Though Zelenskyy has noisily rejected that at every turn, what really worries many of his supporters is that Ukraine will be forced to hand over these lands without the appropriate “security guarantees” from its allies, perhaps in the form of peacekeeper deployments in the hope of deterring Putin from simply regrouping to launch his next aggression.

“The angst is that, in Trump’s desire to have some sort of deal, it’s going to be a really bad deal for Ukraine,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, an ex-commanding officer in the British Armed Forces, told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday. “This seems to be a deal between the gangster and the real estate mogul. But actually the real people involved, who should be involved, are not.”

The Europeans issued their statement Sunday after being hosted by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy at his official residence in Chevening, a 17th century mansion set in a sprawling estate southwest of London. But Lammy’s main guest over the weekend was Vice President JD Vance, who stopped by before the European guests while on vacation in the United Kingdom with his family.

Vance and Lammy shared a perhaps unlikely connection — given their right and left politics, respectively — bonding over fishing and their shared working-class roots and Christian faith.

But in an interview with Fox News, the vice president, a longtime skeptic of America’s support of Ukraine, made the geopolitical differences clear.

“We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” he said. “Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money and tax dollars to this particular conflict. If the Europeans want to step up and buy weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that,” he added. “If you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a direct and more substantial” role.

That is a much more hard-line way of stating what Trump has already pledged himself: that the United States is willing to get weapons to Ukraine but only if European allies pay for them.

The flurry of diplomacy aside, it is still the case that Russia and Ukraine remain diametrically opposed in what they want from peace talks. As well as more Ukrainian land, Russia wants a promise that Ukraine will neuter its army and never join NATO, something its critics say would make Kyiv a vassal of Moscow.

Ukraine wants mainly to survive as a nation and stop the hemorrhaging of people and resources it has been forced to commit to in fighting off its attacker.