Trump Calls Off Talks With Putin

The Ukraine war won’t end anytime soon, it appears, after a second peace summit between President Donald Trump and Russian ruler Vladimir Putin was called off yesterday.

Russia refused to accept Trump’s plan to freeze fighting along the current front lines. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a call with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Putin’s goal remains regime change in Ukraine, not merely keeping the territory Russia has seized.

• “An immediate ceasefire in Ukraine would mean only one thing: most of it would remain under Nazi rule,” Lavrov said, calling the nation’s elected government by the Kremlin’s catch-all slur for any who resist its domination.

After the call, the White House stated that there are now “no plans” for a Trump-Putin meeting to take place in Hungary, which the two men had mapped out during a two-hour phone call last week. The summit would have been their second following their failure to break the war’s deadlock during talks in Alaska in August.

After the cancellation, the Europeans aimed to capitalize on perceptions that Trump is frustrated with Putin. They dispatched nato Secretary General Mark Rutte to Washington, D.C., today to brief Trump on a 12-point European plan to end the war.

Whether or not the president backs the new European plan, it is unlikely to persuade Putin to end the bloodbath. Unless the package imposes pain on Russia that cuts deeper than economic sanctions that can be circumvented, the brutal war will continue. The limits of negotiation in resolving conflict and confronting evil continue to show themselves. Truly, mankind does not know the way of peace (Isaiah 59:8).