U.S.-Russia Meeting Marks New Era of Superpower Diplomacy
Feb. 20—A meeting of American and Russian officials Feb. 18 at the Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to discuss a process and plan for ending NATO’s very bloody war in Ukraine, marked a new beginning for a diplomacy that rejects geopolitical alliances like NATO, in favor of superpower discussion to achieve a shared objective.
The meeting, according to reports, lasted some four and half hours, and was a free-ranging discussion of what it would take to secure a peace deal and end the slaughter, which has claimed a million lives on both sides.
NATO and its sock puppet Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed dismay and even anger that Europe and Kyiv were not given a seat at the table, and that President Donald Trump and his team, which had first engineered a phone call last week between the President and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were prepared to develop on their own a peace plan, in discussion with Russia.
For more than two years, a central feature of NATO strategy, slavishly followed by the dithering old fool who was the U.S. President, Sleepy Joe Biden, was to try to make Russia a pariah state, sanctioned by the U.S. and NATO, kept out of international fora, and even expelled from the G-8. Trump has personally smashed this policy, engaging Russia with respect for its superpower status, and trying to find common ground to work together on numerous issues, including ending the wars in Ukraine and Southwest Asia.
“This is a radical change,” said a source familiar with the President’s thinking. “Trump believes that the ‘Big Boys,’—the United States, Russia, and China—have a special responsibility to get things right for the good of everyone—to stop wars, to work for global cooperation, and to offer aid and assistance when that is needed. They can disagree on things and on how to get specific objectives right, but in the end they must work together. Trump does not and will not see these three nations as enemies, but rather as a special kind of friend, because of their great power status to do good, or bad—to blow up the whole damn world. One might call them ‘the Three Policemen.’
“The funny thing is, that this concept, with the same nations involved, and perhaps adding the Brits, was exactly how President Franklin Roosevelt saw America securing the peace at the end of World War II,” said the source. “FDR had created the United Nations as a global forum where polices and ideas could be discussed and implemented, but he still saw the Four Policemen (China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) as the way to secure the peace, for all of the world. FDR was against the creation of blocs and alliances that were eventually pitted against each other. He would have been opposed to NATO, because, had he lived, Russia would have been both part of Europe and part of Asia, and would not have been forced to create a paranoid bloc to protect itself.
“He probably does not know this, but Trump’s concept of global diplomacy parallels FDR’s,” the source continued. “Trump has a clear idea of how the process will work and he doesn’t want to involve other nations, including Ukraine, until he works out some parameters with the Russians. He is fully aware that the war in Ukraine was started by NATO and its puppet regime in Kyiv with the insane objective of destroying Russia and Putin. It was a losing strategy from the get-go. So, Trump will consult with NATO and Ukraine, but they are not controlling him nor the outcome of this process.”
Seeing the direction that this is taking, Zelenskyy pushed back against the Riyadh meeting and the process, stopping just short of calling a meeting between Trump and Putin “illegitimate.”
“Decisions on how to end the war in Ukraine cannot be made without Ukraine, nor can any conditions be imposed,” Zelenskyy said, according to The Hill. “We were not invited to this Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia. It was a surprise for us, [and] I think for many others as well.”
Zelenskyy told Newsmax Feb. 14 that Trump “has [to] make a deal, not with Putin, [but] with us, and then pressure Putin. Because any negotiations without us, we will never accept, because the war is in Ukraine, not somewhere [else].”
“I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well,” Trump said during a news briefing Feb. 18 from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “But today I heard, ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve [Zelenskyy] been there for three years.… You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down, but they chose not to do it that way.”
“I like him personally,” Trump said of Zelenskyy. “He’s fine, but I don’t care about ‘personally.’ I care about getting the job done. You have leadership that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened, even without the United States.
“Look, we had a president [Democrat Joe Biden] who was grossly incompetent. He had no idea what he was doing. He said some very stupid things like going in for portions and all of the things. He made a lot of bad statements, but he [was] grossly incompetent, and I think everyone knew that this is something that should have never happened.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Saudi Arabia that any final agreement must be acceptable to Ukraine and Europe, as well as to Russia, according to The Hill. Don’t expect to see Zelenskyy at the table with the “Big Boys” until the outlines of a deal are agreed to.
Trump is on schedule of the leaked, so-called Trump Peace Plan, which called for a phone call with Putin, and then a meeting in Riyadh to set the process in motion. According to that schedule, leaked to the Ukrainian press last month, the next things that will happen are a Trump-Putin meeting, most likely in Saudi Arabia and a phone call between Putin and the little Ukrainian dictator. After that comes the terms of a ceasefire which would go into effect on Easter Sunday (April 20). During this time, there would be a face-to-face meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin. In the final phase of this process, which will also lay out how the deal will be guaranteed and policed and how Ukraine will be rebuilt, the final terms will all be agreed upon, and will be announced on May 9—the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This an ambitious schedule but Trump thinks it is workable. Trump said yesterday that he thought the talks with Russia in Riyadh—which marked a dramatic shift in relations between the countries since the war started Feb. 24, 2022—went well and that he’s “much more confident” that either a ceasefire or peace deal can be reached.
“Russia wants to do something,” Trump said. “They want to stop the savage barbarianism. What’s going on over there, soldiers are being killed by the thousands on a weekly basis. It’s ridiculous. And they’re not American soldiers. They’re Russian soldiers and they’re Ukrainian soldiers largely, although a lot of [North] Koreans have been killed, as you know. But we want to end it. It’s a senseless war. It should have never happened, would have never happened if I was president. And it’s a shame to see it.”
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy, under pressure from Trump, as well as internally, is starting to behave like a "cornered rat," as the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dimitry Medvedev observed and warned against a possible staged provocation by Zelenskyy to sabotage the momentum for peace. But sources with knowledge of the internal pressure on NATO's dictator say that his options are limited. They report that Trump's call for elections also reflects the feeling in the leadership of the Ukranian Armed Forces, who have had backchannel discussions with their Russian counterparts for months—discussions that Zelenskyy has been unable to shut down.
Zelenskyy bristled at Trump's "interference" in Ukranian internal affairs, saying that the President was living in a "Russian disinformation space." If he thought that such statements would cause Trump to back off, he was terribly wrong, and himself "delusional."
Trump fired back at the sock-puppet dictator, posting on Truth Social yesterday morning: “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and 'TRUMP,' will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is 'MISSING.' He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden 'like a fiddle.' A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only 'TRUMP,' and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…..”
"As I have been saying for some time now," a source stated, "once there is any momentum towards peace, Zelenskyy and his coterie of crooks and fools can only get in the way. If he thinks he is under pressure now, wait until Trump really starts to turn up the screws. The point is that there are several people waiting in th wings who can take Ukraine out of this terrible war. And Trump knows that—and much more."