To hear President Trump’s description, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin (V.
He did not explicitly mention the 1945 conference, Churchill, Stalin and a dead Franklin Roosevelt carved the mainland into the western United States and the Eastern carvings dominated by the Soviet Union, creating areas of influence and becoming the battlefield of the Cold War.
But when Mr. Trump returned from Florida on Sunday night, speaking with an Air Force reporter, it was clear that his scheduled telephone conversation with Putin would focus on land and assets Russia would retain in any ceasefire with Ukraine.
Essentially, he will receive a reward for the 11-year public aggression of Russia against Ukraine, starting with the Crimea attack in 2014 and a full-scale war that began three years ago. White House aides made it clear that Russia would certainly retain Crimea – in one of the strange twists and turns of the week-long Yalta meeting in February 1945, Russia would certainly retain Crimea and strongly advised it to obtain almost all the territory it owns.
Although government officials stressed that they had asked Ukrainian colleagues and European leaders to give a complete overview of their interactions with Russia, only Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will be called, presumably with assistants listening. And it is unclear everything that Ukraine or European powers may agree with Mr. Trump and Mr. Prin.
Mr. Trump and his aides were cautious about the details of the deal discussed with the Russian leader. Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate developer and old friend of Mr. Trump, is now a special envoy to the Middle East, who has been with Putin in Moscow for several hours and has recently prepared for the phone call.
Mr Trump said: “I think we're in a good situation and I think we have a great chance to get to the ceasefire. But then he turned to the question of what Ukraine might have to give up.
“I think we're going to talk about land, it's a lot of land,” he said. “As you know, it's a lot different from before the war. We're going to talk about land. We're going to talk about power plants. “It's a big problem.” But I think both sides have discussed a lot. ”
Mr. Trump was careful not to say too much about which parts of Ukrainian territory he was discussing, or whether he was trying to limit Mr. Putin's ambitions. The Trump administration has made it clear that Russia will control the land that its troops have commanded, accounting for about 20% of Ukraine. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month they were worried that Mr. Trump might entertain Putin’s other desires for parts of Ukraine, perhaps including the key port of Odessa.
Mr. Trump's national security adviser Michael Waltz said in a weekend's “Meeting Media” on NBC that he hopes the talks with Russia are pragmatic and he tends to any discussion about whether Russia is rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Walz is a voice defender of Ukraine and his sovereignty. As head of Mr. Trump's National Security Council, he avoided saying that it was obvious that Russia began the war.)
“Are we going to expel every inch of Russians from Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?” Mr. Waltz asked in an NBC interview.
In recent weeks of television appearances, Mr. Walz has taken the stance that the most important outcome of the negotiations should be the end of the killing after three years of vicious trench and drone wars.
He and other Trump aides said little about the conditions of the ceasefire, but suggested that they were bigger after the mission. Another option, Mr. Waltz suggested, is to go with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Walz insisted that it was a prescription, “In a context where we actually lost hundreds of thousands of people, essentially endless war.”
He warned that the conflict could still be “escalated to World War III” in a case Trump brought to Mr. Zelensky last month during a fierce public debate in the Oval Office. “We can talk about right and wrong, and we also have to talk about the reality of the local situation,” Walz said.
There are other issues that could be at the heart of the negotiations. France and Britain have proposed to include troops in Ukraine, perhaps other European powers. But it is not clear that Mr. Putin will agree to maintain peace or “stumble” the forces. These forces will become part of Ukraine’s security guarantees, although it is unclear how efficient European forces are in the absence of Washington’s reserves.
The government also narrowed down the work done by the Justice Department’s War Crimes Responsibility Team, which was made by Mr. Beden’s Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
To sum up, these actions are a major retreat from an effort announced by then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2023, as the United States concluded that Russia committed a “crime against humanity.” These steps seem to be part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to align with Mr. Putin.
Of course, there is no historical analogy to the previous era, and the negotiations to end the Ukrainian war differ a lot from the conditions deep in the winter of 1945, when it was obvious that Nazi Germany would soon fail.
But, as Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, recently wrote on diplomacy: “The geopolitical landscape today is particularly similar to the Second World War II ended” because “the main powers are seeking to resell the world map on Yalta’s world map, they are trying to negotiate with each other’s new global order, just like the leaders involved.”
Professor Toft said in an interview that land expansion is what Putin wants, obviously what Trump wants – just look at Greenland, Panama and Canada. ”
“That’s what these leaders think they need to do to make their country great again,” she continued.
“The biggest question mark is China,” she added. The outcome of the negotiations – especially the question of whether Mr. Putin was rewarded for a cruel and expensive war, “may indicate what would happen if Xi Jinping decided that he wanted to ride in Taiwan.”
