El día de Pascua, 20.04, me entrevistaron en directo por radio, en muchas ciudades de Europa y del hemisferio occidental. On Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, I was interviewed live in several cities of Europe and the Western Hemisphere.The interview was in Spanish. An English Google translation is below (RHS column). The topic was the negotiations of the Trump USA administration between Russia and Ukraine to end the war. Tom OD.)
Mi agradecimiento por la invitación de María Eugenia Plano, productora del programa radial Corresponsales en Línea, realizado por las corresponsales de los diarios Clarín y La Nación en París y Londres (María Laura Avignolo), París (Danielle Raymond), Madrid (Silvia Pisani), Berlin (Araceli Viceconte), Washington ( Paula Lugones) y San Pablo (Cristina Veiga) con la conducción de Silvia Naishtat (Editora de Economía de Clarín). en vivo y en directo para Radio Ciudad en Buenos Aires, los días domingos de 10 a 12 AM Hora Argentina. My thanks for the invitation from María Eugenia Plano, producer of the radio program Corresponsales en Línea, made by the correspondents of the newspapers Clarín and La Nación in Paris and London (María Laura Avignolo), Paris (Danielle Raymond), Madrid (Silvia Pisani), Berlin (Araceli Viceconte), Washington (Paula Lugones) and Sao Paulo (Cristina Veiga) hosted by Silvia Naishtat (Economics Editor of Clarín). live and direct for Radio Ciudad in Buenos Aires, Sundays from 10 to 12 AM Argentine time.
TRT asked me to be ready to comment, live, on the Oval Office meeting just before it blew up. I said Vance acted “infantile”. What I should have stressed, however, is that understanding Vance’s decision to blow up the meeting is key to understanding Trump’s strategy towards Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. (So, in this post the written analysis is the main thing, not the video.)
My TRT quick take, 28 Feb. See my later analysis, in the blog post.
There is plenty of facile analyses of this clash. Many say the blowup reflected “chaos” in Trump’s policy on Ukraine and Russia, or that Trump has an “impulsive” strategy, that he “dislikes Ukraine”, he’s “pro-Russian,” or that the blowup was a “prearranged ambush” to “humiliate” Zelensky, or similar.
Too few consider the possibility that the rebuke is consistent with a well-defined USA strategy. What quickly becomes clear from listening, at face value, to multiple statements by Trump himself and his team is that they have a consistent strategy. This is clearly not the first Trump administration. This second administration is different in its unity and consistency on its Ukraine, Russia, and Europe policies.
What was the purpose of the “minerals” deal that Zelensky came to sign?
The weeks-long USA-Ukrainian clash over this deal has reflected their geostrategic differences on a peace deal with Russia. After heated exchanges and compromises, clearly the Ukrainian side was not pleased with the issues it had had to give up in the minerals deal. Nevertheless, Zelensky’s Council of Ministers voted to endorse the deal, and Zelensky went to DC explicitly to sign it.
Interestingly, just before he went to the White House, President Zelensky met with a group of Republican and Democratic senators, who had “… all told him sign the deal and don’t get into an argument.” (War on the Rocks, timestamp 7:58-8:19, 06.03.25). Alas, if one watches Zelensky’s public argumentation, from the start of the press conference, and his telling Trump that a deal without a US security guarantee won’t work, all of which is in contradiction to the deal he is about to sign, it is clear that he precipitated the breakdown. In my reading of the event, he seemed to not be able to restrain himself, seemingly out of an understandable deep anguish at being about to sign an accord contrary to his better judgment.
What did each side want in the “minerals” deal, and who got what?
Everything I found to have been said by the actors on the USA and Ukrainian sides as to what each wanted in the document is quite consistent.
On the Ukrainian side, the big one was a USA security guarantee for any deal Trump makes with Putin. The Ukrainians certainly welcome the willingness of European allies to extend security guarantees for any deal, especially the public commitments made by both the UK and France to contribute troops, but they were clear that they did not think this can substitute for a USA guarantee standing behind theirs. Related to this, the Ukrainians opposed taking NATO membership for them off the table. Another was a seat at the table for Ukraine and the Europeans during negotiations with Russia (Trump wants something more like a shuttle diplomacy between the two.) Related to this, is that the USA should not negotiate a cease fire deal without them. Still another was refusing to agree beforehand to give up any Ukrainian territory that has been occupied by Russia.
Obviously the USA disagreed and de facto or openly refused all these conditions. However, the disagreement over the security guarantee seemed to be the most hot-button issue between them. Trump flatly refused. His reasoning, as explained to the press was interesting, revealing a lot about his philosophy or method for negotiating a peace deal. He said that the two sides obviously hated one another and he had to go between the two to negotiate anything. (Read Trump’s own words, in the transcript below.)
The Trump concept of economic interests and security interests
He also said that they had to trust him, saying that it just would not work if he first gave a security guarantee, taking Ukraine’s side so clearly beforehand. He also said that the ultimate security guarantee “is the easy part” and getting the deal “is the hard part.” He said the guarantees can “come later.” It became clear that, in his approach, this minerals deal was to be the signal to Putin that the USA would have long-term economic interests in Ukraine and would, of course, in Trump’s view of how the world works, defend against any threats to those economic interests.
This approach is clearly seen as highly risky by Ukraine, which has been abandoned once before under what was an explicit security guarantee, the Bucharest Memorandum, extended in return for giving up its nuclear weapons in the 1990’s. As Zelensky recounted for Trump, no signatories of the Minsk Accords extended security guarantees after Russia’s 2014 aggression, and Putin broke them constantly
The text of the final document, the one the Ukrainian ministers approved, is known; it was published in Kyiv two days before the Oval Office meeting. (The full text of the Ukraine-US Minerals Agreement, European Pravda, Kyiv, 26.02.25). So, it is easy to see that Kyiv didn’t get its main demands, although the USA did compromise, in a sense, on one of them, agreeing to an explicit mention of a “security guarantee.” However, the USA did not extend one as a quid-pro-quo for the minerals deal, rather in Section 10. the wording is:
The Government of the United States of America supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace. Participants will seek to identify any necessary steps to protect mutual investments, as defined in the Fund Agreement.
So, the USA vision of security, to “protect mutual investments,” is asserted in association..
First, Bloomberg reported Ukraine had destroyed an oil pumping station on the pipeline feeding Russia’s big Ust Luga oil export terminal on the Baltic Sea. This is the first time Kyiv has shutdown a Russian oil port, … which is exactly what I advocated in the interview above and since early-2024 as a military tactic to accompany imposition of “real” USA-EU oil sanctions on the three Russian west-facing oil ports, replacing the failed “oil price cap” policy.
Second, Christof Ruhl, former-BP VP, and -World Bank Moscow rep., now at the Columbia U. Energy Center, had an OP-ED in the FT, with a similar argument that Russian oil can be replaced with OPEC crude. I recommend it:“Trump should call on Opec in his bid to negotiate with Putin Ukraine’s western allies must join forces with the oil cartel to really squeeze Russia’s war economy” Christof Ruhl, 30jan25.]
There are two topics in this interview with Diana Skya of Poland’s national broadcaster, TVP:
Putin’s oil export income can be slashed via new sanctions and military policies, in line with Trump’s interest in forcing a “deal”
EU member states that seek a new Putin gas partnership are dysfunctionally replaying Merkel-ism and avoiding the real solution of reforming the Green Deal to put nuclear energy in the center. (See: “EU debates return to Russian gas as part of Ukraine peace deal. Advocates say reopening pipelines could help settlement with Moscow and cut energy costs” Henry Foy and Alice Hancock in Brussels and Christopher Miller in Kyiv, FT, 30jan25)
OIL SANCTIONS:
I have argued for three years that the rationale behind the USA-EU imposition of a Russian “oil-price cap” rather than simply imposing real oil sanctions has been flawed, and the policy has failed.
It was conceived in early-2022, apparently by former-central-banker Mario Draghi of Italy and taken up by then-USA-Treasury-head Janet Yellen, neither of whom understood global oil trade sufficiently to see how easily the Russians could get around this scheme, as they have with a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers insured by Chinese, Russian or other non-EU, non-UK firms.
The Global Barrel 