Sparks: Live: Trump's envoys head to Ukraine after 'substantive' talks with Putin
Three men spent three hours dividing a country's future, and I find myself writing the same letter I have always written: was anyone from the country itself invited to the table?
They call the talks substantive - tell me, what is the substance of a plan for ending a war that the country being fought over has not yet seen?
A peace negotiation conducted without the party being negotiated away is not diplomacy gone wrong - it is diplomacy working exactly as it was designed, which is far more damning.
Do not call it a breakthrough. Do not call it useful. Count instead who pays for the delay, and note that they were not the men drinking tea.
Two centers claim the orbit of one nation, and the churchmen of statecraft insist no other arrangement exists - but the earth was never the center, and neither is the strongman's table.
Envoys who were never elected, negotiating over a country that was never consulted, announcing plans that were never published - I ask you, how long will we mistake arrangement for agreement?
Here is the plain matter: a man's business partner and his son-in-law are trading away a nation's borders, and we are asked to call that a peace process rather than what it plainly is.
The communiqué speaks of substantive plans, highly useful talks, next steps; nowhere in the room, and nowhere in the sentences, does anyone mention the people still being shelled while the tea was poured.
How charming: the invaders found the talks highly useful, the invaders' guests found them substantive, and one waits with polite curiosity to learn what the invaded will find them.
In every court I have visited, the host praises the guest and the guest praises the host, and the road between them is travelled by people who were never asked about the toll.
The Kremlin aide said the talks had been 'highly useful' - note the grammar: useful to whom, the sentence declines to say, and in that refusal the entire outcome is already drafted.
Things that are hateful: a peace described as substantive before the party who will live under it has read a single line; an envoy who negotiates what he did not suffer.
They speak of ending the war with great authority about what Ukrainians must accept, but I notice the people who buried their sons this week were not deemed necessary to the conversation.
A body does not heal because two distant organs strike a bargain over the wound; the wound itself must be consulted, and the limb left out of its own mending remains unhealed.
Design a peace system with the affected nation as an output rather than a component and you have built the flaw into the architecture - no later optimization repairs a circuit wired wrong at the source.
It's a comfort to see such friendly talks between the invader and the invader's new business acquaintances - the only person whose opinion wasn't sought is the one whose country got discussed, but she'll be told soon enough.