The US has secured control of Ukraine peace process with Western Europe pushed out of the room<\/p>\n
This weekend\u2019s emergency consultations in Geneva between senior officials from the United States, Ukraine and handful of European NATO states were convened after President Donald Trump\u2019s peace plan burst into the open. The meeting was supposed to clarify the roadmap for a settlement in Ukraine. Instead, it preserved the intrigue and the deliberate \u201cstrategic ambiguity\u201d that now surrounds Washington\u2019s approach.
\nThe final statement issued by Washington and Kiev was remarkably vague. It offered only a general commitment to building a \u201clasting and just peace\u201d in Ukraine, without saying whose definition of justice or whose version of peace would prevail. And while Kiev and its Western European backers had loudly objected to key elements of Trump\u2019s 28-point proposal, it\u2019s still unclear whether the document was meaningfully amended at all. Even so, several conclusions from Geneva are already visible.
\nFirst, the main winner was the American delegation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Representative Steven Witkoff set the tone of the meeting, and Rubio\u2019s insistence that \u201cthere is only one peace plan, not two\u201d became the defining line of the day. Only 24 hours earlier, both Kiev and European capitals were buzzing about an alternative scheme supposedly being rushed to Switzerland. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Trump\u2019s document included provisions directly affecting all of Europe \u2013\u00a0frozen Russian assets, Ukraine\u2019s EU prospects, NATO activities \u2013 and therefore required broader agreement.<\/p>\n
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Zelensky is sending a very important signal about Trump\u2019s peace plan<\/p>\n
Yet none of this resulted in real changes. Whatever Western European leaders hoped to insert, nothing of substance appears to have made it into the negotiations. Trump\u2019s peace plan did not become, and will not become, a joint American\u2013EU project.
\nThe second conclusion follows from the first: Britain, France and Germany were sidelined. The Geneva meeting was officially trilateral, yet the final outcome was a bilateral US\u2013Ukrainian statement. Western European officials, present in the room, vanished from the document. That omission is not an accident, it\u2019s a clear sign of who holds leverage and who does not.
\nThird, Ukraine itself emerged as the other loser of the day. According to the White House, Kiev has now agreed that Trump\u2019s draft \u201creflects its national interests\u201d and provides \u201creliable and feasible mechanisms\u201d for Ukraine\u2019s security. That is a dramatic reversal from President Zelensky\u2019s address the previous evening, in which he accused his \u201cmain partner\u201d of trying to deprive Ukraine of its dignity and promised to resist. Geneva shows how little of that rhetoric survived contact with reality.
\nTrump\u2019s plan, dismissed at first as a political \u201cfog,\u201d is beginning to solidify into the framework for future agreements. Whether Kiev or its Western European backers like it or not, Washington is setting the terms, and everyone else is learning to live with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US has secured control of Ukraine peace process with Western Europe pushed out of the room This weekend\u2019s emergency consultations in Geneva between senior officials from the United States,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t