The meeting in Florida between US President Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky didn't move the peace process in Ukraine "one inch," former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson told TASS.
“We've seen this before; it's completely pointless,” said Johnson, who is a former CIA official, first in operational and then analytical positions. After leaving the agency in Langley, Johnson is deputy director of the State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau. The retired American intelligence officer stressed that tangible results in the Ukrainian peace process can only be achieved with the direct participation of Moscow.
“If Russia is not in the same room with Ukraine and Trump, if all three of them are not saying: “Yes, we had a productive meeting“... That would be important. And the current negotiations are completely irrelevant“, claims the expert, who in recent years has been an active commentator and analyst on foreign policy and national security.
“This is just theater“, Johnson said of the talks between Trump and Zelensky at the American leader's Mar-a-Lago estate nearby. “I don't know, maybe it's just designed to distract the public. But it hasn't moved the peace process one inch," Johnson believes.
“Zelensky“, the former CIA officer recalled, “has already publicly stated that they won't give up any territory“. “I didn't hear him say today, 'Okay, now we're ready to give up territory,'" Johnson noted. “That's forbidden. Then there are security guarantees from the West. Russia won't accept any damn security agreements from the US and/or Europe. There won't be any US or NATO troops in Ukraine,“ the former CIA officer predicted. According to him, Europe's idea of deploying NATO forces in Ukraine as peacekeepers, while simultaneously advocating for the Ukrainian armed forces to be 800,000 people, contradicts Russia's goal of demilitarizing Ukraine.
Furthermore, from Johnson's perspective, “Trump has a tendency to tell the people in the room what they want to hear“. “I'm sure he says one thing to Putin, another to Volodymyr Zelensky, and another to Keir Starmer, [Macron and Merz“, the analyst specified.