Afrasianet - Abd Al Halim Qandil - At the aristocratic Dshell Pay Club outside Miami, a private club partly owned by U.S. envoy contractor Steve Witkoff, and away from official meeting venues, peace plans are being negotiated in Ukraine, with Kirill Dmitriev, Russia's foreign investment official, representing Ukraine, and Ukraine being represented by its chief negotiator Rustam Amirov, a Crimean Tatar Muslim who was deported with his family from Samarkand, Uzbekistan in the 1940s, until he became a prominent figure in Ukrainian politics. 

He took over as Ukraine's defense minister for a time, and has participated in most of the negotiations with the Russians since the start of the ongoing war on February 24, 2022, and played a key role in the first Istanbul negotiations, after the start of the war, and later in the negotiations of the grain agreement, which the European and American West intervened to thwart later.

Although the US negotiations are currently taking place individually with the representatives of Russia and Ukraine, and have not yet developed into direct trilateral negotiations, Ukrainian President Zelensky aspires to move to them quickly, and speaks The Russians, on the other hand, do not seem in a hurry to negotiate, preferring to reach an understanding with the Americans first, and seek to shake the positions of the Europeans who are more supportive of the Ukrainian president, and to gain the time needed to complete the new Russian military winter campaign, and to impose facts on the ground, forcing the Europeans and the Ukrainians to declare a final surrender. According to the Europeans' diligence, and their resentment of the Americans' unilateral negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the most important points in all the rounds of negotiations revolve around the fate of the Ukrainian territories, which were controlled by the Russians, and about the security guarantees set for Ukraine after it officially abandoned the dream of joining NATO, and then about the fate of Zelensky and his army after the war, while the Russians insist on official and realistic recognition of the annexation of the Ukrainian territories in question to Russia's sovereignty, especially the accession of the four Ukrainian provinces (Donetsk, Lugansk, and Zaporizhzhia In addition to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, and the five regions make up about a quarter of Ukraine's total area, which amounts to a little more than 600,000 square kilometers, and Trump's first 28-point plan, prepared by Witkov and Jared Kushner with Russian envoy Dmitriev, delivers to the Russians all their demands in Ukrainian territory, and realistically and legally recognizes its annexation to Russia, especially in the Donbas provinces (Donetsk and Lugantsk), which are the richest regions of Ukraine ever, and were included in the decision of the Russian State Duma issued in late September 2022, which decided to annex the Donbas with its two provinces to the entire administrative border, while the decision did not stipulate the annexation of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to the end of the administrative borders, leaving the determination of the border line to military realities on the ground, and about four years after the start of the war, the new border line appears to be drawn on the shore of the Dnipro River, which divides Ukraine longitudinally between a Russian east and a west that remains Ukraine for a while.

Trump's envoy with his plan, continues to align himself with Russia's goals on other fundamental issues, he is against Ukraine's accession to NATO, neither immediately nor in reception, and with the reduction of the number of the Ukrainian army to 600,000 troops, and with the holding of presidential elections that remove Zelensky from the scene, the American plan stipulated that Ukrainian presidential elections would be held within 100 days, after the ceasefire, and Zelensky's presidential term ended more than a year ago, and the American policy may have its own reasons for a siege Zelensky and getting rid of him, either because of his lack of full response, and perhaps his lack of obedience to Trump's financial desires, or to the bleeding of American weapons and money in Ukraine, and the rampant and rampant corruption inside Ukraine, which has led to massive thefts of weapons and money, and the diverse American and European support for Ukraine has reached about a trillion dollars to date, and Trump wants to recover Washington's money by completely seizing the rich precious metal mines in Ukraine, on top of his desire to remove the obstacle of Ukraine and go head-to-head to large investments with Russia, and the lifting of sanctions The Russians continue their first narrative, whether about the sins of the Soviet era in transferring Russian lands and regions to the borders of Ukraine, in addition to the determination of the Russian decision-maker to stigmatize the Ukrainian authority as Nazi, the need to de-Nazize the army in Ukraine, and the uprooting of the legacy of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis in the Great War against Russia, and the KGB. He was liquidated in his hiding place in Munich, Germany, in 1959.

The negotiation of the peace of Ukraine will remain suspended for more time, as no one wins at the negotiating tables beyond the feet and the tracks of tanks above the ground

Europe seems lost in the current situation, as it fears the consequences of the Russian victory in Ukraine, and narrows its chances of moving and negotiating away from Washington, as the European Union is basically an economic statement, but the diversity of its decision-making centers deprives it of a real opportunity to crystallize an independent political and military path, and the plans of the Europeans seem very confused, as the economic and financial exhaustion resulting from the war in Ukraine does not retain enough resources for independent armament, and Trump's temptation to pay in cash for American weapons going to the Ukrainian field, does not seem to be satisfied for an incursion The American appetite, especially with the emergence of the overwhelming American desire to abandon Europe, and the consideration of the new American national security strategy for Russia as an implicit friend rather than a threat, in exchange for considering Europe as a danger, and perhaps an implicit enemy, and the sharp and harsh criticism of European policies, and saying that it is on the path of suicide and the erasure of Western civilization, all of which adds to Europe's confusion, as it does not have the luxury of security independence from Washington, and the increases in European arms budgets have not worked, nor Europe has met Washington's unfair conditions in trade dealings, nor has it been subjected to Trump's demands to increase US oil and gas imports are many times more expensive than his Russian counterpart, and thus Europe is lost in the vortex of confusion, it is not able to completely distance itself from Washington, and it cannot offer a convincing alternative to support Ukraine in a war that seems to be over in favor of the Russians, and therefore Europe seems to be offering one man and delaying another in the ongoing negotiations.

The Europeans tried to harden Zelensky's position, in the rounds of discussion of US peace plans, and focused on the stories of providing security guarantees to Ukraine after the war, and talked about perceptions They have put verbal pressure on Washington to participate in providing security guarantees, but America does not seem ready for an effective response, and takes into account the considerations of the Russians' total rejection of the presence of any European or American forces on Ukrainian territory, which pushes the Europeans to something like despair, even though they are trying to open their own path to dialogue with Putin, in the way that French President Emmanuel Macron announced his readiness to meet with the Russian president again, which was welcomed Moscow is in an apparent political temptation, especially since the recent meetings of the European Union summit failed to report the theft of frozen Russian assets in Brussels, the capital of the Union, and to present them as they claimed for the reconstruction of Ukraine, and European leaders adopted an alternative resolution, in which they pledged to provide new loans to Ukraine worth 90 billion euros, with a dispute over the method of recovering the loans, after rejecting the proposal to recover them from the frozen Russian assets amounting to about $300 billion, to which Russia has repeatedly responded, and confirmed its intention to respond with a measure In the opposite direction, the confiscation of European assets inside Russia.

More importantly, the military realities on the ground are steadily moving in Russia's favor, which is no longer content with controlling Crimea and most of the four provinces, but also increasing its areas of new control in the Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv districts, and Russian forces have recently regained control of the city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv Oblast, and advanced to suddenly full control of Siversk in the west of the Donetsk Oblast, and the way was opened for them to later take control of the cities of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk.  After the continued advances inside Pokrovsk and Mirnograd, which simply means that the negotiation of the peace of Ukraine will remain suspended for more time, no one is winning at the negotiating tables beyond the feet and tank tracks above the ground.