His capitulation to Putin over Ukraine reveals a pattern. He’s the patsy: giving everything away, getting little in return

He parades as a strongman, but in fact he’s weak, weak, weak. In the face of America’s adversaries Donald Trump is, as he might put it, a patsy, a sucker, a pushover. He folds like a pack of cards. He’s a human doormat. A loser.

Just consider the gifts he has handed Vladimir Putin this week. He has brought Russia in from the diplomatic cold after three years of ostracism following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, whose anniversary is nearly upon us. Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, was meant to be persona non grata; he remains under international sanctions. Nevertheless, this week in Riyadh he met Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in so-called peace talks.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

In a matter of days, Donald Trump completed the most radical shift in US foreign policy in decades, bringing Putin back into the fold while sidelining Europe. He claims to have brought the end of the war in Ukraine in sight, but with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the rest of Europe excluded from the US-Russia talks, are we really any closer to peace? And, at what price?

Jonathan Freedland speaks to veteran US diplomat Kurt Volker, who served as Trump’s special representative for Ukraine during his first term, and the Guardian’s US live news editor Chris Michael

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