From The Australian. Here's what's on the front, Unclaire Harvey. It's Tuesday May twenty seven, twenty twenty five. Private hospital operator health Scope has collapsed into receivership and the government says it won't use taxpayer funds to bail it out. The receivers will now try to sell off its assets, including the troubled Northern Beaches Hospital in Sydney. There's a
huge drama brewing over the Port of Darwin. It's owned by a Chinese government linked firm, but Anthony Albinizi says it must be sold off or forcibly acquired.
By the government.
Now, a US private equity firm or its strong ties to the Trump administration is preparing to make an offer its owners can't refuse. That's an exclusive live now at the Australian dot com AU. Vladimir Putin is pounding Ukraine more intensely than ever, despite Donald Trump's boasts.
He could bring peace within a day.
In today's episode, why Trump's peace process has failed and why he can't just walk away.
Remember when Donald Trump said this.
If I'm president, I will have that war settled in one day twenty four hours.
That was during the presidential campaign, and he was talking, of course, about Russia's twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths with.
A barrage of missiles on multiple targets right across the country.
Trump was inaugurated in January. The war didn't end.
We're having very serious discussions about that war.
Trying to get it ended with Russia. America's efforts to negotiate a peace resulted in little more than a spectacular blow up in the Oval Office.
What kind of diplomacy US became boved?
What?
What?
What do you mean?
I'm talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country has But President, mister President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.
Going into that meeting, Trump thought he had made a deal with Ukraine's President Volodimi Zelenski. Ukraine would agree to allow America to exploit its critical minerals in return for American protection. That would involve an agreement that Russia could keep the territory it had already seized that would be a huge win for Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has repeatedly praised.
Zelensky balked at Pope Francis's funeral in Rome. Other world leaders shepherded Zelensky and Trump together for a brief conversation, and then Trump's rhetoric changed again.
I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time, always gotten along with him. But he's sending rockets into cities and kelly people and I don't like it at all. We're in the middle of talking and he's tuning rockets into Kiev and other cities. He's killing people. And something happened to this guy, and I don't like it.
And now on his truth social platform, Trump is doubling down. We've used an AI voice generator to bring his words to life.
I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely crazy. He is needlessly killing a lot of people. And I'm not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever.
Cameron Stewart is the Australian's chief international correspondent, Cam We don't usually see world leaders talking this. Frankly, how do you interpret Donald Trump calling Vladimir Putin crazy?
Is this just a Trump tantrum or is it.
A big change in the way he's thinking about Vladimir Putin.
I think it's a big change, Claire. I think this is a big moment in this conflict, because what we've really seen ever since earlier this year is Trump trying to get a deal together, trying to intervene personally in this by appeasing Vladimir Putin very deliberately to try and get Putin to the negotiating table in a serious way. He's made all sorts of demands on the Ukrainian Vladimir Zelenski, but not on Putin. He has just held out in the hope that Putin would actually come to the table.
He hadn't said anything publicly until now, but Putin has provoked him by having this massive series of attacks on Ukraine. And really, I think a lot of the rest of the world has looked at Trump and been puzzled as to why he has been so tolerant with Putin. He always claimed a good personal relationship with him in the first term as president. He always believed that he could actually use his charm, I guess or his persuasive techniques
to actually get Putin to come to the table. But this language suggests that Trump has had enough.
Trump's argument all the way along was it Putin just needed to be treated as a businessman. This needed to be a negotiation rather than America accusing him of being a war criminal basically, and that he would respond to that.
Was that a miscalculation?
Do you think, cam given that Vladimir Putin is not a businessman.
He was an agent in.
Russia's secret service, the FSB who became president, has a massed, enormous wealth.
He's not a businessman like Trump, is he?
No, not at all, not at all that you say. He's KGB trained, is very skilled in manipulating people, and he had no particular reason to come to the table. I mean, Putin has a lot greater resources as far as money and manpower than Ukraine does. He sees what's happening in the United States or the Republican Party. The isolation is stwing that doesn't want to give aid to Ukraine. He's not losing the war, he's not particularly winning it, there is a starmate along the front line, and believes
the long game is very much in his favor. And so therefore it's Trump that actually doesn't have the cars rather than Pusin.
Over the weekend, and this is the thing that triggered Trump's angry social media post, Russia launched one of the biggest single night attacks of the whole war.
Why is Vladimir Putin ramping it up now?
It's a great question. I think that Vladimir Putin is effectively trying to ape the peace process. I don't think there's any other conclusion you can come to here. Just the other day, after the two hour phone call with Trump, the olive branch that Vladimir Putin put out was that he was happy to start direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
And he said that, and then he fired a barrage of missiles over these last coming days, huge attacks on Ukraine and very cruel ones directored towards residential buildings, certainly not military installations. You can only imagine that Putin doesn't want these talks to go ahead, and he's doing everything he can to talk p do them because he just
doesn't want peace. And in fact, Donald Trump briefed European leaders some days ago and it was leaked that he had told them that he doesn't think that Putin is ready for peace because he thinks he's winning the war.
Russia, of course, has a long history of winning long ground out wars on its own territory or what it considers its territory. Do you think Russia can just grind its way to victory here and never back down?
I think Russia has the ability to do it for at least a couple more years. And probably the more important question is they can do it for longer than Ukraine can. Where is Ukraine going to get its resources from now? Obviously Trump wants Europe to step up. Europe has said they will step up in their age to Ukraine, but there are limits to that and Ukraine has a lot of manpower problems. They have fewer resources than Russia on that front. So when you're talking the long game,
there is an advantage that Russia has. Does that mean they can eventually roll across Ukraine? That is a huge question which no one can really answer, and that wouldn't be for quite a long time. But certainly the advantage is with Russia as far as time goes.
Coming up, So why doesn't Trump just walk away? Let's talk about what's on the table right now. Trump and JD. Vance brought to Ukraine an idea that America would invest in Ukraine's critical minerals, and that would involve sending American personnel to Ukraine with an implication of essentially a security guarantee that there would be Americans there and that would mean that America would be heavily invested. Zelensky was open to that. Is that still the way that this would go?
Do you think?
Well?
Zelensky was very annoyed with America firstival in the way that the Trump administration in the sense that he thought they would basically going to take it and not give enough compensation to Ukraine, that it was a violation of
sovereignty and sort of finances. Really, but I think Zelenski has come around, especially after the Oval Office blow up between Zelenskin and Trump, He's come around, I think to thinking, look, it's probably better to have American investments in these minerals because Americans will be based there as a result doing that, and that just makes it more difficult for Russia to be rolling across the border when there's American workers there. I think Zelensky has decided that there's a part of
the deal. But of course Trump has been very reluctant to give Zelensky any security guarantees as far as in the future if there is a peace deal or a ceasefly deal, and that's been one of the real sticking points for Zelensky. He says, Look, we just can't have a cease fly I deal with Russia if we've got no promise that America will come to our aid.
One of the things that Trump has been quite cavalier in talking about is the idea that Ukraine just needs to give up on the territory that Russia considers it has taken over the past several years, even before this latest round of conflicts started beginning. Of course, with Crimea, is Vladimir Zelenski ever going to give up that territory and agree that Vladimir Putin can just have it, Well, he'll.
Never admit that it's a part of Russia. That's a big thing for Zelenski. But look, I think that Trump is on the right track here in the sense that if there is going to be a ceasfar idea. It almost certainly has to be along the front line at the moment, because neither side is going to give up what they've actually got at the moment. In fact, Putin
wants to. He's annexed three regions of Ukraine, which his troops don't even control all of those regions, so he would have to step back and they would have to agree on a front line settlement. I think that is problematic, but I think it's something that is certainly doable.
Zelenski is saying now that what he wants Trump to do is impose tougher economic sanctions on Russia. Why is Trump not doing that or is that the next step?
Trump said this week that he is now definitely going to have a good look at sanctions. He's deliberately stayed away from that simply because he wants to get Vladimir Putin to the table, and so he's been so careful not to say that Russia invaded Ukraine and that was a breach of international law. All those things that Putin
did wrong when he invaded Ukraine. Trump has been out of backwards, and he's got a lot of criticism for simply not criticizing Putin, so he's deliberately stayed away from sanctions. Now he is talking about him. The great question, of course, that clear is will sanctions be able to change Putin's mind? Because people often forget that there's a lot of sanctions on Russia at the moment. Joe Biden put a lot
of sanctions on Russia. There's only so much that sanctions can do, so you can levy more and more sanctions, but it's probably being optimistic to think that sanctions alone would actually change Russia's thinking on this war.
The other thing that, of course, the United States could do is dramatically increase the support it gives to Ukraine in terms of money and in terms of the kind of weaponry that Voladimi Zelenski has wanted all along, really aggressive weapons that would allow him to take the fight to Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Is that something that could change? Do you think can?
I think that would be a very good thing for the Americans to do, because that's the only way Ukraine could actually technically win the war rather than simply hold off Russia, and that is to get long range weapons. You know, if they start lobbying weapons into Moscow, for example, that would change the calculus enormously. As you can imagine, Donald Trump isn't out a bind here. He has been critical of USA to Ukraine military aid, and so this hard for Trump now to turn around and suddenly give
a lot of military aid to Ukraine. And that's why he's been saying a that the Europeans need to step up and be the ones who provide the aid to Ukraine. And he's also tried to deal himself out of the equation by saying that it's up to Ukraine and Russia to negotiate. In other words, brackets. I Donald Trump will not be inserting myself into this peace process.
Given that big isolation is thread in America and probably in Trump's voter base, why doesn't Trump just throw Ukraine the wolves and say it's not our problem. Europe can deal with it.
This is the great dilemma, I think for the Republicans with their isolationist policy here, because he can say that, and in a way he has said it's a European problem, it's not our problem. He said that to a degree, well at the same time trying to solve the actual war. But the trouble for Donald Trump is that he wouldn't want to be the president who loses Ukraine because it would be a black mark against his legacy forevermore. And
so Trump is in a bind here. He doesn't want Putin to win, but he doesn't want to be the person who makes the conditions to make him lose.
Is there any possibility now, do you think cam that Ukraine will get its ultimate wish, which is to be welcomed into NATO, and the rest of Europe would essentially go to war with Ukraine.
I think that NATO won't be on the table for the Ukrainians because I don't think that the NATO countries in Europe want to prove folk Putin a lot more than they already have. But I think what is on the table is that you might see down that track, any cease fire would have to involve European troops peacekeepers being based in Ukraine. Otherwise it is simply a non starter.
But to actually invite Ukraine to be a part of NATO, it would be very provocative for Putin, and I'm not sure that the Europeans are ready to do that just yet.
Camerin Stewart is the Australian's chief international correspondent. You can read all the latest from the war in Ukraine and the rest of the world right now at the Australian dot com dot au