The Russian side has revealed that during talks with the American delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this week in Riyadh, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov demanded that NATO scrap its 2008 promise to eventually give Ukraine membership in the Western military alliance.  The response to this has been positive, given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth already made clear last week that a Ukrainian path to NATO membership won’t happen and is off the table. The NY Times has summarized Trump’s ‘flipping the script’ as follows: Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a “dictator without elections” who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping. Lavrov has responded, telling lawmakers of Trump that “He is the first, and so far, in my opinion, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO.“  “No Western leaders had ever said that, but he had said it […]