In light of Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict “within 24 hours of being elected” predictably falling flat, the US President has now given himself a more plausible, albeit still farfetched, “100 days upon assuming office” to achieve this gargantuan task. Reluctant to lose face twice, Trump is bent on strong-arming Ukraine into accepting a “cold peace” against its will before this self-imposed deadline lapses.
Gutting USAID, the US government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance, is part of a pressure campaign intended to leave Volodymyr Zelensky no choice but to choose “jaw-jaw” over “war-war.”
Granted, the previous administration bears much culpability for not permitting strikes deep inside Russia in the name of “escalation management” up until the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency. That being said, pulling the plug on foreign assistance that has hitherto shielded Ukraine’s wartime economy from total collapse and kept state organs functioning is a far more consequential move.
Worse yet, the current establishment is playing right into Vladimir Putin’s hands by omitting Ukraine from mediation efforts while simultaneously sidelining the “Weimar+” Group (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Poland).
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The Kremlin maintains that Zelensky is an “illegitimate usurper” by virtue of staying on in power beyond his official mandate and has refused direct engagement with the so-called “expired Ukrainian President,” citing a decree he ratified in October 2022 which precludes bilateral discussions between Moscow and Kyiv.
Knowing that Ukraine can ill-afford rough-and-tumble general elections as it struggles to mobilize enough warm bodies to the front lines to fend off Russian battlefield advances, Putin is making it seem as if he is legally constrained from negotiating with Zelensky in the hope that humiliating and discrediting his opposite, a legitimately elected president, will bring about regime change.
The 90-minute phone conversation between Trump and Putin that took place earlier this week somewhat validates the latter’s narrative on Europe being completely irrelevant – so too does their upcoming tête-à-tête in Saudi Arabia.
Make no mistake, the Saudis place greater emphasis on posturing and grandstanding than actually saving lives or delivering tangible results
As signatories to the Rome Statute that enforced a pan-continental airspace ban on all Russian carriers once the full-scale invasion was launched, EU member states are admittedly off-limits to ICC-designated war criminal Putin for whom an arrest warrant has been issued.
Nonetheless, the fact that a resolution to the nearly three-year long “special military operation” is now being sought in an entirely different geography than the actual theater of carnage does not bode well at all for a supranational bloc whose raison d’être was to prevent such flare-ups post-WWII and project strength on the global arena. Brussels’ dovishness and refusal to go all-in for Ukraine has not only emboldened Moscow but also the White House.
Apart from threatening to forcibly annex Greenland as well as levy prohibitive 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports from the EU, brushing the Eurocrats aside and attempting to cut a deal with Putin over their heads reflects Trump’s sheer contempt for an entity he considers a spent force.
A Reuters article published two weeks ago suggested that both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were frontrunners to host Russo-American deliberations on Ukraine’s future.
Although Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s (MbS) commitment to invest $600 billion in the US economy coupled with eschewing near-term BRICS membership clearly played a role in Riyadh being favored over Abu Dhabi as the host venue for this high-profile meeting, Trump remains keen on roping the Saudis into the Abraham Accords and skirting around the “two-state solution” they have demanded as a precondition for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.
Lionizing MbS as a key power broker and allowing him to share the spoils if a cessation to the fighting is eventually agreed on by Moscow and Washington could prompt the House of Saud to take a less intransigent stance vis-à-vis Palestinian statehood and enter into the “deal of the century” regardless. Trump has even suggested that his first overseas trip could be to Saudi Arabia, as was the case during his previous term in the Oval Office.
Make no mistake, the Saudis place greater emphasis on posturing and grandstanding than actually saving lives or delivering tangible results when taking it upon themselves to hold a summit of such magnitude.
At the same time, a vanity exercise of this kind serves as a much-needed red herring for MbS with his Vision 2030 initiative floundering. Grandiose infrastructure projects like NEOM have failed to draw significant interest from external investors whereas the kingdom still suffers from an “image problem” owing to its abysmal human rights record. This includes the inhumane treatment of migrant workers, draconian cybercrime laws, and a record upsurge in beheadings for petty crimes.
Zelensky, for his part, should harbor no illusions about Saudi Arabia being a good-faith, “agenda-less” interlocutor. Last July, its officials threatened to sell the Kingdom’s European Debt Holdings if the Group of Seven (G7) seized $300 billion worth of Russia’s frozen foreign reserves.
Mere weeks after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in late February 2022, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – a Saudi billionaire businessman and member of the ruling Al Saud dynasty – ploughed nearly $500 million into three legacy state-owned Russian energy companies – namely Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil.
Moreover, and as per an OCCRP-led investigation, Riyadh spent roughly $2.3 billion to procure 39 Russian Pantsir-S1M Missile Systems from sanctioned defense contractor Rostec back in April 2021. A year and a half later, the Saudi government slashed OPEC+ oil production by 2 million barrels a day and in doing so, fueled the Kremlin’s war chest thanks to higher crude prices.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are ideologically aligned with Russia and focused on mainstreaming the “authoritarian stability” model beyond the Middle East.
Neighboring UAE has likewise positioned itself as a neutral destination for peace talks, yet warrants some degree of skepticism. Whereas the Emiratis have successfully arranged multiple prisoner swaps, the sobering reality is that for every Ukrainian POW released, hundreds of high-net-worth Russians are being issued UAE “Golden Visas” and allowed to live in the lap of luxury in Dubai. According to a 2024 report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), Russians have snapped up $6.3 billion in Dubai real estate since the onset of the war and constituted the third largest group of foreign property buyers in 2023. Meanwhile, the UAE welcomed two million tourists from Russia last year and 150 weekly flights operate between both countries. Their citizens are also mutually exempt from entry requirements.
In addition, the tiny federation has long been permissive of illicit financial flows from co-belligerent Iran and emerged as the go-to playground for IRGC-affiliated fugitives to splurge and launder their ill-gotten wealth.
Despite their decades-old, unresolved territorial dispute over three Persian Gulf islands (Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb), the UAE remains Iran’s second biggest trading partner and exported goods valued at $21 billion to the Islamic Republic in the first seven months of 2024. Numerous Emirates-based logistics companies were targeted by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for facilitating the transfer of Iranian-made Shahed UAVs to Russia.
Abu Dhabi was additionally at the forefront of rehabilitating murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad and bringing Syria – one of the few UN nations to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics – back into the Arab League before the Ba’athist Party was overthrown last December.
Incumbent as it may be on Zelensky to leave no stone unturned in pursuing an immediate and sustainable ceasefire, he must be sure to frequent Saudi Arabia and the UAE with his eyes wide open in the coming weeks. After all, their leadership is ideologically aligned with Russia and focused on mainstreaming the “authoritarian stability” model beyond the Middle East.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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