There were also two Ukrainian delegations at the table - the Zelensky team and the opposition government team.
The reality is that the Trump Administration is riding the tiger and they are slowly distancing themselves from the debacle in Ukraine and transferring the responsibility for the war to the Europeans where it belongs.
The reality is that President Trumps enemies - foreign and domestic are the same people who are driving the war in Ukraine.
The Zelensky regime is running the Ukraine off a cliff to disaster and everyone knows it.
In fact Zelensky and the EU are intentionally engineering a crisis in Ukraine to force the Trump Administration to resume supply of free weapons to Ukraine and to provide political and media pressure to force President Trump to intervene directly with US troops in Ukraine
Absent the massive US economic and military support under Biden , the Ukraine will begin to collapse both economically and militarily in short order.
The US funding and military authorizations expired in October 2025 and both the economic and military situation is rapidly deteriorating in the Ukraine .
The Europeans have promised to take up the slack but they are not following through on both their their military and economic commitments to support Ukraine. The EU are not sending the euros and, like the US, they simply do not have the weapons to spare because the Ukrainians have already blown through the NATO stockpiles.
Despite the multiple impending crisis in Ukraine, Zelensky and his EU backers refuse to negotiate seriously with Russia to put an end to the fighting while the Ukraine still the ability to resist.
This is also by design.
The current Zelensky/EU strategy is to engineer an economic and military collapse of the Ukraine that they can blame on President Trump to allow Democrats to win back the House and Senate in the 2026 elections, force the US to massively intervene in the Ukraine and then impeach President Trump for the disaster they engineered in Ukraine.
I think the Zelensky and EU public position is still for Russia to unilaterally withdraw from Donbas and Crimea, repay war reparations to the Ukraine and submit Russia to war crimes tribunals plus a long list of other non starters so as long as Zelensky and his backers are in charge, the peace process is dead in the water with zero chances of moving forward
President Trump is trying to end the war before the impending Ukrainian meltdown takes place and to stay relevant in Ukraine to prevent a major Russian military move to exploit the Ukrainian weakness.
At the same time, Trump is doing everything possible to win the blame game when the crisis hits while the Ukraine proxy warriors and their media allies are getting ready for the anti Trump media full court press tom take down the Trump Administration once the SHTF
Nice fairy tale. The EU never would have sent 200 billion Euros to Moscow the past 3 years if they wanted Putin to lose. It’s that simple. Trump and the EU Globohoms and in broad agreement here: Ukraine surrenders its national identity to Russia and then back to business as usual with Moscow.
They've been trying to ensnare the US via an Article 5 for a while. However, on the bolded bit: absent an attack on the US, if DC were to do that, I would suspect 'civil unrest' in the US would ensue (from the productive folks). I think even the Democrats aren't that stupid.