BONUS EPISODE: The panic driving Europe’s leaders to Washington with Zelenskyy

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0:41Make a deal. Make the deal. Gotta make a deal, yeah. That was Donald Trump talking to Sean Hannity with his advice for Volodymyr Zelensky. Make a deal. But what would that look like? Volodymyr Zelensky is on his way to Washington now, along with a phalanx of European leaders hoping to avert another meltdown in the Oval Office. It will prove to be an extraordinary meeting. Rarely, if ever, has international diplomacy been done through solidarity alone. But why are those European leaders choosing to go with Zelensky? Is it just about that last Oval Office meeting or something more sinister? A fear that Trump has bought Putin's talking points, hook, line and sinker.

1:30Is this Europe's last stand? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:39The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And it's Sunday. And we're not in the studio. We're in respective homes, each trying to outdo the other on the number of books in the background. I win. Yeah, you do win, actually. And it has been remarkable to watch events unfolding. I mean, yesterday, you hear that Zelensky is going to the Oval Office and you think, oh my God, is this going to be a repeat of what happened last time? And then one by one, other European leaders, Georgia Maloney, Friedrich Mertz, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, the head of NATO, the head of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, one by one, they're all going to Washington.

2:19And as you said, Lewis, it does feel, is this Europe's last stand or do they think there is something more hopeful to be achieved in terms of, you know, American security guarantees for the future of Ukraine? Because looking at what happened in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday, Vladimir Putin arrives, is clapped, literally clapped by Donald Trump, literally given a red carpet treatment by Donald Trump. And then at the end of it, Donald Trump is talking in the same way as Vladimir Putin about what needs to happen next. All talk of sanctions, all talk of immediate ceasefires gone. Now, at some future indeterminate date, there needs to be a security peace deal.

3:07Yeah, John, I think it was quite fashionable or it was received wisdom to basically write this summit off even before it started. And I can understand that in one sense, which is that Trump himself, very unusually for him, was trying to play down expectations, right? Basically, you know, saying, well, actually, probably, if anything, this will lead to a second meeting and so on. And that press conference, which I was watching on the way back from San Francisco on the plane, I mean, it was extraordinary. a press conference without any questions, without any press involvement whatsoever, but which didn't need any for its importance.

3:43Because here we had, for the first time in four years, an American president sharing a stage, sharing a platform with a war criminal, or at the very least, someone with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head. I don't think it was an important meeting in the end. In one sense, nothing happened. And yet everything thing happened. Because not only was there the symbolism for Putin being brought in from the diplomatic deep freeze via an American president, but also we could see that within two and a half hours, as you say, the backdrop to this meeting had been a long-term hardening of Trump's position towards Putin.

4:24Each time them having a conversation and then Trump getting more and more frustrated that the bombs kept coming down and the missiles kept flying and the drones kept appearing over the head of Kiev and people were dying. All that talk of sanctions, as you said, gone. And not only that, but a really substantive evolution in American policy. Up to now, Trump's position has been, let's just have a ceasefire. A ceasefire come what may, then we'll sort out the rest of the details later. That was Ukraine's position. That's been Europe's position. That's no longer Trump's position. Trump's position is now Putin's position, which is there's no point in having a ceasefire until we can, quote, address the root causes of the war, Putin using that language again, i.e.

5:04stuff he doesn't like. So in every sense, I think the reason that European leaders are decamping en masse in this extraordinary fashion to Washington is because they're scared. I think it's because they're worried that Putin scored win after win after win on Friday, and they're looking to try and steer him again away from that. I mean, this is a quote from someone who, for a long time has been a friend of Donald Trump, of what he thought of the summit that took place in Alaska. It is the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy. That was Boris Johnson on the summit.

5:46So not exactly a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump's tough negotiating stance that he took with Vladimir Putin. If we just go through it one by one. And there are the atmospherics and there are the really substantive things that happened in Anchorage. Vladimir Putin wanted diplomatic recognition for himself and Russia. Tick. Got that. He wanted to isolate European leaders. Tick. Got that. The meeting happened thousands of miles away from European soil. Zelensky wasn't there. No Europeans were there. He wanted Russia to be re-established, seen as a great power. Donald Trump talked afterwards about Russia being a great power and Ukraine isn't.

6:27And on and on it went. But the two most important ones are exactly as you say. Donald Trump, up until that meeting, had been talking darkly about serious sanctions being imposed. Vladimir Putin succeeded in buying himself time on that. And then the other thing that, you know, was the kind of fear that there would be the demand of an immediate ceasefire. And that has gone too. Now, one of the interesting things is that Donald Trump declared in true Trumpian fashion that the summit had been a 10, a 10 out of 10. It was perfect. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state today, was on face the nation, striking a very different note and a very different sound about what unfolded in Alaska.

7:11Our goal here is not to stage some production for the world to say, oh, how dramatic he walked out. Our goal here is to have a peace agreement to end this war. OK, and obviously we felt and I agreed that there was enough progress, not a lot of progress, but enough progress made in those talks to allow us to move to the next phase. If not, we wouldn't be having Zelensky flying all the way over here. We wouldn't be having all the Europeans coming all the way over here. Now, understand and take with a grain of salt. I'm not saying we're on the verge of a peace deal, but I am saying that we saw movement, enough movement to justify a follow up meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans, enough movement for us to dedicate even more time to this.

7:47I just want to dwell before we move on to what happens on Monday, because obviously that is in effect the European riposte or the Ukrainian riposte, what we saw on Friday. I do think there was something especially galling about what happened on Friday, which was just the symbolism, you've already adverted to it, John, of Ukraine and Ukraine's future being discussed without Ukraine's presence, let alone European's presence. and you know what it's funny i i actually don't doubt trump's motives with this in a weird way i'm sure there's lots of other stuff going on no there's lots of other stuff going on he's always had a weird soft spot for putin he's always had a weird soft spot for his being an autocrat which is really sinister i also think two things can be true at once my impression is that he's genuinely motivated by a desire to sort of get this done and to have get a peace deal i think he's genuinely I think he watched a lot of cable news, and I think he sees the pictures, and he doesn't understand it.

8:41The pictures of the senseless destruction, the kids dying, the homes being destroyed. To him, it's just senseless. He just doesn't understand it. He's also got Melania, the first lady, talking about, interesting, her sending a direct letter to Vladimir Putin personally, talking about the fate of the 20 ,000 kidnapped Ukrainian kids, something that we don't talk about enough. It is a moral, political, historic scandal, what's happened with the Russians taking those kids. So I think that he is motivated by some positive instincts, and I think he probably also is desperate to have the Nobel Peace Prize.

9:12But nonetheless, he is allowing Putin to manipulate those instincts, not least by the picture of the two of them appearing together with a backdrop behind them saying, securing peace, which is darkly comic. darkly comic when the only reason that peace isn't in place right now and hasn't for the last three years or 10 years was the man to his right Vladimir Putin the only man who has caused this war on completely spurious pretenses so that was dark but it was dark in another way as well which is you know Putin's always wanted this he's always wanted to be there starting like you know Roosevelt to his Stalin right at Yalta carving the world up like great powers it fits into to a vision of politics that Putin has, which is a world of spheres of influence, which is a world where the poor suffer what they must, where great powers divide the world as they see fit.

10:09That is a world, a deeply colonial imperial vision that we hope that we'd left long behind. That is not what was on display in Anchorage on Friday. And it is a vision as well that frankly appeals to Trump's worst instincts as well, because he likewise, as we've discussed on the show before, sees the world, his own country, but the world as well, international relations, as might is right. And, you know, he keeps coming back to this idea, which he's come back to before, which we've talked about a lot before, which is, you know, he said it there in that clip. Russia's a superpower, in his view, or a great power, big military power.

10:43Ukraine isn't. So Ukraine has to get in line. That was a pretty, pretty unsettling and disturbing element to the whole thing on Friday, without the Ukrainians even being present. I think there's such an interest. I agree with you 100 % that I think Donald Trump is motivated by laudable ends, that he wants to see the killing stopped. He can't understand why this war is still continuing. He thinks it's utterly senseless, all the rest of it. I agree with all of that. But it's his reading of history that I think is just kind of fascinating and disturbing in kind of equal measure. His insistence that Russia is a great power, and therefore it needs to be treated like a great power.

11:23And therefore, as we heard in the clip at the very start of the podcast. Zelensky has to make a deal. You've got to surrender something. You've got to do something because you've got to get the Russians off your back. They're a great power. You're not. And you think, well, hang on. I mean, America is 25 % of the world's GDP. The EU is 25 % of the world's GDP. Russia is 2%. The Italian economy, the Italian economy is bigger than Russia's economy. So it's not a superpower in that sense. No, he elevated. Trump elevated him. Trump elevated him. Exactly. And just because you've got nukes doesn't mean that everyone is going to bow down before you.

12:02I mean, you know, look at the Mujahideen in kind of 1980 in Afghanistan. Russia had many more weapons, but the Mujahideen fought Russia to a standstill and Russia retreated. Look at what happened. I mean, you know, Britain's got nuclear weapons. That didn't stop the Argentinians invading the Falkland Islands in 1982. they went ahead anyway. It doesn't mean that you've got to kowtow and endlessly just surrender to this mighty power if they do something wrong. And let's face it, the invasion of Ukraine was the biggest kind of breach of international law in Europe since the Second World War. And as you say, Lewis, if Donald Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin had happened in any European country, the obligation would have been on those European countries to arrest him because of the warrant put out by the International Criminal Court.

12:52I mean, the backdrop, of course, to this is that, you know, the war has not been going well for Ukraine for quite a while. That's not to say it's going catastrophically badly, but the Russians are on the advance. Putin thinks he's got the wind on his back. That process has accelerated, if anything, over the last couple of months. Ukraine is struggling to replenish its manpower at the front. Russia has endured horrendous losses, but because of its size and because, frankly, of Putin's complete indifference to even the life of his own citizens. He's completely content to send endless numbers of young Russian men into the organ grinder of Donetsk.

13:29So it is true that Zelensky's position is not an especially strong one. It is not as weak as Trump presupposes. And of course, one of the reasons that it is weak is because, unlike the Biden administration, the Trump administration has been generally unwilling to provide new weapons, which has obviously had an attritional impact to the front. In terms of other stuff which came out of the summit, which you could say was slightly more on the more positive side of the ledger for Ukraine, potentially, for the first time, again, Trump is starting to make hints at the idea of American security guarantees, which is something that he has been completely unwilling to countenance before.

14:06The Trump administration line has been to say, it's Europe's security problem. Europe has got to provide the guarantees. Europe's response has been to say, well, that's all very well, Mr. President, and perhaps we might be able to do so in 10 years' time or 15 years' time or whatever it is. But right now, we do not have the security capacity to be able to do that. The question is, of course, is whether, I mean, these security guarantees, the briefing that's come out has said it wouldn't be NATO membership for Ukraine, but it would be something equivalent to Article 5 membership, i.e. if Ukraine were attacked, the US would support it.

14:35The question for Zelensky is, if the deal that Trump is trying to drive towards is basically that Ukraine would have to give up all of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, which, by the way, Putin doesn't even fully control. He only controls about two-thirds of it. He's been trying to seize it for 10 years, not just three years since the war, but 10 years since the initial invasion of Ukraine. So if Ukraine is being asked to cede all of that in exchange for security guarantees, Ukraine's got to be pretty bloody sure that those security guarantees are going to be honoured, because they would be giving up their most fortified bit of the country.

15:11And the worry would be that in 18 months, two years, Putin comes back for more cognizant of the idea that Europe, when push comes to shove, isn't going to defend it and neither will Trump. And of course, we've been here before, right? Because Ukraine did get security guarantees from Russia and the United States and the UK as part of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which was a lot longer after Ukraine became an independent state from the USSR. are. So it seems to me that this talk about security guarantees, the gulf between where Ukraine is right now and where it would need to be in terms of assurances on security is so vast and so big.

15:48Again, it doesn't seem very obvious how the conflict ends on that basis anytime soon. Well, you talk about the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. And that was about Ukraine because it had nuclear weapons sighted on its soil when Russia was the Soviet Union, that in return for giving them up, there would be security guarantees. Just worth adding one point to what you just said, which is that it was Vladimir Putin who then signed that undertaking to keep Ukraine sovereign and safe and not be invaded. So how seriously, if you're a sensible Ukrainian, would you take Vladimir Putin's word right now when he says, okay, we're done.

16:30We've got what we wanted. We're not going to do anymore. We're not going to come again. And the key point about the Donbass, which again, I'm not a military historian, but from what I've read and what I understand is that the bit of the Donbass that Ukraine still holds is massively fortified. And that is what protects the rest of Ukraine. And for them to give up that bit of land means that Russia has got an easy journey into the rest of Ukraine. And therefore, of course, if you've got any sense of self-preservation, you're not going to say, okay, Russia, you can take it over. And again, the question is, how seriously does Europe believe the security guarantees from the US will be binding?

17:20It's not Article 5. It's being described as some kind of Article 5 light of the NATO treaty. If you're Ukrainian, and if you've seen what's happened to you over the past three years, and you've seen what Vladimir Putin has done, are you going to trust him to be a really honorable leader and not come again but this is why the ukrainians and europeans have been arguing for a ceasefire right because i mean look the ukrainians know zelensky knows he's not stupid he knows that ukraine does not right now have the capacity and maybe never will to reconquer the territory that has been lost there was hopes that that might happen two years ago in the summer offensive 18 months ago didn't happen hasn't happened and in fact as i say they've actually been on the on the retreat in quite a few areas so the idea of a ceasefire the reason that ceasefire is relevant to that is if you had a ceasefire, you could say, okay, we clearly don't recognize the fact that you've occupied this land.

18:16We will never recognize that. But we accept as part of this ongoing negotiations, the fact that you've got it at the moment, which is, you know, there've been other conflicts like that. What happened in the Korean War example. It's the difference between de facto and de jure. You don't recognize it in law, but it is what it is like for the time being, right? You could imagine something like that would be acceptable to Zelensky. Putin knows, knows that And if you're trying to say, let's have a full peace treaty, where you're trying to recognize something de jure, i.e. in law, not just de facto, in fact, then he knows that his preconditions that he's asking for, the complete seeding of the Donbass, not being able to join NATO or the European Union, all these maximalist objectives of Putin's, he knows for a fact that Zelensky's not going to be able to accept it, and the Europeans are not going to be able to accept it.

19:04And what does that mean? It means that he wants the war to continue because he thinks he's winning. And what he's able to, the last six months have been extraordinary, right? It's been this kind of like weird sort of pass the parcel, particularly since that February blow up in the Oval Office between Zelensky and Trump. It's passed the parcel between Zelensky and Putin and Europe and Russia to basically try and convince Trump that the other is to blame for the fact that there hasn't been a peace deal. and as I said to go back to the beginning Europe has been winning that battle for Trump's favor and Trump's understanding of that and it seems that Putin scored a major win on Friday passing the parcel back the other way and saying no it's not us it's Zelensky and it's Europe so it seems to me that one of the reasons for all so many European leaders decamping en masse to Washington is to try to put the ball back into Putin's court and convince Trump once again that in fact it is not Europe and Ukraine which is the impediment to peace.

20:04It's Putin himself. And we'll be back in just a moment.

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21:14This is The News Agents. So let's talk about the meeting because we all remember what happened in February and what a horror show that turned out to be. To the kind of, I mean, it was appalling to watch and to behold the way Zelensky was treated. For me, this has the faint echoes of Churchill when he was trying to persuade Franklin Delano Roosevelt to join the war effort against the Nazis in kind of, you know, before Pearl Harbor, when Churchill was making frequent visits to Washington and endless phone calls and begging letters saying, you know, we need you on our side. And I feel that this is the continent of Europe saying to America, we need you on our side right now.

22:06And that Russia is the menace and the threat, not Ukraine. And, you know, I look. Putin played it masterfully, talking about how this invasion would never have happened if you had been president at the time. You know, you just thought, oh, come on. And, you know, flattery with Donald Trump will get you everywhere. and it did and it worked and you now feel that you've got you know disparate political figures from you know georgia maloney through to keir starmer all on one page saying we've got to try and do something about this either to say we've got to insist on a ceasefire i can't see trump going back on that because trump will then look like he doesn't know what he's doing which may be an accurate assessment of what has unfolded but maybe it is about right let us talk about what the the American security guarantee looks like and how can we make it have as much teeth as possible if we're going to try and sell this to Zelensky as a realistic idea.

23:04And also, I think that they're going as chaperones to him so that you don't have another bloody meltdown like we had in February. Yeah, it'd be very interesting to see whether Zelensky turns up in a suit rather than his military fatigues, right? And there's some speculation about that. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he turns up in a suit at this point. Do whatever you need to do. whatever he needs to yeah which is what european leaders have been telling him you know since the since the february bust up but i mean i was because i was i was doing the sunday show on lbc this morning when all the news started to come through that all these leaders were going because we didn't in the in the papers this morning it had been briefed that there may be a couple maybe someone from the eu you know just a smattering just to kind of hold his hand and then it came through sort of in a sort of two-hour period more and more were going you know i said on the line was going to go friedrich mertz was going to go and macron was going to go i thought at that point i was like okay well starmer he's clearly got to go and they obviously all agree agree to do it when they had the meeting on saturday and i i was sort of going through my head like initially i thought is trump gonna like this because will he feel that he's being sort of pressured or that he'll you know that all these people have just come to give him a hard time and i thought no of course he's gonna love it of course all of these courtiers courtiers leaders democratically elected leaders in their own right turning up at the core of donald trump to pay homage and to encourage the king to do what they want him to do right and and it just made me think i mean again going back to the kind of pass the parcel metaphor how absolutely there's two things i sort of think about that one is for all of the talk that people sometimes have about the decline of american power here we have not just all of the european leaders kissing the feet of trump but also vladimir putin okay he's got his own agenda and he's playing him and all of that kind of stuff but all trying to curry favor and to make sure that their version of reality their asks their wants are the thing that in the end gets done or is is are adopted by the american president so so much for the decline of american power and then the other thing like i know this is kind of glib in a way because we've got used to it by now but how amazing john i mean how amazing that of all the men in the world of all the people in america at this clear inflection point it does feel like monday could be an inflection point or at least leading up to an inflection point oh yeah that it's donald trump who is the man to basically be this pivotal figure in not just the american history but in european history setting the course for us for our generation for potentially generations to come in terms of how safe we can sleep in our beds at night in europe because that's what's at stake here because if we get a lousy deal lousy security guarantees if it just gives putin encouragement and time it will be like czechoslovakia in 1938 a guy who just thinks i can come back for more and more and more and god knows that is scariest to where it leads and it basically it's in trump's hands look this is about international order the sovereignty of nations everything that the un was set up to defend has been threatened in europe in a way that it hasn't been, as you say, since Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, the things that caused the outbreak of the Second World War.

26:08These are big stakes that are taking place. And I remember that photo that was taken at the G7 summit in Quebec, where Justin Trudeau was presiding, and you had Angela Merkel there, and you had Macron, and you had Theresa May, and they're all looking over at Donald Trump, and they're trying to persuade him on something or other. And Donald Trump is sitting there cross-armed and it looks like he is being harangued by these old European leaders like what are you doing you don't know what you're doing get your act together tomorrow they're going to be there as supplicants they're going to be saying please Mr President if only you could do this for us that would be absolutely marvelous and you're the man you're the guy you can we'll all vote for you we'll all nominate you for the Nobel Peace Prize but please do the right thing at this critical moment.

26:58And the other totally superficial, shallow thought I had about this whole thing is, oh my God, can you imagine at the DC Police Department, which has got enough problems at the moment, trying to find enough motorcyclists to escort the motorcades that are going to be coming in their numbers with only 24 hours notice and all expecting all the bells and whistles to take them in from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland into Washington, DC. This is not the way things are done. Normally, a meeting like this would be months in the preparation. It's happening in 24 hours. And that's what worries me. That's what worries me about it.

27:37Go back to exactly the beginning. They wouldn't all be going over there if they didn't think. They spoke to Trump. They spoke to Trump at the weekend. And in fairness, Trump, he has been keeping them up to date and informed in a way that perhaps even three months ago he might not have been doing you know he has been discharging his obligations for want of a better word in that regard but it makes you think what has he said what do they know it can't just be about chaperoning zelensky it isn't just about because if trump wants to have a go at zelensky again he'll do it he won't care if everybody's in the room or not there's something else going on here and it makes you think that either it's just the gravity of the moment they know that this is an inflection point or something else that's been said by trump or zelensky or so on that makes them feel that they all need to clear their diaries in the middle of August, in the middle of summer, and to send en masse in a way that they would only normally do for a long-planned summit event that are years in the making, not 48 hours.

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