A few days ago, I wrote on that website that I needed time to understand what was happening in our world. Today, one day after US President Donald Trump’s disastrous meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, it becomes clear that I do not have much time to think. How can a meeting turn so quick into a diplomatic dumpster fire?
Throughout my more than 30-year career in the diplomatic service, with over 20 years dedicated to the ambassador role, I have had the privilege of participating in numerous diplomatic meetings. These engagements have taken me to various corners of the globe, even during opposition and subsequent government takeover. The sheer number of these meetings is difficult to quantify; I never counted them.
I have met people who have disappeared in the whirl of time, where I, too, will disappear. But I have also met people whose light will shine for long or forever. Like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Jiang Zemin, Jacques Chirac, or even Putin in a small circle when he was still considered as the great Russian hope for a unified world.
I met with presidents, foreign ministers, vice presidents, and ministers, just as you find in diplomatic travel diplomacy. I was there at all the meetings, although I wasn’t notable because I was not the head of the delegation. I attended as a notetaker, consultant, and observer who analyzed these meetings with my boss afterward.
I have never witnessed anything I observed as a television viewer yesterday.
In all these meetings, I have never witnessed anything I observed as a television viewer yesterday. We also attended meetings that we anticipated would be highly challenging and confrontational.
A specific format or procedure was consistently followed in these occasionally uncomfortable meetings, as it is also common for more cordial meetings. The delegation leaders convened privately, then in a small circle, and finally with the entire delegation, whose size had been previously determined by protocol activities. Consequently, these well-known formulas emerged: 1 + 1, 1 + 2, or 1 + 10. Subsequently, a press statement was invariably included as a scheduled program item. These meetings were primarily intended for the public, although occasionally with sincerity, but more often as mere window speeches.
Typically, these press statements provided only a concise summary of the content. Public discussions of emotional tensions, conflicts, and disputes were deliberately highlighted only to escalate public opinion.
So, based on this experience, I can only conclude: if you receive the president of an Ally, a friendly state who is in the middle of the war, in your most important representative room and attack him and belittle him in the face of the international media, there can only be one reason, and there is only one reason – distraction, misleading and disinformation.
Everyone will assess such behavior aggressively and entirely inappropriately, whether they are diplomats or not. When the vapor has warped and the dust has settled, the question remains: Why?
Why does the government of the most important power, the most enormous military power in the world, have an interest in publicly insulting the president of a country that has been resisting brutal aggression for three years to such an extent to speak little about him and massively attack him with lies that follow Russian propaganda?
Closing eyes to the obvious? This was not merely a tense meeting; it was a deliberate demonstration of power. But how powerful is Donald Trump?
There is already a man on this planet who can end this war within one day.
For three years until today, there is already one person on this planet who can end this war not only in 24 hours but even in 1 hour or 1 minute, and that is not Donald Trump. That’s not the Americans or us, the Europeans.
It is Putin who started this war of aggression and who can end it at any time. With an order to his troops to stop and withdraw, the war is immediately over today, here and now. Any other discussion about the war’s end or a ceasefire is unnecessary.
Ukraine has not expressed any interest or shown that it wants to keep Russia at war or get involved further, and that is why I repeat: it seems to be lost in this whole discussion.
There is a man on this planet who can end this war within 1 minute, 1 hour, or one day, at least faster than Donald Trump, if he wants to end it.
He sits in the Kremlin and can’t believe his luck because the deal-maker thinks he can do it.