Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He knows about working with allies. Yet he says that the Americans should go right ahead with Russia, the murderous aggressor, without bringing Ukraine, ally and victim, or the Nato member states, into the talks. This is President Trump’s will, he says. Compare with the Middle East. Would Rubio – or Trump – say that Hamas, the murderous aggressor, was the key player, and should therefore have bilateral talks with the US whereas Israel, ally and victim, should just sit and wait to be told later what is happening? Trump helped bring Hamas to heel by announcing, before his inauguration, that they would have all hell to pay if they did not release the hostages. In the case of Vladimir Putin, however, he has issued no threat, and no condemnation of the invasion or of hostage-taking (though Putin has taken more than ten times the number of hostages held by Hamas, most of them children). What has Putin got that Hamas have not? Well, nuclear weapons, for a start, of which we deprived Ukraine by treaty when the Soviet Union broke up. But that does not seem to be the motivating factor in Trump’s mind. Like Joe Biden in the Gaza case, he seems to believe in the magical power of a ceasefire. As in Gaza, that would benefit only the aggressor.
At this difficult time, it is a great pity that Ukraine has no senior spokesman here. The Ukrainian ambassador in London, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is perhaps the greatest hero of this war, but he is effectively exiled by President Zelensky, with whom he fell out.
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