POLITICS: Positive signs for peace — but pressure Putin if he doesn’t respond

President Donald Trump declared Monday a success, posting around 6 p.m. that he’d “had a very good meeting with distinguished guests,” then “a further meeting in the Oval Office.”

After which he phoned Russia’s Vladimir Putin to start arranging a Putin sitdown with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, then “we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself.”

Crucially, he was caught on a hot mic earlier saying he believes Putin truly wants to reach a peace deal: “I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

The day sure offered grounds for hope, starting with an Oval Office love-in as Trump, Zelensky and a pack of European leaders cooed at each other.

Finland’s President Alexander Stubb probably best summed up the crowd’s praise for Trump: “I think in the past two weeks, we’ve probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past 3½ years.”

And: “The fact that we’re around this table today is very much symbolic in the sense that it’s team Europe and team United States helping Ukraine.”

Up in the air: Can the West give Kyiv sufficient hard security guarantees that it might give Putin part of what he wants as his price for peace?

And: When if ever will Trump ever turn the screws on Putin to make him reduce that price?

Those long-discussed secondary sanctions are an obvious cudgel that could leave the Kremlin no choice but to bend.

Vlad’s demanding a lot, including surrender of Ukraine’s “fortress cities” in Donetsk: Sloviansk,  Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka — which have held out not just since Russia’s 2022 invasion, but since the 2014 offensive.

In exchange, he’s offering to return some of the other Ukrainian land he’s now occupying, plus he’ll deign to accept the fact that the West is making those security guarantees.

We say “hard” guarantees, by the way, because Washington and Moscow both promised to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity decades ago, as part of the deal where Kyiv gave up the nukes it inherited from the USSR — yet when Putin broke Russia’s word with that 2014 invasion, President Barack Obama refused to make good on America’s commitments.

Hence the need for something like deployment of actual European and even US troops to secure a peace.

In Alaska on Friday, Putin apparently told Trump he could accept something like that — yet Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Monday was calling it completely unacceptable.

It looks like Trump and the Europeans are all on the same page; they’re backing Trump’s plan for a Putin-Zelensky meeting that could settle things.

Which puts the ball in Putin’s court: For years, he’s refused any such such sitdown without preconditions that amount to Zelensky’s surrender.

If he wants to make a deal, he’ll bend now; if not, Trump has to turn up the heat with secondary sanctions.