The “Coalition of the Willing,” again threatened with the prospect that Washington and Moscow might sit down together and negotiate, issued a new joint statement today, signed by, amongst others, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukraine’s acting president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It asserted: “We strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately” but are forced to concede, “and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations”—demonstrating that they are aware that they have no power to enforce their delusional position of “no territorial concessions.” They then continue with meaningless blather: “Russia’s blocking tactics have repeatedly shown that Ukraine is the only serious party to peace. We are all seeing that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction…. We must ramp up the pressure on Russia’s economy and its defense industry, until Putin is ready to make peace.”
Leaders will meet later this week in the European Council and in the Coalition of the Willing format to discuss how to take this work, going forward, and to further support Ukraine. Radio Free Europe cited diplomatic sources to report that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is planning to fly to Washington tomorrow.
In tandem, there was a stampede in the Western media declaring that the Budapest summit was stillborn. Reuters cited “a senior White House staffer” saying no meeting “in the immediate future”; White House correspondent Garrett Haake cited an unnamed senior official, etc. The question is, since President Donald Trump has seen this circus before, both prior to and after the Alaska Summit on August 15, did he learn anything from the experience?
Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto arrived in Washington today to make arrangements for the summit. On his Facebook page he posted: “At the minute of announcing the next peace summit, it could be known that many people would do a lot of things to prevent this summit from happening. The war political elite and their media always do this before important events that could be decisive for war and peace…. There is nothing new under the sun. Now, until the summit is established, there will be dozens of leaks, fake news and statements that there will be no summit.”
Trump today would not confirm that the summit had been postponed, but he did indicate that he had decisions to make over the next two days. First he told reporters in the Oval Office: “I don’t want to have a wasted meeting, I don’t want to have a wasted time, so I’ll see what happens.” When asked why he thought the meeting “might be a wasted time,” he said: “I didn’t say it would. You never know what is going to happen. A lot of things are happening on the war front with Ukraine and Russia. We’ll be notifying you over the next two days as to what we are doing.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Oct. 21 that “serious preparations are needed” ahead of the summit. “You’ve heard statements from the American side and from our own that this may take time. So, no definite timeframe has been established.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s deliberate reminder to Trump today poses the challenge to him as to whether he will stand and fight for what he discussed with President Vladimir Putin.
