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Source: Trump Discovers the War In Ukraine May Be Too Complicated to Fix | TIME
Coming out of his two-hour call with Vladimir Putin on Monday, Donald Trump made an unusual concession: Only Russia and Ukraine should be involved in talks to end the war between them, he wrote on social media, “because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.” The admission of ignorance seemed out of character for a President who often claims to know more than anyone else about a great variety of subjects, and it may have set the peace process on a new and uncertain course.
From Putin’s point of view, the gaps in Trump’s knowledge about the war have always offered an advantage. One of the Russian leader’s favorite negotiating tactics is to overwhelm his interlocutors with a torrent of historical theories and cherry-picked facts. Ukrainian officials and their European allies have tried to prepare Trump for such conversations with Putin by offering their own views on the complexity of the war and its history, but they have often run up against a wall of ignorance about Ukraine within the Trump administration.
“They’re not read-in on a lot of the background,” says a Western official who has discussed Ukraine at length during visits to the White House. On the Ukrainian side, a diplomat put the same frustration in starker terms: “It’s this messianic attitude,” the diplomat says of the U.S. approach to Ukraine under Trump. “Like they know everything and don’t want to hear anything.”
The Trump team’s faulty command of the facts has at times been painfully obvious. In a call on Monday, Trump reportedly told a group of European leaders that Ukraine and Russia could begin ceasefire talks “immediately.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was also on the call, reminded him that these talks had begun a few days earlier, on May 16, in Istanbul. Trump’s apparent lapse in memory led to a moment of “puzzled silence” on the line, according to Axios, which reported the exchange.
Trump’s lead envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Steve Witkoff, has had similar moments of confusion. In an interview in March, he could not name the regions over which the war is being fought. “These so-called four regions,” he said, struggling to recall them. “Donbas, Crimea… You know the names.”
A real estate tycoon with no formal diplomatic background, Witkoff has met with Putin several times this year, and the contrast in their level of knowledge about Ukraine has been striking.
