Following a brief ceasefire negotiation between high-level delegations of Russia and the United States led by their foreign minister in Riyadh on Thursday, the US has switched its previously stated position that there would be “nothing about Ukraine without the Ukraine” stance held by the Biden regime.
On Thursday, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Russian diplomatic language invoking “realism” when he told Ukraine Defence Contact Group partners in Brussels that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”
The US had promised NATO membership to Ukraine in 2008 and has since supported the bid till Trump took over the office on January 20, 2025.
Realising the importance of how and why a long war in Eastern Europe is fuelling inflation, costing previous lives in a war that could be ended within one week without US help, the US has decided to keep Ukraine out of negotiations.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius called the one-sided concessions “clumsy” and “a mistake.”
Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war and implied it had stolen aid; these allegations were quickly met with a strong response from President Zelensky.
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“Today, I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited’ [to talks in Riyadh]. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump also took a jibe at Zelensky, posting on X that a “modestly successful comedian” had become “a dictator without elections” who had “done a terrible job.”
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the United States has donated $114bn and the European Union $132bn over three years.
“We see in America a president who admires autocratic systems,” said Germany’s next chancellor-presumptive, Friedrich Merz, and a “vice president who tells us how to run our democracy.”“We are no longer sure if the Americans still stand by our side as they did after 1945,” he said.
The US has made it clear to its European counterparts that they have no interest in being the security guarantee of the EU and said that they can look after nations without US assistance in the future.
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