Zelenski, Trump and Putin, face to face in Budapest? The diplomatic maneuver that experts see as delaying the inevitable

Security expert Hari Bucur Marcu explains what would be the result of a possible meeting between presidents Putin and Zelenski, with Trump in the role of mediator, in Budapest.

The meeting of the three presidents will bring peace. PHOTO: AP

Donald Trump recently announced that a meeting between him and Vladimir Putin could take place in Budapest in about two weeks. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has shown himself willing to host the event and ensure the necessary conditions for the Russian leader's participation, despite international legal problems related to the arrest warrant issued in Putin's name. The main aim of the discussion would be to find a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine and a possible negotiation leading to an end to the conflict.

In case of successful negotiations, this meeting should be followed by one in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will participate. He did not receive a formal invitation, and the details of the format of the meeting, the exact date or the participants were not clearly established.

Meeting remains a possibility, not a certainty. It depends on several political, diplomatic and logistical factors, but if it takes place, it could represent an important moment in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, international analysts say.

The Budapest summit, a timid and thin maneuver to prolong the inevitable

Security expert Hari Bucur Marcu explained what he thinks would be the potential outcome of such a meeting.

“According to all the data and information available to me, from my home, this probable meeting in Budapest is nothing more than a timid and thin maneuver to prolong the inevitable in which the United States, through President Donald J. Trump, abandons the role of mediator between the aggressor Russia and the aggressor Ukraine and goes arms and baggage, as the people say, to the side of the Ukrainians”claims the expert on his Facebook page.

Among the weapons mentioned are the famous American Tomahawk cruise missiles. These missiles, the expert says, Ukraine requires from the United States not as aid or as a gift, but in exchange for drones developed by Ukrainians and produced in Ukraine, including by exporting the production of such weapons to American territory. “Which would be sweet music to the ears of Trump, who has a strategic policy of reindustrializing America, as anyone can tell“, he elaborates.

The Tomahawk topic brings Putin's Russia into contact with the Americans

Bucur Marcu claims that the refusal to send the dreaded missiles to Ukraine following the Zelenski-Trump meeting in Washington does not represent a failure:

“Although anti-Trumpists in the international media, such as those at the BBC, have presented as a failure of Kiev's efforts to obtain Tomahawks the fact that America did not agree at the meeting in Washington DC to the alleged exchange between American missiles and Ukrainian drones, the reality highlighted by Zelenski and good-faith commentators is that, at this moment, the subject Tomahawk is one that goes no further than getting Putin's Russia to contact the Americans, to propose immediate meetings at the level of foreign ministers between the two nuclear power nations, and to favorably contemplate the idea of a summit meeting between the heads of state and government involved, probably in Budapest, in the next two weeks.”

What the missile delivery would mean for Russia

In this context the question arises “Why would Putin's Moscow be so sensitive to this subject?”

“Because, for more than three and a half years, Russia has been in a war of attrition in Ukraine, a war in which Moscow is resisting positions (although it claims to be on the offensive) with the help of Iran, which gave the Russians attack drones, but also a drone factory, with the help of North Korea, which put tens of thousands of soldiers at Russia's disposal (many thousands of whom would work in the drone factory itself) Iranian), as well as various types and quantities of Soviet munitions, from their own stockpiles, as well as with the financial help of China and India, among others, aid in the form of purchases of Russian oil and intended to finance the long-lasting war with no prospects of victory in the theater of military operations in Ukraine”. claimed the expert.

Ukraine's acquisition of long-range weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles would virtually undo a good part of the military power advantages Russia has gained from China, North Korea, India and Iran, among others, he points out, adding: “This, because these American missiles can strike deep inside Russian territory the essential targets, such as the Iranian drone factory, the refineries and installations through which Russia supplies oil to China and India, ammunition depots and concentration of forces, but also the deep airfields from where Russian strategic bombers take off, carrying missiles equivalent to the Tomahawks American, intended to hit eminently civilian targets in Ukraine, with the aim of weakening the will of the Ukrainian nation to continue the war to repel the Moscow aggressor.”

“Russia will not be defeated, but it will lose its current advantage”

The expert also answers the question of how the entry of such missiles into Ukraine's arsenal would change the fate of the war:

“So while this cruise missile weapon, with a range of over 1,500 km, could not by itself change the course of a conventional war, nor lead to victory for the user (just as equivalent Russian missiles cannot, despite being used for a long time and in remarkable numbers), they can make a strategic difference when their use is aimed at weakening Russia's ability to resist war wear, longer than the Ukrainians would.”

The expert is of the opinion that this is where Putin's desperate attempt to extend the expected outcome by at least two weeks comes from: “the one in which Russia will not be defeated, but the current advantage, in which it has resources of all kinds from those who support it in various forms, is exhausted or disappears, due to those American Tomahawk missiles and other sophisticated deep-strike weapons in Russian territory.”