There are two sets of talks going on at the moment. In one set, Europe is trying to help its ally bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine with a “just peace”, retaining as much of its land as it can and extracting as much money to rebuild its wrecked economy as it can.

In the other set of talks, US President Donald Trump is talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine plays a very minor role.

Since taking office, Trump has cut off all financial aid and stopped weapons deliveries. The only weapons that are being delivered, such as this week’s deal to supply thousands of Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) missiles worth over $800mn has only been possible as Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway will pay for them. The US contribution to this deal? To book the mark-up it says it's charging on all weapons sales for Ukraine.

He has made plenty of threats, but he has given Russia “another two weeks” four times this year after making these threats. The Trump administration has imposed no new sanctions or duties on Russia since he became president. Even on Liberation Day when all of America’s trade partners got a minimum 10% duty, Russia was assigned 0%.

Based on his actions, the only reason Trump seems to be participating in the Ukraine peace deal at all, apart from his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize, is that it gives him leverage over Putin.

For his part, Putin is happy to parley. He has little to lose. If the talks don’t come off, he is winning on the battlefield and Europe has neither the money nor the materiel to force him out of Ukraine without US help. If the talks do come off then he will get most of what he has demanded, including significant sanctions relief and he has already effectively broken up the unipolar world order that he has been complaining about since his Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech in 2007.

The conversation between the two leaders is on-going and friendly. Trump has consistently backed Putin’s position when drawing up his compromises. In his first big push to “broker” a ceasefire, the seven-point “final offer” peace plan presented in April was pretty consistent with most of Putin’s key demands, including giving up sovereignty over the five occupied regions and significant sanctions relief. That was rejected out of hand by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his European allies.

Now more details are trickling out of the conversation that Trump and Putin had in Anchorage during the Alaska summit on August 15 and it includes several important items that have little to do with Ukraine. One detail is that they talked about oil and gas details, apparently preparing the way for ExxonMobil to return to the Sakhalin-1 oil project worth billions of dollars to the company. Putin signed off on a decree to make that easier the next day and it has been revealed that the company’s management has already had a secret meeting with the Kremlin earlier this year to work out a blueprint for its return.

Business obviously plays a big part in the largely unspoken Trump agenda. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund Kirill Dmitriev has participated in all the main meetings since the start, despite having zero diplomatic experience, and said after the first meeting in Riyadh in February that he was conducting “a parallel track” of negotiations on business. His counter party, Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, has an almost identical profile to Dmitriev. Witkoff has been heavily criticised for also having zero foreign policy experience, but both men are fund managers, both are experts on the Middle East where they have both done a lot of business and know a lot of the same people. Witkoff has shown himself to be a useless diplomat, but as an interlocutor for Dmitriev on business, he is perfect.

Another detail slipped out this week. Putin and Trump also talked about restarting some of the Cold War-era missile agreements. This is another topic that has little to do with Ukraine and is not amongst the agenda items in the current negotiations on providing Ukraine with security guarantees. But it is a topic close to Putin’s heart and Trump has also expressed what appears to be a genuine interest in reducing the number of nuclear missiles the world has. It appears as if the two will make a serious effort to extend the START missile treaty again when it expires next February.

This is bad news for Kyiv as it suggests he doesn’t care about ending the conflict in Ukraine and that he sees Europe as irrelevant. The big guns of French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer make a lot of bluster, but the bottom line is the EU have been entirely excluded from the ceasefire talks chain so far. Trump is going through the motions because he has to, but when it came to delivering on EU demands at the Alaska summit on August 15, he said no to almost everything.

Trump has conceded that he will “help” Europe with its security guarantees arrangement, but explicitly said no US troops will be involved and what they will get is maybe some satellite intelligence without which the Nato-made missiles won’t work. US Secretary for Defence Pete Hegseth said this week, the US won’t even provide that despite the $825mn ERAM deal which completely relies on US satellite data to work.

Another key EU demand to provide a “backstop” to any security guarantee that the EU signed with Kyiv also got a flat “no” from Trump. Starmer says Europe security deals won’t work without this assurance. Trump is leading Europe up the garden path, while he continues his negotiations with Putin.

“[European leaders] contend that they have been able to get in Trump’s ear and, through the Jedi mind trick of sucking up to him, bend some of his most problematic instincts,” editor-in-chief of Carnegie’s Comments Rym Momtaz wrote in a recent commentary for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“And yet, the overall picture emerging eight months into Trump’s second presidency confirms that on Ukraine and on trade, he is not on the same team as the Europeans.”

Unlike Europe, Trump is not interested in getting a just and lasting peace deal for Ukraine. He is just interested in getting a deal so that he can start the process of rolling back sanctions and setting up companies. The only leverage the EU has over Trump, as he discovered in April when he tried to force his final offer on Zelenskiy, is that the US can’t roll back the sanctions without Europe’s cooperation. But that is not enough leverage for Europe to be able to force any of their demands on the White House.

The upshot is that Europe has become increasingly irrelevant as it is forced to roll over to Trump's demands, just as the leading BRICS countries are standing up to Trump and winning. India and Brazil have both been hit with big tariff increases they are trying to wiggle out of and China has gotten off largely scot-free. Trump’s aggressive action against the BRICS is only likely to drive the members closer together into the increasingly powerful BRICS bloc that has emerged in recent years.

“Instead of finally conquering their naive discomfort with the language of power.. [European leaders] are leaning hard into appeasement and toadying,” says Momtaz. “They call it pragmatism but, compared with how China or India have handled Trump, Brussels and a few European capitals are signalling to their international interlocutors that they are not first-tier players. Not even on trade.”

The truth is that over the last six months there have been two sets of negotiations going on: a public one to try and stop the killing in the wheat fields of the Donbas with a ceasefire; and a secret one where the Trump team are trying to do some big business deals to tap Russia’s cornucopia of raw material riches.

In the new economic paradigm of Trump’s transactional world, who cares about Ukrainian sovereignty? For Trump it's all about Making America Great Again and putting America First and everyone else last.