The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Friday that the Kremlin was scoffing at U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine.
Trump met with Putin in Alaska last week in a bid to get Russian leader Vladimir Putin to end his brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He also convened European leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for a crunch summit at the White House on Monday.
Kallas reckons Trump’s efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine had handed a major propaganda win to Putin — and risked walking into the Kremlin’s “trap.”
It’s “clear that Russia does not want peace,” she told BBC Radio 4.
“Any promises that Putin has given so far, he hasn’t kept,” she said, adding that the Alaska summit had been a public relations jackpot for the Kremlin.
“This is what he [Putin] wanted,” Kallas said. “It was clear before the meeting that he wants the picture, but he got so much more. He got such a welcoming in America.”
Calling Trump’s efforts to broker a truce “welcome,” Kallas said the Russian ruler was nonetheless less inclined to come to the negotiating table after Alaska “because he has achieved what he wanted from this meeting.”
“Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing but increasing the killing,” she added.
Trump’s whirlwind diplomacy in the last two weeks, including the summits in Alaska and Washington, has yet to extract any concessions from Moscow, which has not backed down from its maximalist demands — namely that Ukraine give up vast swathes of territory in its eastern Donbas region, which Russian troops have partially occupied, and renounce joining NATO.
Meanwhile, Russian missiles and drones continue to rain down on Ukrainian cities, killing civilians and pummeling infrastructure.
“We are forgetting that Russia has not made one single concession, and they are the ones who are the aggressor here,” Kallas said, adding that focusing the negotiations on Ukraine giving up territory was a “trap that Putin wants us to walk into.”
On security guarantees for Ukraine, Trump said Monday he was ready to offer a “lot of help,” raising hopes that the U.S. could participate meaningfully in an international peacekeeping force. But he backtracked Tuesday, suggesting instead that he was open to providing air support for European troops deployed there.
“We’ve got the European nations, and they’ll front-load it,” Trump said on Fox News, adding: “France and Germany, a couple of them, U.K. They want to have, you know, boots on the ground.”
Kallas said Ukraine’s allies in the so-called coalition of the willing had yet to take “concrete steps” and it was up to them to figure out what they could contribute to a future deterrence force in Ukraine and what shape it would take.
“Russia will just gather its forces again and attack again,” she said, “so we have to make sure that they don’t do that in the future.”
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