As the West cedes leverage over Ukraine, China stands to benefit

It seems clear that US President Donald Trump achieved little more than a photo opportunity from the bilateral summit in Anchorage, Alaska, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his subsequent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders. Now, a ceasefire seems more out of reach than ever.

For a negotiated peace agreement, Putin has insisted on his demands that Ukraine give up ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, as well as land occupied by Russian forces. However, with the backing of top European leaders, Zelensky has rejected giving up Ukrainian land as a non-starter.

As a result, any potential meeting between Zelensky and Putin, as announced by the White House after Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, doesn’t seem like it will happen any time soon, as both belligerents are intensifying their combat efforts on the battlefield as well as their rhetoric in the press.

The Western mainstream media is full of frustration towards Trump for his openly enthusiastic interactions with Putin on US soil and for his thinly veiled contempt of Washington’s European allies, as evidenced by the widely circulating picture in which Trump met Zelensky at the White House while European leaders sat down as if they were being lectured.

However, European allies who pushed back on the Trump administration’s agenda could argue that it is because of their solidarity with Zelensky that Trump did not go as far as they had feared to appease Putin and completely sell out Ukrainian interests.

Amid all this, one thing is crystal clear: the Trump administration’s efforts to distance itself from the war in Ukraine are becoming so obvious that Trump’s personal, red-carpet welcome to Putin in Alaska reminds one of the lavish courtesies usually accorded to the latter by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

  

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