Nobel judges won't be fooled by Trump appeasement plan

So welcome, then, to the 28-point Witkoff-Dmitriev plan: the most cynical plot to carve up a smaller independent state since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact sealed the fate of Poland back in August 1939.

- SEAN O'GRADY

For the West - if such a term can still be used in the time of Trump - it represents a betrayal, not only of the people of Ukraine, but of Europe, and the international order, and the Atlantic Alliance that has kept the peace in this part of the world for eight decades. The vicious irony, of course, is that, just like that earlier treaty signed between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, it will not preserve the peace in Europe for very long, and it will not satisfy the imperial ambitions of the participant common to both exercises in expansionism - Russia.

That should be reason enough to reject it. The Witkoff-Dmitriev plan was, like its inglorious predecessor, negotiated in secret, because even tyrants can be embarrassed. The Ukrainians and the Europeans have had no role in it, and they won't, other than being asked to sign up to it at some ceremony in a gilded hall in the Kremlin or the White House (which are also converging in their Rococo style).

The “security guarantees” being offered to Ukraine are worthless. It is about to be dismembered, and practically disarmed. The Russians get the whole of the Donbas without even fighting for it, and the Americans the lucrative mineral rights “negotiated” (ie coerced from a desperate President Zelensky) in a previous deal, even though the idea there was that the Americans would not abandon them to Russian occupation.