Trump Discussion With Putin to Focus on What Ukraine Will Lose
The New York Times
In an echo of the Yalta Conference in 1945, the American and Russian leaders will talk on Tuesday about who gets what in the process of ending the war in Ukraine.
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To hear President Trump describe it, he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are about to have something akin to their own Yalta moment, great powers determining borders within Europe.
He didn’t explicitly refer to the 1945 meeting, where Churchill, Stalin and a deathly ill Franklin D. Roosevelt carved the continent into the American-aligned West and the Soviet-dominated East, creating spheres of influence that became the battlegrounds of the Cold War.
But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any cease-fire with Ukraine.
He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds.
Though administration officials have stressed that they have kept their Ukrainian counterparts and European leaders fully briefed on their interactions with Russia, only Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will be on the call, presumably with aides listening in. And it is not clear that either Ukraine or the big European powers will go along with whatever Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin might agree on.
