Donald Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ on Ukraine has been exposed - Patrick Mercer

Perhaps it’s beginning to dawn on him that he’s not omnipotent, that other nations have their own, independent interests and that he’s not so overwhelmingly influential that other countries will simply jump when he says so?

It’s not just Russia. President Zelensky (who’s been excluded from peace talks that intimately involve his country and generally treated like a pawn) is even daring to disobey his master. Some reticence from Ukraine’s leader drew this response from President Trump, “I see he’s trying to back out of the rare earth deal. And if he does that, he’s got some problems. Big, big problems.”

Little wonder Kiev’s hesitating: as Bloomberg said, “This deal was recently revised in a form reminiscent of Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo in the 19th century, with no security guarantees provided to Ukraine.”

But, there’s a wrinkle here that few seem to have noticed. In January London and Kiev signed a 100 year partnership agreement the headlines of which concentrated on military and reconstruction matters, but which in the small print talked about developing a ‘critical minerals strategy’.

Now, not much has been said about this so far, but could Zelensky’s prevarication be because Britain’s beaten the USA to the punch on the deal of the century? All will become clear, but in the meantime, Team Trump’s being defied - and that was never in the script.

Russia’s lack of cooperation with the White House, though, is not so much an act of defiance as a complete lack of understanding by the Trump administration of what the Kremlin intends to achieve.

It’s as if the myriad US intelligence agencies and diplomats have completely failed to grapple with the Russian mindset, a problem that seems to have beset them from at least President Obama’s time.

Neocon thinking, which is still very much in evidence today (with a Trumpian makeover), appears to have clouded US analysis to the realities of the situation. First, the regimes in Kiev and Moscow - unsurprisingly - are deeply inimical with Russia maintaining that they will not negotiate with a president and his cadre whom they claim to no longer hold a mandate. That’s nonsense, of course; the Ukrainian constitution is quite clear about the suspension of elections in time of war.

Yet Russia scorns that, suggesting that lasting peace can only work once the regime has been changed and Mr Trump has strengthened Moscow’s argument by recently labelling Mr Zelensky a ‘dictator’.

Then, Washington doesn’t seem to be able to grasp that Crimea and the four ‘new’ oblasts are now written into Moscow’s constitution as formally part of Russia. Kiev and the West see them as Ukrainian, but having voted to become part of the motherland, Russian law cannot now allow them to be surrendered or be used as a bargaining chip.

Were Mr Zelensky’s troops able to recapture them, it would be a different matter, but the ban on intelligence sharing that the Pentagon recently imposed damaged Kiev’s tactical position very heavily. I have no doubt that being effectively blind on the battlefield caused the badly conceived Kursk offensive to finally collapse and paved the way for Russian advances on almost every part of the frontlines.

Now it looks as though fresh, Russian offensives may test the Ukrainians to the very limit.

Meanwhile, Moscow continues to ask for sanction relief as a precondition for a ceasefire, whilst Trump’s and NATO’s tin ear is turned towards the fate of a proposed peacekeeping force. Russia has made it quite clear that such troops are utterly unacceptable and will be attacked, yet British and other officers are already reconnoitring in Ukraine. Our people just plough on planning an operation that will never happen; were Mr Putin’s deadly comments simply lost in translation?

Similarly, the Kremlin’s idea that the UN, US and European countries might establish a temporary government in Ukraine - displacing Mr Zelensky’s ‘illegitimate’ one - seems to have completely blindsided Team Trump. Russia proposed that such a government would be established by the United Nations’ Security Council (UNSC), the permanent members of which would be able to vote on its composition.

In reality this was just an artifice to allow Moscow a veto on anything that wasn’t going to put a more pro Kremlin regime into Kiev.

Last Wednesday we heard that Mr Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister, had formally rejected plans for a broader truce saying, “…none of the root causes of the war has been addressed…all that exists at the moment is a scheme that would allow us to achieve a ceasefire as the Americans think of it”.

The last few words are the crux of this: less arrogance and more empathy applied by proper diplomats might just allow the ‘art of the deal’ to succeed.

Patrick Mercer is a former MP for Newark and Army colonel.