Trump and Ukraine ceasefire talks: One last roll of the dice?

Meeting in London follows growing US impatience with failure to strike a deal.

- Jonathan Eyal

US President Donald Trump has had enough. After promising to end the Ukraine war in "24 hours" only to extend the deadline to the first 100 days of his presidency, Mr. Trump is now threatening that, if the parties to the conflict won't stop fighting immediately, he will drop the entire matter, and find something else to do.

If either side continues to block a deal over the next few days, Mr. Trump warned: "We're just going to say, 'You're foolish, you're fools, you're horrible people', and we're going to just take a pass."

It is still possible that a ceasefire deal may emerge from talks taking place in London on April 23. But if this happens — and the chances are not great — this will be primarily due to the help that the Europeans, whom Mr. Trump initially dismissed as irrelevant, are providing in saving the US President from his errors.

What remains clear, however, is that the US President's entire approach to the Ukraine crisis has been an unmitigated disaster, a classic example of how not to conduct foreign policy.

A LITANY OF ERRORS Since the Ukraine war erupted in February 2022, Mr. Trump based his policies on two fundamental assumptions. The first was the claim that the war would have never started if he were in the White House instead of President Joe Biden, and the second was the idea that Ukraine is responsible for the tragedy.

It is true that both the first Ukraine war, in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, and the current war we experience today started when Democratic presidents occupied the White House. But to extrapolate from this that, somehow, Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have dared to move if Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office remains nonsense. After all, Mr. Putin was also not deterred from invading Georgia in 2008 when Mr. George W. Bush — a Republican — was in charge.