Donald Trump’s boast that he was close to ending the war in Ukraine was in ruins on Wednesday, with his much vaunted peace plan in tatters.
The U.S. president was left humiliated, with British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer claiming Russian leader Vladimir Putin was never serious about seeking peace.
His comments came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled his planned talks in Brussels with Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
The architects of the Gaza peace deal flew back to Washington, and Marco Rubio snubbed a meeting of NATO ministers in the Belgian capital, the first time a U.S. secretary of state has missed the summit since 1999.
The collapse came a day after Putin declared that Russia was “ready right now” for war in Europe.
For the past two weeks, Trump has bragged about his 28-point peace deal as the latest reason why he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize. But the draft deal was put together with the Kremlin, with no input from Ukraine, and included compromises Zelensky was never likely to accept.
Kyiv has also reportedly rejected a revised 19-point deal that, while dropping some contentious demands, still required Ukraine to pull out of parts of the Donetsk region it already controls and to cut its military by a quarter.
On Wednesday, Starmer dismissed Putin’s war threat as “Kremlin claptrap” and urged NATO members to support Ukraine “in every conceivable way.”
He told the House of Parliament: “We all know that Putin is the aggressor here. We all know that Putin is dragging his feet, not wanting to come to the table, not wanting to reach an agreement.”
“What we see is that Putin has not changed any course. He’s pushing more aggressively on the battlefield. It’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t want to have any kind of peace,” said Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna.
Russia attempted to save a little face for Trump by praising his attempts to broker peace. “This is a normal process. It was the first time there was a direct exchange of opinions,” said spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
But he made it clear that Moscow found the terms of the American deal “unacceptable.”
“There’s still a lot of work to be done, both in Washington and in Moscow,” said Putin’s advisor Yuri Ushakov.
Trump met Putin amid great fanfare in Alaska in August and, although the three-hour talks did not yield immediate results, Trump insisted “great progress” was made.
Since then, he has repeatedly claimed that he felt the U.S. was close to striking a deal with the implacably opposed Russian and Ukrainian delegations.
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