Peter Baker
speaker
291 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Jan
Peter Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And for Zelensky, this is existential for him. And he faced this pressure from Trump to sign a rare minerals deal, handing over a lot of Ukraine's natural resources to the United States without any assurance that the United States is going to give them anything back. Trump said, you owe us basically for all the aid that Biden gave you over the last three years. Right.
So Zelensky unhappily, grudgingly comes to Washington as almost a supplicant to sign this agreement, hoping that that will keep Trump on Ukraine's side in any future peace talks.
Yes, that's right. Because he hopes that it will keep the United States on Ukraine's side, give it something at stake in the war, in this case, economic stakes. And he knows how much that matters to Trump. So Zelensky shows up at the White House on Friday morning, and Trump comes out at the door to greet him as he does with foreign leaders.
And they have a polite handshake, but not a lot of warmth, I would say. And Trump makes a comment as Zelensky arrives that later I think becomes kind of telling. He says, I see you came dressed up for the occasion.
Zelensky, of course, is wearing his tactical dark sweater, one of the versions of the combat type clothing he's been wearing for the last three years in solidarity with Ukrainian soldiers. Right. And... They go into the Oval Office. They take their seats. There's a number of top officials there. J.D. Vance is there. Secretary Rubio is there. And the meeting gets off to a relatively fine start.
But Zelensky's trying to make sure Trump understands that Ukraine is the victim, not the villain in this war.
And he shows him pictures. of Ukrainian men and women who have been released from Russian prisons and how amazing they are, how terribly abused they had been in Russian captivity, tries to get Trump to see that the Russians are the bad guys here.
That's tough stuff. And the first 20 minutes, 25 minutes are perfectly normal, perfectly fine, but you begin to hear a little bit of an edge. You begin to hear a little bit of the tension that's there.
And they just don't see the war in the same way.
You've been the president, but he... Zelensky does not want Trump to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia with no conditions, and Ukraine gets nothing out of it. He doesn't think Putin can be trusted.
He doesn't think that a ceasefire would hold. So he says, I need security guarantees. And that's what he's there to ask the United States for. And Trump does not want to have anything to do with it.
But then in the midst of this back and forth, suddenly you hear a new voice.
It's the vice president, J.D. Vance, who hasn't really been talking in the meeting. And he pipes up and he says, I want to interject here. And he offers a pointed defense of Trump's approach to the conflict. Trump is the one, he says, who's going to bring peace. He's going to be engaging in diplomacy.
And Zelensky, who's been listening to all this, really feels like he has to respond here.
And Zelensky basically proceeds to pick apart this idea that diplomacy is necessarily going to work. He points out there's a long history here. The war didn't just start three years ago. It started in 2014 when Putin first sent forces into Ukraine, seized Crimea, began seizing parts of eastern Ukraine.
And he points out that this war had been going on ever since, including during Trump's presidency. Yes.
And that seems to get under Trump and Vance's skin.
I noted it. Yeah, absolutely. And look, you know, on one level you can say he's trying to be friendly with him. Sometimes foreign leaders do refer to each other by their first names, but Vance takes offense and then jumps back in.
And this is when things go from bad to very bad.
You start hearing Vance say, you should be grateful to us and really putting Zelensky on the defensive there. And Zelensky, of course, has thanked America for three years quite prolifically. But, you know, what's actually, I think, striking about that demand by Vance, you should be thanking us, is he is demanding that somebody thank two leaders who haven't supported him. Ukraine.
Showing 81–100 of 291 · page 5 of 15
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