As Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency last year, he repeatedly boasted that if he won the election he’d end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. Four weeks into the new administration, Trump scheduled a Feb. 18 meeting in Saudi Arabia between his new Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to begin talks on ending the Ukraine war. This first meeting between Washington and Moscow officials since Russia’s Feb. 22, 2022 invasion of Ukraine ended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s isolation and was notable in that neither Ukraine or European officials were invited to the negotiations. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky protested his exclusion from the meeting.
Before the talks got underway, Trump administration officials — in contradictory statements — made major concessions to Putin’s long-standing demands, including a declaration that Ukraine will need to concede territory to Russia, and that the U.S. will not support Ukraine’s future membership in NATO.
Days before negotiations began in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a widely criticized speech at the Munich Security Conference, overshadowing the Ukraine talks, when he attacked European leaders for spurning extremist right-wing parties. Then, 10 days before Germany’s election, personally embraced Germany’s far right neo-Nazi-linked AfD party. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst, now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Here he examines Trump’s initiative to end the Ukraine war and how these negotiations could impact the people of Ukraine, Europe and Russia.
MEL GOODMAN: Well, I think Ukraine, as much as anything, exemplifies the amateurism of the Trump administration. They clearly have no game plan. They clearly do not know what they’re doing. They’ve created nothing but confusion and worry in Europe, particularly among our closest allies in the European Community.
It’s anarchy that I see because the message keeps changing and the messengers themselves keep changing. So on the one hand, I guess it was, last Wednesday you had Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who was in way over his head make concessions before we even get into the talks. He talked about “Ukraine will have to lose territory” and he seemed to imply Ukraine would have to lose all of the territory that the Russians occupy and that NATO would never be an opportunity for Ukraine.
That issue was a nonstarter. So here you give the Russians two major victories that they can put in their pocket and then turn around and ask, what else do you have for us?
Then you have the secretary of the Treasury. And again, these people have no background in national security affairs that can be taken seriously. Scott Bessent is his name and he flouts the idea that the United States wants half of Ukraine’s rare minerals.
Now, these rare minerals are important for all of the sophisticated technology that we do with computer chips and semiconductors. And this is a terrible hit for the Ukrainians to have to take and deal with.
And then Vance, to me, took the real prize over the weekend. One day he goes and he visits Dachau, which is the oldest German concentration camp that was built in the late ’30s and early 1940s.
And he visits there and the next day, he turns around, he goes to, I think, Munich because he was there for the Munich Security conference, which is a very important international meeting. And he meets with the cochairman of the AfD, the right-wing German party that’s trying to force its way into a coalition government in Germany.
So in just a few days, the messages keep changing on a regular basis. Zelensky is excluded from all of this discussion and the concessions are out of his hide. Then they try to woo Zelensky in a certain way and then they try to fend off Zelensky, making it clear he wouldn’t be at the early talks. So you have Vance haranguing Europe and insulting the German hosts.
And I read somewhere that the (German) defense minister, Pistorius, was heard to say during this speech that this is totally unacceptable. So you have a president whose ethos seems to be fire, ready, aim. You have all of these discordant officials who are amateurs at what they do. They have no real background.
In fact, the idea that (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio, who was confirmed 99 to nothing which I didn’t understand; Mike Waltz, who has a military background and is now national security advisor; and then the real estate developer Steve Witkoff (as Middle East special envoy), are going to sit down with Sergei Lavrov, the very experienced, very polished, Russian foreign minister.
And the Russians will have a strong delegation. So who knows what’s going to come out of this? What the United States is prepared to say. What kind of programmatic approach they’re going to make with Putin? Are they just going to turn all Ukrainian territory over to Russia? Are the Russians going to have to make no concessions whatsoever?
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Mel, today, on Monday, the 17th, European leaders held an emergency meeting in Paris to discuss Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine and other issues. And it appears to be quite obviously, a rift between NATO allies. Where do you think this could lead?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, it could lead to, a more unified Europe, realizing that the United States can’t be counted on on any of these high-level security matters.
They’re going to have to engage in more planning and more coordination and probably more spending on defense, because some of the members of the European Community have very worrisome thoughts about what Putin would do if he occupied part of Ukraine, where he would go next. And there are other European, Western European members of the NATO alliance that feel that they still have to do business with Putin.
But all this is undercut by what Trump is doing. And essentially it looks like he’s selling out Zelensky. And the problem partly is because Russia is still having some success. It’s costly, but some success on the Ukrainian front. I think the last number I saw was, the Ukrainians lost another 4,000 square miles of territory. This is just in the last several weeks.
And I don’t think the Europeans know what’s coming next, because with Trump, you just don’t know what’s coming next.
For more information, visit Melvin Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com.
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