US President Donald Trump has said French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “haven’t done anything” to end the war in Ukraine, ahead of their visits to the White House next week.
Trump also said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had “no cards” in peace negotiations, adding: “I don’t think he’s very important to be in meetings.”
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the UK, France and other allies have been supplying Kyiv with weapons and other aid.
Donald Trump is following through on long-promised policies – our leaders are still unprepared
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. It’s one of the oldest pieces of homespun wisdom in the book, but rarely is it practised. History is littered with examples of failure to prepare. Instead, we are much more likely simply to hope for the best. Sometimes it works out; often it doesn’t.
Nobody can say they weren’t warned. Donald Trump has never made any secret of his sympathies for Vladimir Putin. Settling the war in Ukraine was one of his promises while campaigning to be US president, and he has long warned fellow members of Nato that they need to stop sponging off America and take better care of their own defences.
And yet the spectacle of Trump actually doing what he said he was going to do has still taken European leaders entirely by surprise. They’ve been caught with their trousers down, woefully unprepared for the extreme security challenges that Trump’s actions pose. Having shamelessly milked the post-Cold War “peace dividend”, they find themselves naked before the storm.
