Zelenskyy to meet Trump in DC while war Rages in Ukraine and Russia Ups Ante 

Ahead of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s expected meeting with President Donald Trump next week during the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral, unsettling issues are circulating about the course of negotiations about ending Russia’s four-and-half year war against Ukraine.

The most detrimental is that Russia is hardening its territorial demands and no longer plans to return some occupied areas of northern Ukraine in a future settlement, according to Bloomberg .

The account says Moscow now intends to keep parts of the Sumy and Kharkiv regions as border buffer zones.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on July 23 after meeting with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, that ending Russia’s full-scale war would require “new ideas” to reach a peace agreement.

The mere premise of that thought is ridiculous and all discussions are wasteful. You either want peace or you want to kill. If Russia wanted to reach a peace agreement then it, as the aggressor, violator, murderer and rapist, must simply stop in its tracks and say we won’t bomb and kill. 

Meanwhile, Russian fuhrer Vladimir Putin has upped the ante by making demands that he has not yet made.

Any point of departure in the negotiations with Russia must begin with the understanding that there cannot be any special considerations for Moscow’s seized Ukrainian lands, as Trump had remarked — after all, Russian soldiers fought and died for that real estate.

Russia proved once again its intentions by striking the southern city of Zaporizhzhia with five guided aerial bombs on the evening of July 23, injuring at least 25 people, regional authorities said.

According to Zaporizhzhia Oblast Gov. Ivan Fedorov, those wounded include six children, one being a three-month-old infant.

Rubio and Lavrov met on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers’ meeting. The two discussed US-Russia relations and the need to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Ukraine, more than Washington and Moscow, wants the war to end because for some 56 months innocent Ukrainian men, women and children have been dying at the hands of Russian cutthroats and aerial bombs. As current events demonstrate, Russia doesn’t care about ending the war. Its eternal goal is to capture and subjugate Ukraine and Ukrainians.

“If, when peace comes, it'll be because of some new idea and some new concepts, and we're prepared to offer some of those in the right setting and form if the opportunity presents itself and the conditions are right,” Rubio said. "

“We're prepared to play that role in a positive way.”

The only way the USA can play a positive role is by not kowtowing to Russia and forcing it to concede its guilt, drop its weapons and return home.

Lavrov countered by again demanding that the US halt weapons supplies to Ukraine.  He also claimed that Moscow was ready for a diplomatic settlement of its war against Ukraine, saying any agreement should be based on the “understandings” reached by Russian fuhrer Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump during the ill-famed Alaska summit last August.

The so-called “understanding” refers to Moscow’s request that Washington pressure Ukraine to withdraw completely from Donbas. The demand — which would involve Ukrainian forces giving up territory it currently controls — has obviously been rejected by Kyiv.

Rubio said that ending the war would require new proposals, and he’s correct in saying that previous ideas on the table had been unacceptable to Ukraine and would likely be even less acceptable now.

Ukraine, which has demonstrated that it not only can it hold the line against Russia but also bring its war back to the streets and homes of Russians in Moscow, Petersburg and other cities.

Proof of Russia’s plan to continue the war is its hardening of territorial demands and stating it will not return some occupied areas of northern Ukraine in a future settlement.

Bloomberg says Moscow now intends to keep parts of the Sumy and Kharkiv regions as border buffer zones.

According to the source, Putin wants to keep the captured areas of Sumy and Kharkiv regions under his control. At the same time, the Kremlin has strengthened its position due to the escalation of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory.

Russia is no longer ready to return some occupied territories to Ukraine as part of any agreement to end the war and plans to keep them as “buffer zones.”

Putin remains determined to establish full control over eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region by force, and now also wants to retain areas of Sumy and Kharkiv regions near the Russian border.

As the publication notes, Putin has abandoned territorial concessions because Russia views increasingly confrontational statements from the United States as evidence that informal agreements reached during the summit in Alaska Trump have collapsed.

This shift marks a tougher stance from Moscow, which had previously been linked to informal proposals under which Russia would return occupied parts of Sumy and Kharkiv in exchange for Ukraine ceding the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Unless Russia is prepared to discuss surrender, all topics for consideration are irrelevant.