Ukraine wars pivot point is now if Trump and Zelensky move fast

This week’s NATO summit in Ankara may have finally brought a breakthrough moment in President Donald Trump’s efforts to reach a stable ceasefire in Ukraine. The pivot point wasn’t Trump’s warm bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, surprising as that may have been given their fraught history.It came soon after, when Trump said he’ll permit Ukraine to produce US-licensed Patriot interceptor missiles, which Kyiv desperately needs to blunt Russia’s barbaric ballistic-missile attacks on its civilians. The Patriot offer was exactly what Putin was striving to short-circuit when he called Trump on July 4. Last October, the Russian dictator used just such a chat ahead of a Zelensky visit to the White House to successfully dissuade Trump from providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.This time around, it fell flat.Putin’s failure was evident in the chummy public exchange between Zelensky and Trump when they broke the Patriot news in Ankara.“We’ve actually developed a good relationship! Hard to believe, right? From the Oval Office to now,” Trump said, all smiles, as the Ukrainian leader sat beside him.And when Trump asked Zelensky whether he’d be willing to go to Moscow to negotiate peace, the former comedian quipped that he wasn’t sure that was possible, given Moscow’s problems with Ukrainian drones.Both chuckled. You can be sure they weren’t laughing in Moscow. Trump critics have observed for months that Putin has been playing him — rejecting a half dozen American peace proposals, all while praising the president profusely. But after Ankara, arch Russian nationalist Igor Girkin Strelkov moaned that the developments had Trump leading Putin by the nose.Ukraine’s recent breakthroughs in drone, missile and air defense technology — which has given it a clear edge in the war for the first time since its successful counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 — made the Ankara gesture possible.Its large increase in the prod...