Even though no ceasefire deal was reached during the summit in Alaska between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, “a lot of progress has been made,” Dan Rice, a former special adviser to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and president of American University Kyiv, told Newsmax Saturday.
“First of all, you can’t solve this war without dialogue, and this is the first step in dialogue,” Rice said on Newsmax’s “Saturday Agenda.” “As much as we’d all love to see Putin hanging from a rope, basically you can’t humiliate a dictator with nuclear weapons in public. So President Trump chose diplomacy.”
Rice said Trump likely told Putin during their meeting that the United States, NATO, and Ukraine do not want the war to continue. He added that Trump also likely warned that if the fighting does not stop, the United States will provide Ukraine with more weapons than it has supplied so far.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should be involved in negotiating the peace, Rice said, adding that he hopes the Ukrainian leader’s upcoming meeting at the White House will move both sides toward “peace, progress, and security.”
Rice also commented on Putin’s contention that the war would not have happened had Trump been in office, saying he agrees that the invasion likely would not have occurred, but for different reasons.
“I do think he was right that the invasion wouldn’t have happened, but he’s using the wrong reasons,” Rice said. “He’s saying that Ukraine wouldn’t have been the aggressor. Ukraine wasn’t the aggressor.”
Rice further argued that former President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. Army Special Forces from Ukraine signaled weakness.
“That sent a signal to Putin that the door was open,” he said. With those forces and advanced weapons, “they would have stopped the Russians at the front lines. That’s why we need a security guarantee going forward that he will never invade ever again.”
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