No winners in this bitter war of words

WITH the world watching, President Trump turned his meeting with President Zelensky into a jaw-dropping version of his hit TV show The Apprentice. This meeting should never have been filmed. The details of the peace agreement hadn’t been finalised and tensions were running high.

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Perhaps Trump felt the pressure of the cameras would get his deal over the line, or perhaps having already met fawning French president Macron and simpering Starmer — who at no point corrected Trump over his rewriting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — he felt convinced that Zelensky, like them, would roll over and cede to his demands.

Whatever the reason for so badly misreading the situation, this overly long televised meeting probably changed the course of history — and in truth nobody came out of it with any credit.