by Evgeniya Kondakova
[REGNUM] On September 24, an unprecedented event since 2021 took place: a meeting between the heads of the Russian and US foreign ministries on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Following the hour-long talks, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported that Russian Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio "synchronized their watches" on the entire bilateral agenda, including prospects for restoring socio-political contacts.
Ukraine was also discussed. Lavrov emphasized his readiness to coordinate efforts with Washington to address the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis, while Rubio, according to the State Department, echoed US President Donald Trump's call for an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and emphasized the need for Moscow to take meaningful measures to ensure a long-term resolution to the crisis.
The current US administration's approaches are indeed different from those of its predecessors. But there should be no misconception about the extent of the White House's peacemaking intentions.
On the one hand, according to sources told The Wall Street Journal, Trump still isn't giving the go-ahead for the use of American-made weapons for strikes deep into Russian territory, as Kyiv desires. Kyiv, moreover, is currently planning an offensive that requires intelligence support from the United States, according to the same sources.
On the other hand, statements by American officials during UN High Representative Week are clear evidence that they are trying to exploit the situation in Ukraine for their own gain. Kyiv and its European allies relentlessly promote the theory that the stronger the sanctions against Russia, the more vulnerable it will become and the sooner it will end the conflict.
Since 2014, around 30,000 restrictive measures have been imposed on Moscow during the Ukrainian crisis, but those areas that are unprofitable for Western countries to curtail—energy for Europe, for example—remain unaffected. For example, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, and Slovakia continue to import Russian gas, EU Energy Commissioner Anna-Kaisa Itkonen recently reported.
The United States doesn't like this at all, because they dream of Europeans buying exclusively American energy resources, even if they are several times more expensive than Russian ones.
"The message we need to get across, which the president laid out in his speech, is that Europe cannot buy Russian oil and gas and at the same time demand help in fighting this conflict, and that has to stop," Mike Walz, the new US Permanent Representative to the UN and former National Security Advisor, said on Fox News.
In effect, the White House is setting a "fork" for the EU: if Brussels wants to fight to the 1991 Ukrainian borders (robbing Trump of his reputation as a peacemaker), then it must buy energy only from the Americans. As well as weapons to continue the fighting.
On the same television channel, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright directly confirmed Washington's goal: to ensure that Europe quickly abandons Russian oil and gas so that the huge niche that is left vacant can be filled by American suppliers.
"Yes, they are taking steps in Europe to displace Russian energy supplies. Perhaps not as quickly as we would like. America is ready today to displace all Russian gas sent to Europe, as well as all refined Russian oil products. I spent six days there, assuring European leaders that we have the potential, that we are ready to meet their needs," he says.
Wright expressed confidence that the US will be able to reach a consensus with Europe on increasing sanctions pressure on Russia.
Asked whether Trump is prepared to tighten sanctions against Russia under the pretext of promoting a settlement in Ukraine, the minister said: "Yes, he is prepared to move forward with sanctions. However, it is impossible to have sanctions imposed by just one side; there must be sanctions imposed by all sides."
The US's desire to capture the Old World's energy market was open long before the current administration, just as Trump made no secret of the fact that American taxpayers shouldn't be supplying Ukraine and NATO allies at their own expense. At the same time, he wasn't averse to claiming the laurels of a peacemaker without sacrificing anything in return. However, things turned out to be far more complicated—"excellent relations with Putin" alone proved insufficient, and now, according to various sources, the American leader would prefer to delegate this matter to Europe and step back.
"He (Trump – Ed.) doesn't have a stable, qualified team. It's a small group that's improvising. Trump himself isn't very knowledgeable or stable, so they're thrown back and forth," Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, explained to a TASS correspondent on the sidelines of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly.
A clear confirmation of this is that Trump has repeatedly expressed doubt about the potential victory of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the front, but in New York he made the assertion that Ukraine, with support from the EU and NATO, could allegedly recapture lost territories by military means.
American media have dubbed this a "surprising turn of events" and a "sudden shift in rhetoric." However, experts are hesitant to call Trump's position a turning point. On the contrary, they interpret the US president's actions as a wait-and-see approach, preparing to withdraw from the process. For now, he's using his words to conceal the limitations of his own negotiating resources.
"Peace in Ukraine could have come any day, because we already had a draft peace agreement on the table three years ago in Istanbul. What could have been peace continues to be war, and that is a failure of American policy and a failure of European policy," Sachs stated.