0:00
I am desperate to hear what Simon made of that. I really am
0:03
Simon, good to have you on the show as ever. That was gripping
0:08
It was absolutely gripping. And it was very clear, Ian, that as that meeting now finally goes into the closed door session
0:17
that eight of the people sitting around that table were desperately craving
0:22
I don't think they really wanted to spend 24 minutes addressing the world's media
0:25
any more than Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to spend 28 minutes earlier today
0:29
addressing questions in the Oval Office. Did you say craving or craven
0:36
Craving. I think that they wanted to get into the closed-door session
0:40
I don't think anybody came here thinking that they were going to burn an hour of this day
0:45
by engaging in the Donald Trump made-for-TV show. But, you know, there is no way ever of overcoming it
0:52
where the rubber hit the road during the course of what we've just witnessed
0:56
came in two separate occasions. First, the German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz telling Donald Trump he is talking nonsense
1:03
when he says that you can have a peace negotiation without a ceasefire on the ground in Ukraine
1:11
And Donald Trump, by the way, is articulating total falsehoods when he says that he's resolved seven wars without ceasefires
1:20
I mean if you just look at two of them India and Pakistan the recent skirmish he didn solve a war He negotiated a ceasefire Cambodia and Thailand he didn resolve a war he negotiated a ceasefire Suddenly today he has persuaded himself that you can actually stop wars
1:39
even while the fighting is still continuing before you get to a ceasefire. And Chancellor Mertz
1:45
essentially stood up to him and said that's complete nonsense. And Donald Trump again pushed
1:49
back with this falsehood that he's already done it. And the second point of contention there came
1:54
when Emmanuel Macron said, a trilateral meeting, Mr. President, between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky is delightful
2:01
And of course, it's very important. But really, what we need to have is a quadrilateral meeting
2:06
that includes a seat at the table for the European leaders. And Donald Trump has steadfastly refused to allow the Europeans
2:15
into the Alaska summit, disastrous as it was on Friday with Vladimir Putin
2:20
into other conversations that he's had with Volodymyr Zelensky. If you looked at the, I thought, tension and irritation at times on the face of Georgia Maloney, the Italian prime minister, a woman who is normally, you know, one of the Trump whisperers in that group
2:35
I mean, that's reflective of the fact that they have all had basically to fly here at incredibly short notice to muscle their way into the White House
2:45
And their task in the hours ahead is to try and pull Donald Trump out of Vladimir Putin orbit into which he began to drift on Friday and then which basically captured him entirely on Saturday and Sunday And clearly you know there are going to be very complicated conversations about security
3:09
guarantees, because it is far from clear what Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy
3:17
is talking about when he said over the weekend that Russia has effectively offered Article
3:24
five like language governing security guarantees for Ukraine. No one sitting around that table
3:31
including the president of the United States, has any idea what that means. And they are going to
3:38
try and tie him down today. And I suspect that they are going to expose deep fissures between
3:45
them and him that may end up irritating him as much as he talks about how excellent his
3:51
conversations with both Zelensky today and Putin on Friday really were. But he did use every
3:56
opportunity to say how he thinks that Vladimir Putin is serious about peace, he wants peace
4:02
and it didn't seem to me that he'd changed since his rhetoric on Friday, Saturday and Sunday
4:09
He still thinks that Putin is the man that none of the rest of us think he is
4:14
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and of course one can argue that Vladimir Putin wants peace
4:18
but he wants peace entirely on his own terms as evinced by the insistence that Ukraine needs to cede the whole of Donbass to Russia Russia doesn control the whole of Donbass It fighting tooth and nail to try and take possession of vast parts of that section of eastern Ukraine
4:37
that it does not currently control. But we saw Donald Trump on social media last night
4:43
parroting Vladimir Putin word for word. Ukraine is never going to get Crimea back
4:49
They're absolutely not going to get membership of NATO. You know, key issues in a negotiation
4:54
that the president was staking out for Vladimir Putin on social media last night
5:01
even as the European leaders were beginning to board planes and head here
5:06
So, you know, for all the bonhomie today between President Trump and President Zelensky
5:14
and at least there wasn't another made-for-TV mugging of the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office
5:19
The only way that was achieved was by Wladimir Zelensky coming here with a phalanx of European leaders to support him
5:28
And now they're going to have to go to the mat along with Wladimir Zelensky
5:32
It's going to be eight on one in there as they explain to Donald Trump the intricacies of a conflict that President Trump still naively seems to think he can resolve with a snap of the fingers
5:45
and he can't. This is going to be a long, complicated, difficult negotiation and he never ever
5:52
evinces any understanding of that. Simon, it wouldn't be the same without you
5:57
Thank you very much indeed. That's Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent
