Trump's call with Putin will force Ukraine and allies in a difficult choice

America is under a new government. The President of Ukraine Volodimir Zelenski joins a growing list of allies of us, who find that the world, according to Donald Trump, is more strongly, more uninsured and potentially more dangerous for them.

It was probably bad enough for Zelenski to hear Trump's sharp message that he had welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin back to international diplomacy with a 90-minute phone call, which would be followed by a face-to-face meeting in Saudi Arabia.

After Putin, the White House dialed Zelenski's number. Speaking to journalists in Ukraine in the morning, Zelenski accepted the fact that Putin received the first call “Although, to be honest, this is not very pleasant.”

What he resisted of Zelenski was that Trump, who called him after talking to Putin, seemed to look at him at the best case as a junior addition to all peace negotiations. One of the many nightmares of Zelenski should be Trump and Putin's prospects to try to settle the future of Ukraine without anyone else in the negotiations.

He told the journalists that Ukraine “would not be able to accept any agreements” concluded without his participation.

He was vital, he said that “everything is not going according to Putin's plan, in which he wants to do everything to do his negotiations.”

President Zelenski is heading to the Munich Security Conference, starting Friday, where he will try to unite the allies of Ukraine. He faces a difficult meeting with Trump's Vice President, JD Vance, who was one of the most striking critics of Joe Biden's help to Ukraine.

The argument that Zelenski will hear from Americans is that Ukraine is losing and has to be real about what happens afterwards. He will claim that Ukraine can win – with right support.

The European Union is also worried. After meeting and praising the Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Musrov, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kalas publishes that Europe should play a central role in all negotiations. “Our priority should now be the strengthening of Ukraine and providing stable security guarantees,” Kalas said.

Zelenski is painfully aware that while its European allies sound much more relevant than Americans, the United States remains the strongest military force in the world. He told Guardian last week that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

Collectively European allies have given Ukraine more money than the United States. But Americans have weapons and air defense systems – such as patriot rocket batteries that protect Kiev – which Europeans simply cannot provide.

Putin will be glad that he gets a much easier driving than he had from Biden. The former US president called Putin, among other things, “pure thug”, “brutal tyrant” and “murderous dictator” and interrupted contact after the full -scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine in February 2022.

Just to move home that everything has changed, Trump followed yesterday's positive assessment of his conversation with Putin with an optimistic post in the early morning of his platform, Truth Social, thinking about “great conversations with Russia and Ukraine yesterday.” Now there was “a good opportunity to end this terrible, very bloody war !!!”

Putin is not just about talking to the most powerful country in the world. With Trump, he can now be seen as an arbitrator of the final play in the war, which began when he violated international law with a comprehensive invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.

In the White House, Trump seemed to suggest that the huge number of dead and injured in the Russian military gave some legitimacy to Putin's request to hold the Earth captured and annexed by Russia.

“They took a lot of land and fought for this land,” Trump said. As for Ukraine, “some of them will come back.”

The remarks of his Minister of Defense Pete Heget at a NATO meeting in Brussels were more direct. He wanted Ukraine to be “sovereign and prosperous.” But “we have to start with the recognition that return to the borders of Ukraine before 2014 is an unrealistic goal.”

“The pursuit of this illusion goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Trump is still at the easy end of what could become an impossible difficult diplomatic challenge. To boast that he has the key to ending the war in Russo-Ukrana is one. To happen, this is something else.

His declaration before the conversations with Russia begins that Ukraine will not join NATO, nor to return all its occupied land, is widely criticized as a bad start by a person who claims to be the best deals in the world.

Veteran Swedish diplomat and politician Carl Bilt published an ironic reproach of X.

“This is certainly an innovative approach to negotiating very big discounts, even before they start. Even Chamberlain is not so low in 1938 that Munich ended very badly.”

Both published a photo of the then prime minister of Britain Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1938, waving the notorious and useless agreement that he had concluded with Adolf Hitler – the price of which was the capitulation and breakup of Czechoslovakia and faster slide War.

After the full -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin was widely represented in the West as the new threat to European peace. Trump's approach to him is very different.

He will have to try to overcome the gap between the positions of Putin and Zelenski, which are polar opposites.

The declared goal of Zelenski is to regain the lost territory of Ukraine, which represents about one fifth of its total earth mass. He also wants Ukraine to become a complete NATO member.

Putin insists that any peace transaction will require Ukraine to abandon the land that Russia has been captured, as well as areas that have not occupied, including the city of attachment, which has a population of more than half a million. Ukraine would also become neutral, demilitarized and would never join NATO.

Ukraine's requests will not be acceptable to Moscow and Trump said that he did not like them either.

But Russia is an ultimatum, not a serious peace proposal. Trump, once a developer, likes deals that include tangible real estate. But Putin wants more than land. He wants Ukraine to return to the connection he had with the Kremlin during the days when he was part of the Soviet Union. In order for this to happen, Ukraine will have to lose its independence and sovereignty.

Biden suggested Ukrainian enough not to lose because he took Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons if NATO intervened seriously. Trump must be aware of the nuclear danger, but he also believes that Ukraine's support is an indefinite deal is a bad deal for the United States and he can do better.

As for Europeans, it can force them to face the gross discrepancy between their military promises to Ukraine and their military capabilities. Only Poland and the Baltic States support their public statements about the threat from Russia with quality increased defense costs.

As Russia grinds forward on the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine, this is the most difficult time in which Zelenski will face after the dark and desperate first months of war when Ukraine struggles with Russia's attack against Kiev.

This is also a time of a decision for its Western allies. They face a difficult choice that cannot be delayed much longer.