From campaign boasts to diplomatic blunders: Trump’s Ukraine stalemate

No matter his bluster and bravado, US President Donald Trump has not been able to fulfil any of his major election campaign promises. For instance, he had stated that from the very day he was elected, commodity prices would go down – on the contrary, the ill-advised global tariff war he started has caused inflation in the US to increase even more! The most telling failure in the five months since his election to the White House has been his inability to get Russian President Vladimir Putin directly to the negotiating table with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an effort to bring an end to the protracted conflict in Ukraine. Trump during the election campaign had boasted how close he was to the Russian autocrat and asserted that the Ukraine war would end the moment he was elected.

Till now he is yet to deliver on that promise and is slowly realising that Putin had been “playing” him all along. Though his representatives, along with Zelenskyy and his team had gone to Istanbul for talks with Russian representatives, the absence of Putin meant that those talks ended as soon as they began. In a direct snub to Trump, the Russian President failed to agree to participate in the peace talks despite the former publicly announcing his willingness to go to Istanbul and hold face-to-face talks with Putin.

Even then, there had been hope that Trump’s announcement, that he would renew his request to Putin via a telephonic call at the end of his Arabian trip, would break the impasse.

That much-anticipated telephone call last Monday, which lasted two hours, proved to be a damp squib, despite Trump trying to project it on his social media posting as a success, asserting that “Russia and Ukraine had agreed to ‘immediate ceasefire’ talks.” The rebuttal from Moscow was swift and sharp – it asserted its concerns need to be addressed before talks, reiterating that a ceasefire can be agreed upon after addressing “the root causes of this crisis.”

What those root causes are, of course, well known – Russia wants Ukraine to drop its efforts to join NATO and withdraw its troops from Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Russian forces – demands Kyiv has rejected. Thus, nothing much has changed to the status quo as far as Trump is concerned, but in contrast, the UK and the EU have immediately set about to act. They announced new sanctions against Russia last Tuesday, targeting Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers used by it to transport crude to some nations, as well as financial firms that have helped it avoid the impact of other sanctions imposed over the war. However, it remains moot how effective these would prove unless complemented by a similar move by Washington, only which might induce Putin to enter into negotiations.