Progress toward peace in Ukraine was unlikely before Trump’s Davos rant. Now it looks all but impossible

 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/21/europe/analysis-ukraine-greenland-trump-davos-latam-intl

There were hopes Davos would bring Trump together with Europe’s key leaders and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky around an $800bn “prosperity” deal for a peacetime Ukraine, and the cementing of US security guarantees for Kyiv. It did not. In a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour, Trump referenced both Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron being in the audience when in fact both had stayed away, believing little progress toward peace was likely.

What will greet Zelensky on arrival is more concerning: a hostile and unpredictable US president who seems to flippantly eviscerate his country’s longest-standing allies, mock their leaders, and then find he has loathing to spare for windmills. Trump repeated his claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted a deal on Ukraine – despite little public evidence to support it – and that Zelensky did too. Steve Witkoff, the presidential envoy to the war, is once again due to meet Putin Thursday, possibly after a Trump and Zelensky meeting in Davos. The mayhem of the past week radically decreases the already slim chance of a genuine peace deal.