There is a strange rhythm to today’s diplomacy, a circular choreography of phone calls and photo ops that pretends to move history forward while quietly dragging it backward. Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets Donald Trump. They smile, shake hands, and float a peace plan. Trump then calls Vladimir Putin and emerges with a different peace plan. Zelenskyy, alarmed, reaches out to Friedrich Merz. Emmanuel Macron joins the conversation. Trump adjusts the plan. Putin calls back. The plan changes again. Around and around it goes, a diplomatic carousel that never stops spinning and never seems to land anywhere except where the Kremlin wants it.
This is not negotiation; it is erosion. Each call sands down Ukraine’s position, not with bombs or tanks, but with “pragmatism,” “realism,” and the seductive language of ending a war quickly. Peace becomes a moving target, constantly redefined, always just one compromise away. And every compromise, conveniently, seems to ask Ukraine to give something up first.
The illusion is that everyone has equal leverage. They do not. Putin enters every conversation from a position of brutal clarity: he invaded, he occupies, and he is willing to wait. Time, for him, is a weapon. For Ukraine, time is blood, cities, and exhaustion. When peace plans shift with every phone call, the side that benefits is the one least bothered by delay. That side is Russia.
Trump, in this scenario, becomes the amplifier. Not necessarily a mastermind, but a megaphone. His instinct to deal, to announce, to declare victory before details exist, turns diplomacy into performance. Each new plan is framed as decisive, bold, historic. Yet the substance is thin, malleable, and easily reshaped by the last voice on the line. Putin understands this dynamic perfectly. He does not need to shout. He only needs to call last.
European leaders, meanwhile, scramble to stabilize the narrative. Macron and Merz are reduced to diplomatic firefighters, rushing to contain the damage of the latest revision before the next one arrives. Their involvement is serious, often principled, but reactive. They are correcting course, not setting it. And in a war where momentum matters, reacting is another form of losing ground.
What makes this cycle so dangerous is not just that it favours Putin, but that it normalizes the favour. Each shift is justified as balance, compromise, realism. Ukraine is told that peace requires flexibility, that borders are lines on a map that security guarantees can be vague, that justice can wait. Russia is never told the same. Its red lines are treated as immovable facts of nature, like gravity or winter.
Over time, the conversation itself changes. The question is no longer how Ukraine wins, or even how it survives intact, but how much it can afford to lose for the sake of “stability.” Stability, in this telling, is silence from Moscow and relief in Western capitals. It is a peace that looks calm on television while storing future wars beneath the surface.
This endless loop of calls also corrodes trust. Zelenskyy is forced into a permanent defensive crouch, responding to plans he did not design and concessions he did not offer. Ukrainian agency shrinks with every revision. The country becomes a topic rather than a participant, a problem to be managed between larger men with louder phones.
And Putin? He learns that persistence pays. That he does not need to win outright. He only needs to stay in the game long enough for others to negotiate themselves into fatigue. Every changed plan confirms his core belief: the West will eventually bargain with aggression if the bargaining sounds reasonable enough.
Peace is not built this way. It is not assembled through endless improvisation or last-minute calls that undo yesterday’s promises. Real peace requires clarity, consistency and a refusal to let force dictate terms. Without that, all these conversations amount to theater, and the script is already familiar.
The phone keeps ringing. The plans keep changing. And somewhere beneath the noise, a simple truth is being quietly accepted, as long as this never-ending negotiation continues, Putin does not need to stop the war. The process itself is already working for him.
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