The international community's attention is focused on the Munich Security Conference today. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be present, and for the first time, he will meet with the Vice President of the United States, Jay D. Vance, who, during the presidency of Joe Biden, has been one of the fiercest critics of American aid to Ukraine.
According to skai.gr, what the Ukrainian president is expected to hear from the American vice president, as noted by Jeremy Bowen of the BBC, is that Ukraine is losing and needs to prepare for what comes next. On his part, Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to emphasize that Ukraine can win the war, but with the right support, referring to Washington.
At the same time, the European Union does not hide its discomfort nor its concerns. After her meeting with the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Rustem Umerov, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, stated that Europe must play a central role in the negotiations. "Our priority now should be to strengthen Ukraine and provide it with strong security guarantees."
However, the fact remains that the United States is the strongest military power in the world, and as the Ukrainian president himself emphasized last week when speaking to the Guardian, "security guarantees without the United States are not security guarantees."
The work of Europe without Washington as a guarantor of European security, however, cannot be described as easy. European governments are called to bear the main responsibility for their defense as well as for Ukraine. This, experts and analysts note, will force them to realize the gap between their military promises and their military capabilities. According to early estimates from Bloomberg, Trump's plan for Ukraine and NATO is expected to cost Europeans about three trillion over the next 10 years, while CNN states that "America's century in Europe has ended."
Right now, the former pariah of the international stage, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, is speaking directly with Washington for the first time in three years and gaining the opportunity to negotiate what he truly wants: Kyiv to abandon the territories that Moscow has occupied and for Ukraine never to join NATO. Washington no longer seems to disagree with him. It considers the return of territories to Ukraine at the 2014 borders to be impossible, does not rule out the possibility of Kyiv regaining some of the territories Moscow has controlled for three years of war, and states that "it is unrealistic for the country to join the North Atlantic Alliance."
On the other hand, the President of Ukraine has declared that he wants back the territories controlled by the Russians and for his country to become a NATO member. He has made it clear that he will not accept any agreement resulting from talks without Kyiv's participation and warns everyone not to trust Putin when he says he is ready to end the war.
However, Donald Trump states that he trusts the Russian president when he says he wants peace, saying, "I think he would tell me if he didn’t want that."
Analysts believe that the Russian president will not agree to stop the war until he receives guarantees that at least some of his demands will be met. He does not hide his certainty that the Russian armed forces and the Russian economy can withstand, and if Donald Trump retracts U.S. support for Ukraine, Kyiv will quickly collapse.
The chess pieces are already taking their positions, and the first game continues, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking on Thursday evening with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Sybikha, emphasizing the need for "bold diplomacy" to end the war.
