There are plenty of sour grapes pouring out of London and their international surrogates, over the ongoing dialogue between Presidents Trump and Putin. Topping the list is the Financial Times, which published an Editorial Board statement grousing that Trump didn’t insist on the British script that Russia had to agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, or all talks are off. “The U.S. President said Kyiv and Moscow would start negotiations towards a ceasefire, but he was leaving it up to the belligerents to sort things out,” the FT editors wrote. “There was no sign of the pressure he had hinted he might finally put on his Russian counterpart.”
They stamped their feet further: “Trump’s indulgence of a Russian leader who has been stringing him along for months remains baffling.” But that being the case, “European countries will need to move quickly to implement plans to keep arms flowing to Kyiv if the U.S. walks away, including by buying American weapons and funding Ukraine’s own expanded military industry. They should double down, too, on efforts to shift Putin’s calculus over how long he can keep fighting—by tightening the sanctions noose on Russia’s economy, which, despite its apparent resilience, faces mounting underlying pressures.”
