In what The New York Times called “a head-spinning reset,” American and Russian diplomats met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss both a negotiated conclusion to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a restoration of normal diplomatic relations. As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rekindled relations that had frozen solid, left out in the cold were both Ukraine and America’s NATO allies.

At the very least, this decision sparked a fire in the belly of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who responded angrily that negotiations for a peace deal cannot happen “behind the backs of the key subjects,” so any bilateral agreement reached between the U.S. and Russia “cannot be imposed” upon Ukraine.

“I could understand why Zelensky would say, ‘Well, I’m not going to commit to be bound by whatever these two parties do. I’m going to represent my own country,’” reflected Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “But I think he also recognizes the context in which it occurs is [one in which] the [aid] pipeline of, ‘as much as it takes, as long as it takes,’ is cut off.”

Davidson predicted that “the United States and Russia will work out the framework” for further negotiations, given that “post-Cold War [and even] through the entire Cold War, a lot of the top-level negotiations were U.S.-Russia, U.S.-Soviet Union negotiations.”

“I do think America has a larger share of the conversation here,” agreed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “because without the United States funding and armaments, Ukraine wouldn’t still be in this war. … The United States has funded it. We’ve enabled Ukraine to defend itself against the aggressor, which is Russia.”

European NATO allies were also unhappy at being excluded from the negotiating table, but Davidson blamed this on their refusal to ante-up. “The Europeans have become accustomed to [the U.S. acting as] the de facto European defense force. All the major economies in Europe are underfunding their defense obligation,” he stated. “Kudos to the Baltic republics like Latvia and Estonia, places like Poland, that are really going above and beyond to defend their own countries. But you have your big economies like France, like Germany, like Italy, that aren’t really meeting their obligations.”

“They want the United States to keep running things with the open checkbook,” Davidson added. “And I think [Vice President] J.D. Vance delivered a great message to say, ‘The idea that we’re just going to keep pouring cash into things without saying, “what exactly are we defending,” are over.’”

“I think it’s brilliant how Donald Trump has positioned it in the last few weeks to say, ‘We’re looking at a framework where European forces occupy Ukraine to keep the peace.’ And they’re all quickly going, ‘Well, you know, I don't know about that,’” he continued.

In a further disruption of European expectations, Trump on Wednesday delivered a social media broadside against Zelensky. “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social. “On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’ He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.’”

“A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump warned. “In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia. … I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.”

(Trump’s jab that Zelensky is a “dictator without elections” recalls the fact that the Ukrainian president’s term expired last spring. Ukraine has not held new elections because the entire country is under martial law due to the war with Russia, which has the potential to strike any population center in the country on short notice.)

Such comments surprised many Americans who were used to thinking of Ukraine as the country on “our side” of the war. Are these comments, coinciding as they do with the Saudi Arabia talks with Russia, a move in some game of 4D chess?

National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar suggests “a much straighter, cleaner line to explain Donald Trump’s ferocious hostility toward Ukraine and Zelensky” in the first Trump indictment. “Back in 2019, Donald Trump’s presidency … was derailed by what he considers to be a spurious impeachment attempt by the Democrats,” Blehar explained. “Trump was arraigned for improperly ‘interfering with the 2020 election’ by pressuring Zelensky to probe the details of Hunter and Joe Biden’s financial entanglements with their government — entanglements we now have every reason to believe were indeed significant and deeply corrupt, certainly on Hunter’s part.”

There is, indeed, a bitter irony in the fact that Trump was impeached for using his presidential power in an attempt to uncover Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian corruption, while President Joe Biden used his presidential power to pardon his son for committing it.

But a personal vendetta is no reason to sacrifice a West-leaning country with a population comparable to Canada to the ravenous expansionism of Moscow. The Ukrainian people have spent the last two decades trying to escape from the malign influence of post-Soviet Russia, as Moscow tries to claw back their lost territory and resources by hook and crook. “Remember, there was a state of peace before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. So the real bad actor here is Russia,” declared Davidson.

Unfortunately, as much as “we do not want to concede those things which would encourage this type of aggressive behavior,” as Perkins put it, Russia seems likely to escape the bloody conflict with at least some prize for its unprovoked invasion. “I think a likely outcome, given the situation we’re in right now, is [that] Russia will occupy a portion of eastern Ukraine,” Davidson predicted. The Donbas region, which Russia partially occupied in their 2014 invasion, has a greater proportion of Russian speakers, a fact Russia has used to advance ethno-nationalist claims to that territory, as well as Crimea.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, ceding this territory to Russia also means ceding away populous, industrialized territory — or it did before the war. “Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of the fighting has occurred,” Davidson added. “So a lot of it’s been effectively depopulated from the regular civilian population right now. It is a war-torn area, and the casualties have been bad on both sides.”

That said, Davidson pointed out the U.S. was under no “formal obligation” to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression. The closest the U.S. ever came was the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, he explained, in which the U.S., the U.K., and Russia committed to respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity under the current borders, and committed to refrain from economic pressure or military aggression, in exchange for Ukraine returning Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia.

Obviously, Russia has flagrantly violated its commitments under this memorandum, but the recourse provided by the Memorandum is merely to consult the U.N. Security Council — an obviously futile action against a country holding a permanent veto.

The Biden administration inked two additional security agreements with Ukraine. In November 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba signed a U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership. Then, in June 2024, Biden and Zelensky signed a 10-yearBilateral Security Agreement. However, neither committed the U.S. to direct military involvement, and it never had the Senate approval that would make it a binding treaty.

The U.S. might not have a formal obligation to Ukraine, said Davidson, but “I think people do recognize there’s a sort of moral obligation there.” This moral obligation extends not only to implicit guarantees under the Budapest Memorandum but to the very foundation of the current international order. Essentially, when the democracies beat the dictatorships in World War II (later confirmed by their victory in the Cold War) they set up an international system that made all nations play by their rules: people have the right to choose their own governments, large nations cannot invade small ones for no reason, etc.

If the U.S. allows Russia to get away with dismantling Ukraine or turning it into a puppet state, the foundation of this entire order will be called into question, and other power-hungry authoritarian regimes will take notice. Russia might look to reabsorb other former Soviet states. China will almost certainly pounce upon Taiwan and might contemplate further conquests. Other powerful nations with proud histories — Turkey, perhaps, or India — might also indulge daydreams of conquest to recapture their former glory. If the international order the U.S. built is once dismantled, who knows how much blood and treasure the U.S. will have to expend to protect its interests?

Yet many Americans — and certainly President Trump — are exhausted by the length, fatalities, and price tag of the war in Ukraine. “When you look at … the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent, the tens of thousands of lives that have been lost, you have to ask, what was gained?” Perkins pointed out. “The idea that the United States is just going to keep footing the bill — and, frankly, let the Europeans drive the agenda — I think has to go away,” Davidson said.

But the question remains unanswered: what kind of peace deal can President Trump achieve, and what kind of deal will he seek?