Ukraine’s diplomatic situation was upended during the past week, as its main ally, the United States, reversed several positions.US President Donald Trump announced on February 12 that he was beginning direct talks with Russia to end the war, overturning his predecessor’s promise that there would be “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”.
On the same day, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Russian diplomatic language invoking “realism”, when he told Ukraine Defence Contact Group partners in Brussels that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”
Eventual NATO membership has been a US promise to Ukraine since 2008, and the US has, throughout the war, supported a restoration of the border Russia recognised with Ukraine in 1991.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius called the one-sided concessions “clumsy” and “a mistake”. Advertisement
Worse was to come
On Tuesday, as Trump’s negotiating team arrived in Riyadh to begin talks, Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war and implied it had stolen aid, provoking an angry response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Today, I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited’ [to talks in Riyadh]. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.
The full-scale war started in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Trump said Zelenskyy’s approval rating was at 4 percent, and that he’d “never seen an accounting” of what he alleged was $350bn given by the US to Ukraine.
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which conducts nationwide surveys in Ukraine, polled Zelenskyy’s approval rating at 57 percent this month.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks military, …