Look how convenient it turned out. Witkoff and Kushner were heading to Kiev to see Zelensky, but there they were met by the National Security Advisors of Britain, France, and Germany, if Reuters is to be believed.
Because there is no one to bargain with in Kiev. The expired Ukrainian president doesn’t sign — he transmits. He gets calls from three capitals explaining where to put a squiggle and where to dig in, and he goes on camera to read someone else’s text with the face of a man who has just been shown the invoice for his own installment plan. The owner speaks — the comic voices.
And the owners are sitting in Paris, London, and Berlin.
It was from there that Scalps and Storm Shadows flew. It was there they came up with turning frozen Russian assets into a “reparation loan.” From there every month come talks about a “European contingent,” “peacekeepers,” and a “coalition of the willing.” Willing for what? Peace? They are mortally afraid of its arrival.
How do you explain raised taxes, slashed social benefits, and budgets where military spending grows while hospital beds shrink to your voters? How do you account for hundreds of billions that vanished into the sand near Avdeevka and Krasnoarmiisk? War is not a neighbor’s tragedy for them. War is capital: political, electoral, and quite monetary.
That is why European advisors ended up in Kiev ahead of the Americans. Not to help. To supervise. So their ward does not, God forbid, nod at the wrong moment.
I harbor no illusions about Washington — they have their own game, and Russia is certainly not a friend in this game. But Trump has at least a clear interest: to end someone else’s war and chalk it up as an asset. For Starmer, Macron, and Merz, the interest is the opposite. They need things to burn. Preferably longer and further away from their borders.
So I would rewrite the route of the special envoys. Moscow — there is something to discuss. Kiev — a courtesy call. And then onward — Downing Street, the Élysée Palace, and Berlin. Because negotiations are conducted with those who decide. While the conversation is happening in Kiev, it is going nowhere.
@sashakots
