Speculation abounds. Some leaders would already apply the paradigm of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to the case of Ukraine (Meloni’s proposal). Meaning that, from the moment the new agreement is signed, any attack on this country would be considered an attack on the U.S.? Isn’t that too much?

Since serious matters are boring, we must laugh a little. Comic relief came with Snow White from the Lavra arriving at the White House, accompanied by the seven dwarfs. Fearing that Zelensky’s heroic splendor might be disturbed, the characters of this new Brothers Grimm tale didn’t change his “war orthopedics” outfit, but someone still brought him a jacket so he wouldn’t embarrass himself again in the Oval Office.

It could also be said that Zelensky struggled to appear as a pacifist. Looking at the rows of chairs filled with European leaders in the Oval Office, I had the feeling that the great director of the universe had turned the White Walkers from Game of Thrones from warriors into pacifists.

The dice of war have already been cast. What appears publicly, however, is Trump’s aura as a great peacemaker. A sold-out play is being staged! The American president aspires to the Nobel Prize, while the architects of war push European leaders into turbo-charged calls for fighting.

Regarding security guarantees, President Trump has not committed to supplementing Ukraine’s defense mission with American forces. In fact, he admitted that the U.S. merely supplied Western military equipment, which was then donated to Zelensky’s army. Still, no one has publicly detailed what form this new concept of collective defense for Ukraine would take, though there are a few classic options.

One already familiar concept, with some success, would be a full-fledged “peacekeeping force” supplementing the Ukrainian army. The disadvantage of this formula is that, for deterrence to be credible, it would require tens of thousands of soldiers. Moreover, the line between defensive and offensive is as thin as a hair. A conflict can flare up from something as small as a haystack fire (few people know that the war in Sarajevo in the late last millennium in former Yugoslavia began in such a way).

A second option would be international military militias patrolling the demarcation lines between belligerents. Their presence could discourage Russian troops from firing at “Europeans.”

This trick with “security guarantees” seems pulled out of a magician’s hat. Nobody explains how the international community, including the U.S., could truly protect Ukraine from future external aggression. There could be peacekeeping troops, bilateral agreements, international treaties.

The big problem since the end of World War II is that it did not conclude with individual peace treaties. Today’s discussions on Ukraine’s security guarantees, without a complete picture of combat sensors and territories occupied by invaders, make no sense in the current framework.

It is well known that the architects of war heavily bankroll the European political elite. None of the seven dwarfs landed at the White House thinking that peace could be achieved tomorrow. They did not row in that direction at all. Their absurd conditions showed it clearly, as if they already knew the details of negotiations in Alaska between Putin and Trump!

Personally, I don’t think a tête-à-tête between the Kremlin leader and the one from Kyiv is viable. Various pretexts will be invoked to prevent such a meeting from taking place.

From all these recent events, one thing is obvious: no Western leader wants to openly discuss the interest of stopping the “arms race,” about which communists used to make so much fuss in the Soviet era. Ukraine already had security guarantees from Russia back in 1994, through the Budapest Memorandum (signed alongside the UK, France, USA, and China). Or through the treaty of mutual recognition after the USSR’s collapse. The U.S. president at the time, Bill Clinton, assured Ukrainians that if they gave up their nuclear arsenal, they would be protected. But only in principle, not in fact or in law. The memorandum was not a treaty.

Adrian Năstase, Romania’s former prime minister, rightly asks: to whom will security guarantees be granted? To “big Ukraine” or “small Ukraine”? If the “forces of good” – as the Coalition of the Willing is sometimes called, with European leaders in a trance of permanent war – continue to claim they do not recognize territorial losses, then what’s the point of the quarrel (to use an old Balkan expression) over the diplomatic trilateral?

All discussions on Ukraine’s security guarantees must be aligned with Moscow’s demands; otherwise, it’s a dialogue of the deaf. Vladimir Putin has said countless times that the “special operations” in Ukraine aimed at denazifying Ukraine and liberating Russian-speaking territories. He had asked as early as 1999 for a partnership with NATO (Yeltsin signed with Clinton the NATO-Russia Founding Act). Furthermore, at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, he demanded a stop to any NATO expansion eastward, including to Georgia and Ukraine. Because NATO leaders ignored him, he invaded South Ossetia.

Does it still matter that George W. Bush went to Russia eight times? He slammed “expansion” on the table in Bucharest and then retired from politics. The primordial fault lies with him, but how many glory-seekers understand that?

Western leaders, arriving in Washington without bibs and in fishnet socks, looked like unprepared students at a wartime graduation exam. Their only public stance, the tripartite meeting between Putin, Zelensky, and the West, collapsed today: Trump announced he will not participate in the first Putin-Zelensky meeting.

Today’s European masters are dazzlingly versatile. They swear to industrialists from the military-industrial complex that they will lift profits to the sky, but in public statements they pose like lambs that don’t like hay, preferring the fat grass at home, where propaganda shields them from public backlash.

“At war, as at war” is the paradigm from Tolstoy’s books. Of course, he is politically incorrect today, when scooter-riding hipsters bluff: we make war, not love.

Still, one dilemma hovers in the air like a Voldemort: if European leaders proceed like their predecessors at the Munich Peace Conference of September 1938, when they ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for illusory peace, wouldn’t it be better for them to stay in their lairs and keep the rearmament story going?

Trump has announced another salvo of ninety billion dollars will be poured into the American military arsenal, the noise-team of anti-Putin propaganda has its money files full, Western populations are trained to fear the Russians, Brussels leaders have no pacifist ideas, only warlike perspectives. All the conditions for failure are predictable.

Nobody wants peace, except Trump. The Russian army bombed enemy targets even harder after the Anchorage meeting. With whom should the White House leader fight so that music echoes through the trenches, when the weapons fall silent?

By Marius Ghilezan