Russian officials and state media took a triumphant tone Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump jettisoned three years of U.S. policy and announced he would likely meet soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a peace deal in the almost three-year war in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday he will not accept any agreements about Ukraine that do not include his country in talks. Trump’s change of tack seemed to identify Putin as the only player that matters in ending the fighting and looked set to sideline Zelenskyy, as well as European governments, in any peace negotiations. The Ukrainian leader recently described that prospect as “very dangerous.” Putin has been ostracized by the West since Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion of its neighbor, and in 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader for war crimes. Here’s a look at some reactions to Wednesday’s events. Russia rejoices at Putin’s spotlight role “To us, the position of the current (U.S.) administration is much more appealing,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. Russian officials and state-backed media appeared triumphant after Wednesday’s call between Trump and Putin that lasted more than an hour. “The presidents of Russia and the U.S. have talked at last. This is very important in and of itself,” the deputy chair of Russia’s National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said in an online statement. Senior lawmaker Alexei Pushkov said that the call “will go down in the history of world politics and diplomacy.” “I am sure that in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris and London they are now reading Trump’s lengthy statement on his conversation with Putin with horror and cannot believe their eyes,” Pushkov wrote on his messaging app. Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti said in an opinion column: “The U.S. finally hurt Zelenskyy for real,” adding that Trump had found “common ground” with Putin. “This means that the formula ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ — a sacred cow for Zelenskyy, the European Union and the previous U.S. administration — no longer exists. Moreover, the opinion of Kyiv and Brussels (the European Union) is of no interest to Trump at all,” it added. Russian popular pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda went even further and published a column stating in the headline that “Trump signed Zelenskyy’s death sentence.” “The myth of Russia as a ‘pariah’ in global politics, carefully inflated by Western propaganda, has burst with a bang,” the column said. Zelenskyy won’t accept a deal without consultation In his first comments to journalists since Trump held individual calls first with Putin and then Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian leader said the main thing was to “not allow everything to go according to Putin’s plan.” “We cannot accept it, as an independent country, any agreements (made) without us. I articulate this very clearly to our partners –- any bilateral negotiations about Ukraine, not on other topics, but any bilateral talks about Ukraine without us –- we will not accept,” Zelenskyy said as he visited a nuclear power station in western Ukraine. Zelenskyy said during his conversation with Trump on Wednesday, the U.S. president told him he wanted to speak to both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders at the same time. “He never mentioned in a conversation that Putin and Russia was a priority. We, today, trust these words. For us it […]