Between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump he returns storm. The US President has again defined the Ukrainian one “the largest seller in the world” and warned that for Ukraine he will no longer spend “any money”. Certainly not a good viaticum for the meetings announced in the next weekend by Zelensky in Washington between Ukrainian and American delegations on the peace process. Also because the Tycoon made it known that he returned to talk to Vladimir Putin after the telephone interview with him last Monday, while he received the leader of Ukraine and European countries at the White House.
“We had a good conversation, all our conversations are good,” he wanted to underline. Only a few hours before Zelensky had argued with the US vice president JD Vance, the one who had started the famous altercation in the oval study on February 28 and who on Sunday had recognized to the Russian president that he had made “important concessions to Donald Trump for the first time in three and a half years” of conflict.
Russia, added Vance, proved to be “very flexible on some of her fundamental needs”. Nothing more false according to the Ukrainian president. “As for the concessions of Russia – said Zelensky – I don’t know anything about it. I don’t think the things said on the Russian side, that is, that they are ready not to continue occupying Ukraine, are concessions. I don’t think there are concessions that they are offering us to withdraw from territories that Russia does not control ».
And then he polemically recalled that it was the USA “who proposed, on March 7”, a ceased the fire, the one that Trump believes is not necessary to start the peace negotiations. To curb the new attack by Trump in Zelensky did not even serve the fact that in the same hours the Ukrainian president had a meeting with the US President’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in view of the interviews in Washington.
“We no longer spend any money for Ukraine, we treat with NATO and not with Ukraine,” said the tenant of the White House, reiterating what has been said last month, that is, that the American weapons to be sent to Kiev should have been paid from now on by the European countries. First Zelensky, he added, “every time he left the White House, he took millions of dollars away”. As for the difficulties in organizing the summit between the Ukrainian and Russian presidents, Trump liquidated them by saying that “Putin does not want to meet Zelensky because he doesn’t like it”.
And in any case “the war in Ukraine proved to be a clash between characters”. Trump’s statement is also worrying for Kiev and European countries according to which specific security guarantees have been discussed so far for Kiev, even if the United States will be on the field for this. Words that contrast with those of European sources close to negotiations, according to which in the last ten days the United States have focused on this dossier and there have been “significant progress”.
For his part, however, the spokesman for the German stationery, Stefan Kornelius, warned that “long negotiations will be necessary” to aim for peace, taking into account the “complexity” of the comparison. “The war in Ukraine will certainly not end in a week,” the spokesman insisted. Meanwhile, China has dryly denied news of the Welt Am Sonntag, who citing European diplomatic sources had written that Beijing would be ready to send Peacekeeping forces to Ukraine on UN mandate.
“The news in question is not true,” said the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Guo Jiakun. Finally, on the ground, the Ministry of Defense of Moscow has claimed the conquest of another village in the Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk, which is not among the four claimed by Russia together with Crimea, annexed in 2014.