stop the war.
Trump, by contrast, could not have invested more heavily reputationally in ending a war that has wreaked such a terrible death and injury toll and seems doomed to destroy Ukraine, if not us too.
Nobody should be taken in by the semantics. ‘Releasing’ more billions for Ukraine’s war effort is not ‘releasing’, it is ‘stealing’, as Hitchens says. The money does not belong to these countries.
Nor will it work. Europe has consistently underestimated Russia’s ability to prosecute this war.
Ukraine’s army will carry on shrinking, as will desertion. Europe cannot make the weapons they need and, as I tweeted myself before I read Peter’s article, how much of it will go astray in this most corrupt of countries?
How much into Zelensky’s own pocket to save his skin? A man who has already thrown his top adviser to the wolves on corruption charges.
Do the terrible trio, Starmer, Merz and Macron, not realise or care about any of this ‘harsh truth’?
Apparently not. Here are the last paragraphs of Hitchens’s article:
‘Ukraine is losing the war into which it was manoeuvred and shoved by others – both from the West and in Moscow – for their own cynical ends. One of those others has lost interest.
(Well, can you blame it? My comment.)
‘The other will fight on indefinitely and mercilessly if the conflict goes on. Much of it is in ruins. Multitudes of its best people have gone for ever, killed in battle or fled abroad. Most of us could not bear to see the legions of maimed and disfigured people which grow daily amid the wreckage.
‘Yet we lightly support dangerous, tricky, actions which will extend this hell for long years to come.
‘Have we utterly taken leave of our senses?’
Our reckless, ego-driven, intellectually and morally challenged politicians undoubtedly have.
