In Ukraine and Gaza, Trump finds out that ending wars is tougher than it looks

 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/19/politics/trump-peacemaker-ukraine-russia-gaza-israel/index.html

President Donald Trump is finding out that campaign trail bravura over peace deals can’t yield quick wins as wars rage.

As Trump made the tiniest of steps forward Tuesday on his peace plan for Ukraine, another ceasefire, for which he claimed personal credit, shattered. Israel launched a new onslaught on Hamas in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians.

The US president’s call with a largely intransigent Russian President Vladimir Putin as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to full-scale war highlighted two leaders whose own political priorities will likely supersede his own.

Such is the unpromising geopolitical atmosphere standing in the way of Trump’s dream of a legacy as a global peacemaker, which he’d predicted would be fulfilled as soon as he returned to the Oval Office.

Readouts of his chat with Putin only reinforced the fears of Ukraine’s government and its European allies that Trump sees the war as a sideshow to his wider quest of a rapprochement with Moscow. This leads him to see the conflict through a Russian lens. And it explains why he berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until he signed up for Trump’s 30-day ceasefire plan, but had only praise for Putin when he refused to buy in on Tuesday.