The Russian diplomat indicated his government is not interested in such a meeting until a "presidential agenda" was agreed upon that included certain Russian demands, including an agreement Ukraine will not seek membership in NATO and will discuss ceding some territory to Russia.

"When President Trump brought … those issues to the meeting in Washington, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelenskyy said no to everything," said Lavrov.

Trump has positioned himself as an arbitrator, a peacemaker between two warring governments. And therein lies the problem. As Daniel McAdams pointed out several months ago in an interview with this writer, Washington can't be an arbitrator in this conflict because it is a party to the conflict. "It's like having a boxing match and the referee starts punching somebody," quipped McAdams.

Indeed, I said the same thing just days after the war started. It has been clear from the beginning to anyone being honest with himself this war was never between Ukraine and Russia. It was a war between Washington and Russia, fought by Ukrainians on their land but funded and directed by Washington. It began in 2014 when Washington overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government and installed a Washington puppet, who immediately tried to take away Russia's naval base at Sevastopol.

This came at a time when Washington "just happened" to be conducting a regime-change war in the country home to Russia's only other reliably ice-free port on this side of the Eurasian continent, Syria. I wrote in 2016, when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton suggested putting a no fly zone over Syria, that Russia would never give up its bases in Syria and Ukraine.

Russia did eventually allow Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to be deposed, for reasons that are still unclear, and abandoned its base in Syria. It may have been simply a matter of priorities. The base in Syria was much smaller than Sevastopol's and not nearly so close to Russia's border. In the great scheme of things, it was expendable.

Sevastopol was another story. Home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet for over 240 years, that base was not expendable. Washington's 2014 attempt to take it away resulted in Russia's annexation of Crimea and the beginning of an eight-year civil war in eastern Ukraine, which effectively ended with Russia's 2022 invasion.