Stephen Kotkin, the pre-eminent historian of Russia, on Moscow’s long record of overreach, Biden’s Ukraine failure, and prospects that Kyiv can ‘win the peace.’

By Tunku Varadarajan via Wall Street Journal

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/with-putin-ultimately-trump-holds-the-cards-history-europe-russia-ukraine-war-8fdf5771

Excerpts

Few in the West have a deeper understanding of Mr. Putin than Mr. Kotkin, 66, a historian whose monumental biography of Joseph Stalin—one of Mr. Putin’s heroes—awaits its third and final volume. Mr. Kotkin is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a professor emeritus at Princeton.

His comments shouldn’t be taken as a show of admiration for Mr. Trump. At the Aug. 15 Alaska summit—which Mr. Kotkin disdainfully calls the president’s “surrender photo-op”—Mr. Putin “evidently told Trump that Russia is going to win anyway, so let’s just hand the territories taken over to Russia and save lives in the process.” But Mr. Trump “cannot surrender Ukraine,” he says. “The Ukrainians are not going to accede to that. And Mr. Trump cannot grant Putin a sphere of influence in his neighborhood because it’s been lost for good by Putin himself.”

Mr. Kotkin is similarly scornful of Monday’s White House summit with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, which he calls the “European rescue photo-op.” Europe’s leaders are “talking about providing security guarantees. Well, if they can do that, why are they flying to the White House to ask President Trump to make them do that? They were there to beg the president to help them deliver security. There was lots of theater, melodrama, and attention on President Trump, which, of course, is what he’s after. But I don’t know what, if anything, really happened in terms of Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia.”

Speaking by Zoom from his Hoover office, he’s keen to establish that we need to grasp three truths in the “big picture” of the war in Ukraine.

The first is a “paradox that people don’t usually put together”: Although much-smaller Ukraine may be “losing a war of attrition,” Mr. Putin “made an enormous strategic blunder and is damaging Russia severely for the long term.” He has lost his country’s old sphere of influence: “All his neighbors hate him and are afraid of him.” Even Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator in fraternal neighbor Belarus, is “looking for some distance, to get out of the stranglehold of Russia.” Mr. Putin has also “lost his civilian economy.”

Second, Ukraine is “an asset, not a liability—but we don’t seem to be able to appreciate how it’s an asset, and why.” He means that “Ukraine has an army”—a serious one, unlike, say, Germany. “We’ve been able to send a lot of our weapons and test them in battlefield conditions because of Ukrainian bravery and ingenuity.” As a result, “we’ve been able to see what a 21st-century land war looks like, and we’ve been able to change our defense industrial investments at home as a result.” He adds that military aid to Ukraine is “actually going to the American defense industry.”

Third, Mr. Trump is “correct” to seek an end to the war: “I applaud his forced imposition of a negotiation process.” But the president “lacks follow-through and patience. He lacks consistency. This is a hard problem. He promised to solve it in 24 hours,” but it’s “been going on since 1783,” when Catherine the Great annexed the Khanate of Crimea. Even so, “Trump’s instincts are correct. Ukraine, more than Russia, needs this war to end. And he’s groping towards that solution.”

Mr. Kotkin warns against facile obsessions with “winning.” We talk all the time, he says, about “who’s going to win the war. But what matters is winning the peace.” In Afghanistan, America won the war and lost the peace. In Vietnam, the other way around.

What does that mean for Ukraine? Russia is a “giant neighbor, armed with nuclear weapons, willing and able to build a war machine well beyond its GDP and ostensible means, and indifferent to the loss of its own lives.” Winning the peace isn’t easy against a foe like that: “That’s the conundrum we face, and have faced from the beginning. But we haven’t faced up to it,” he says, exasperated.

In the minds of most Ukrainians and many friends of Ukraine in high places, a win must include the return of Crimea, which Russia conquered in 2014. “We’re all talking about how Ukraine needs to get Crimea back, because Russia took it by force in a violation of international law.” Mr. Kotkin says with the laugh of an unsentimental realist. “Crimea is going back to Ukraine the day after Texas goes back to Mexico.”

Then he proposes a careful-what-you-wish-for exercise, inviting me to “fantasize” that Crimea is back with Ukraine. “Then Russia has two million ethnic Russians inside the Ukrainian state, and can mount a permanent insurgency and sabotage campaign with this gigantic population to recruit from.” There’s also the threat of external force. The return of Crimea to Ukraine would “incentivize Russia to attack again tomorrow, or 20 or 30 years from now. Regaining Crimea is terrible for Ukraine winning the peace in the long term.” The West needs to understand that “what makes sense to some people in terms of a violation of norms and the stability of the international order as a whole may not make sense for the Ukrainian cause they’re advocating for.”

So how could Ukraine win the peace? Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is out of the question, if only because the U.S. opposes it. The alternative is “joining the West through accession to the European Union,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They’ll need massive domestic reforms to be able to join. But it’s a great process for bringing countries into constitutional rule-of-law, open-society, and market-economy institutions.”

The other marker of a Ukrainian win is “some type of security, which some people call ‘security guarantees’, but which looks more like the ‘steel porcupine’ approach.” This is a phrase Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, introduced in March. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen defines it as fortifying Ukraine to make it “undigestible for potential invaders.” Mr. Kotkin says it would mean helping Ukraine set up a “strong defense establishment with weapons production at home and continued financing for that from its European partners. So you get both EU accession and a version of security where Ukraine is doing most of the heavy lifting.”

A win for Mr. Putin would have grave consequences for the West, Mr. Kotkin says. The Russian dictator is “looking for the surrender of Ukraine and the surrender of the United States.” He wants to subjugate Ukraine, to “destroy it as an independent, sovereign state. But more than that, he wants to destroy the Reagan-George H.W. Bush Cold War victory.”

Mr. Putin is at an advantage, Mr. Kotkin says, because he doesn’t need “the maximalist win”—a restoration of the Soviet empire or even the Soviet Union. “He wins by wrecking Ukraine, which is hurt by the continuation of the war.” He gains merely by keeping the war going: “Putin doesn’t need Ukraine. He’s already got Russia. But Ukraine needs Ukraine. They don’t have another state. And Putin’s saying, ‘If I can’t have Ukraine, well, then nobody can have Ukraine, especially the Ukrainians.’ ”

Thus Mr. Kotkin concludes “Trump is correct. Ending the war is Ukraine’s best hope. This is the only country they have, and it’s being devastated.”

Mr. Kotkin is critical of Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy, though in a more measured way than Mr. Trump is. He says Mr. Biden “deserves credit for supporting Ukraine’s self-defense” and also for working closely with U.S. allies and partners. “But overall, the Biden strategy failed. Why? Because the argument was that we’re supporting Ukraine to put them in the best position to negotiate a more favorable settlement. But the problem was, there were never any negotiations.” The support, Mr. Kotkin laments, was “endless and pointless—there was no pathway for negotiations.”

Enter the 47th president: “He comes in. He forces the issue. Immediate negotiations!” Mr. Kotkin sums up Mr. Trump’s strategy as follows: “We’re not going to wait till Ukraine is, quote, in a better position for negotiations. We’re just going to impose an imperative that we have negotiations starting now.” This compelled Mr. Zelensky and the Ukrainians to become “more realistic about their war aims.”

The flaw in Mr. Trump’s approach “is that he didn’t put the same pressure on the other party,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He put all the pressure on the Ukrainians and, so far, next to no pressure on Putin and the Russian establishment to force the negotiations.” The result: “We’re kind of stuck. Even though Trump was correct to move away from the Biden strategy, he’s failed in part to execute a negotiation strategy where he’s built leverage with the Russian side.”

The bottom line, Mr. Kotkin says, is that there’s been insufficient pressure on Mr. Putin. “There’s been military pressure on a high level, thanks to the Ukrainians’ courage and ingenuity, but not on a scale that’s working.” Russia has a bigger army and support from China and North Korea, “which helps quite a bit.” Mr. Putin is also willing to sacrifice Russian lives: “Bleed and bleed and bleed, sending boys to their death on the battlefield in ways that most democratic countries—including a flawed democracy such as Ukraine—cannot do.” That leaves Ukraine in a war of attrition “where it counts lives and the other side doesn’t.”

Economic pressure has been severe, but oil revenue still flows to Mr. Putin, delivering a “massive cash flow that floats this war. So unless you cut off all oil revenues, your economic pressure is going to be insufficient.”

Most important, the West needs “very severe political pressure on Putin’s regime, and that comes in the form of alternatives to his rule.” Many prominent Russians “feel that Russia is on a self-defeating trajectory right now.” These are nationalists; “they are not democrats, they’re authoritarians. They don’t look like the kind of Russian opposition we might associate with in terms of values. They have no sympathy for Ukraine, but they have a lot of sympathy for Russia, and they feel that an end to the war would help Russia regain the civilian economy that it’s lost.” U.S. and European intelligence agencies are “recruiting them inside. We know who they are.”

These sentiments, Mr. Kotkin says, are widespread in the Russian establishment, and even in the armed forces, and became visible with the public comments of retired Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, who in February 2022 accused Mr. Putin of engaging in “a criminal policy of provoking war” and urged him to resign. “Obviously sitting officers of the armed forces and security services cannot voice such public sentiments,” Mr. Kotkin says. “The vast increase during the war in cases brought for alleged treason indirectly testifies to the existence of the sentiments, and the regime’s knowledge and fear of them.”

Mr. Kotkin believes Mr. Trump should make an offer to these patriotic Russians “in exchange for retrenchment, defined as an end to the aggression against Ukraine and a turn to focusing on developing Russia, its people and economy, for the future.” If Mr. Putin refuses a deal, “maybe President Trump can appeal to others inside Russia who would be willing to do it or urge Putin to do it. Maybe the start of a ‘political bank run,’ or the fear of it, could destabilize the regime enough to force retrenchment.” It’s a long shot, “but military and economic pressure without political pressure has not worked.”

There are other things Mr. Trump could do. These include a removal of Russia’s Gazprombank from the Swift international banking system, to which it still has tenuous access, greenlighting the confiscation of $300 billion worth of Russian deposits in European banks, getting India to “buckle” and stop buying of Russian oil, and, most audacious, “cutting a deal with Xi Jinping behind Putin’s back to reduce China’s support for Russia in a bargain between the U.S. and China. It’s thinkable.”

Of all the threats Mr. Putin faces, Mr. Kotkin says again, “none is bigger than President Trump. Putin may smirk. He may walk down that red carpet in a strut. He may joke for the camera with President Trump. But ultimately, Trump holds the cards. And if the president uses those cards, he could unsettle Putin’s smirk, his self-confidence, and his maximalist demands. Will this happen? I don’t know. But it’s there for the taking.”

by Timofey Bordachev, Program Director of the Valdai Club

History shows summits rarely change the world – but this one might prevent disaster.

The meeting between the presidents of Russia and the United States in Alaska is not an end point, but the beginning of a long journey. It will not resolve the turbulence that has gripped humanity – but it matters to everyone.

In international politics, there have been few moments when meetings between the leaders of major powers have decided questions of universal importance. This is partly because situations requiring attention at such a level are rare. We are living through one now: since the start of Russia’s military operation against Ukraine, Washington has declared its aim to be the “strategic defeat” of Russia, while Moscow has challenged the West’s monopoly over world affairs.

Another reason is practical. Leaders of the world’s most powerful states do not waste time on problems that can be solved by subordinates. And history shows that even when top-level meetings do occur, they rarely change the overall course of international politics.

It is no surprise, then, that the Alaska meeting has been compared to famous encounters from the past – notably the 1807 meeting between the Russian and French emperors on a raft in the Neman River. That summit did not prevent Napoleon from attacking Russia five years later – an act that ultimately brought about his own downfall.

Later, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Russia was the only power represented by its ruler on a regular basis. Tsar Alexander I insisted on presenting his personal vision for Europe’s political structure. It failed to win over the other great powers, who, as Henry Kissinger once noted, preferred to discuss interests rather than ideals.

History is full of high-level talks that preceded war rather than preventing it. European monarchs would meet, fail to agree, and then march their armies. Once the fighting ended, their envoys would sit down to negotiate. Everyone understood that “eternal peace” was usually just a pause before the next conflict.

The 2021 Geneva summit between Russia and the US may well be remembered in this way – as a meeting that took place on the eve of confrontation. Both sides left convinced their disputes could not be resolved at the time. In its aftermath, Kiev was armed, sanctions were readied, and Moscow accelerated military-technical preparations.

Russia’s own history offers parallels. The most famous “summit” of ancient Rus was the 971 meeting between Prince Svyatoslav and Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes, following a peace treaty. According to historian Nikolay Karamzin, they “parted as friends” – but that did not stop the Byzantines from unleashing the Pechenegs against Svyatoslav on his journey home.

In Asia, traditions were different. The status of Chinese and Japanese emperors did not permit meetings with equals; such encounters were legally and culturally impossible.

When the modern European “world order” was created – most famously in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia – it was not through grand encounters of rulers but through years of negotiations among hundreds of envoys. By then, after 30 years of war, all sides were too exhausted to continue fighting. That exhaustion made it possible to agree on a comprehensive set of rules for relations between states.

Seen in this historical light, top-level summits are exceedingly rare, and those that produce fundamental change are rarer still. The tradition of two leaders speaking on behalf of the entire global system is a product of the Cold War, when Moscow and Washington alone had the ability to destroy or save the world.

Even if Roman and Chinese emperors had met in the third century, it would not have transformed the fate of the world. The great empires of antiquity could not conquer the planet in a single war with each other. Russia – as the USSR before it – and the United States can. In the last three years, they have often stood on the brink of a path from which there would be no return. This is why Alaska matters, even if it does not yield a breakthrough.

Summits of this kind are a creation of the nuclear age. They cannot be treated as just another bilateral meeting between important states. The very fact of direct negotiations is a measure of how close or far we are from catastrophe.

The United States will arrive at the summit as the leader of a Western bloc whose members – even nuclear powers such as Britain and France – defer to Washington on strategic questions. Russia, for its part, will be watched closely by what is often called the “global majority”: dozens of states across Asia, Africa, and Latin America that resent Western dominance but cannot overturn it alone. These countries know that US mediation in local conflicts will not change the fact that the structure of that dominance remains unjust.

Could Alaska lay the foundation for a new international order? Probably not. The very concept of a fixed “order” is fading. Any order requires an enforcing power – and none exists today. The world is moving toward greater fluidity, to the frustration of those who crave neat arrangements and predictable futures.

Even if a new balance of power emerges, it will not come from one meeting. The wartime summits of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin are not a fair comparison. Those were preceded by the most destructive battles in human history.

Fortunately, we are not in that situation now. The likely outcome in Alaska is the start of a long and difficult process, rather than an immediate settlement. But it is still of fundamental importance. In today’s world, only two states possess vast nuclear arsenals capable of ending human civilization.

This alone means that the leaders of Russia and the United States have no more important duty than to speak directly to one another – especially when they are, for now, the only invincible powers at the edge of the world.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and was translated and edited by the RT team.

by Claudiu Secara

What I think is the purpose of Friday’s meeting between Trump and Putin is that Trump, in the name of the West, is giving Russia an ultimatum. It’s not about a ceasefire, not about a truce. It is about the most sacred of Russia’s stated claims: its claim to the status of a sovereign empire of its own.

The ceasefire is a first step. The goal is to bend Russia, little by little, forcing Russia to cross its own red lines one by one, and forcing it to accept vasality to the Western system in the new feudal-like vasality pyramid.

For Putin, calling for a temporary suspension of hostilities against the battered Ukrainian army, is no-brainer. Obviously, he can do that. But the question that comes to his mind immediately is: what’s next? Would that truce bring a return to the status quo ante?

Of course not. It will only bring more demands and more demands. The war in Ukraine is hardly about Ukraine. It is about the maverick Russia who defied the West. This war, so far, is not even seen by the Masters of the Universe as a confrontation between two powerful stand-alone sovereign states.

The West sees Putin’s actions as a rebellion by an underling. Just simple insubordination by one of its lieutenants, like Pugachev’s rebellion against the all-mighty Tsar.

The West seems like it has hardly mobilized itself, so far, to deal with one of the few remaining insubordinates. (And there are a few more, on the ‘mapamond’. Netanyahu, Orban, Maduro and that funny guy from North Korea. Oh, and Iran.)

So, what are we going to see as the outcome on Friday? More likely some form of ritual dance around the fire with no real commitments by Russia. And that will not be pleasing to the West. At best we could have a replica of the famous Munich appeasement by British PM Chamberlain in September 1938, who waved the famous piece of paper claiming to guarantee a thousand years of peace in Europe just as World War II was about to start a year later.

Hard to anticipate the immediate consequences, but in such a case, the real war is most likely coming soon. The ultimatum is: either full capitulation by Russia or all out WAR.

Washington’s next geopolitical plays in the post-Soviet space – from the Caucasus to Transnistria – threaten to widen the East-West divide

This text was originally published by the Greek media outlet NeoStrategy.gr and has been translated and edited by the RT team. [https://neostrategy.gr/meta-ti-synthikologisi-tis-armenias-i-seira-moldavias-georgias/]

All eyes may be on the scheduled meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, set for August 15 in Alaska – which is likely to be critical for Ukraine. But fears are growing that tensions between Russia and the West are far from resolved.

Recently, with American “mediation” – if not outright pressure – Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a preliminary peace agreement that went largely unnoticed in Greece. In reality, it marks Armenia’s official capitulation after its defeats in recent wars with Azerbaijan. The consensus is that the big winner is Türkiye, which has been openly backing Azerbaijan – and still is.

The peace deal, signed in Washington on August 8 with the help of Trump, is widely seen as a geopolitical win for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ankara, which supported Baku in its “blitzkrieg” in Karabakh, stands to gain the most – first and foremost by securing a direct land link to Azerbaijan via Nakhichevan. That said, the geopolitical and geoeconomic benefits for American interests are hardly smaller.

New ‘Kosovos’ in the making

Following the US-Turkish-engineered deal in the Caucasus, observers expect Washington to push similar plans elsewhere in the post-Soviet space. Georgia and Moldova top the list of likely next targets.

Both countries have their own “thorny” territories – self-declared autonomous regions, Kosovo-style, lacking international recognition and hosting Russian military bases. Kosovo itself, of course, is recognized by most of the West, though it technically still lacks full independent-state status. Notably, Greece, Romania, Cyprus, and Spain refuse to recognize it, while Serbia still considers it part of its territory.

Risky scenarios for war

The hottest flashpoint inside Europe – especially with elections in Moldova this September – is Chisinau’s ambition to “reintegrate” Transnistria.

In recent years, disputed elections have brought pro-Western governments and a pro-Western president to power in Moldova. Now, at least on paper, Chisinau could call on Kiev for help and attempt a military solution to the Transnistria question. No one can rule out such a move – especially with Russian forces largely tied down in the Ukraine conflict.

Parliamentary elections are adding to the tension. The country is split almost evenly for and against pro-Western President Maia Sandu and her PAS party. A new military adventure could serve as the perfect pretext to shift the domestic political climate – and to escalate the broader standoff between Europe and Russia.

Greece – Romania – Türkiye

If another European war were to break out – this time over Moldova – NATO member Romania would almost certainly side with Chisinau.

As Romania’s ally, Greece would face a hard choice: back Bucharest (and by extension, Moldova) or keep its distance from another European conflict? In the case of Ukraine, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government took no such distance – instead, openly declaring that Greece was “at war with Russia.”

Whatever Athens decides will depend in part on Türkiye’s stance toward this – for now – hypothetical scenario. Ankara would likely get involved indirectly, if only to boost its geopolitical influence in the region and its standing within NATO. It has done so repeatedly in recent years – in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond.

Türkiye’s and Azerbaijan’s success in Karabakh – at the expense of Armenia and Russia – has emboldened Ankara in other arenas of foreign policy. Erdogan has repeatedly stated that Türkiye will not give up “a single inch of land once Turkish soldiers have set foot on it.” History suggests those are not idle words.

Washington’s blueprint

The United States is clearly playing a bigger game across the post-Soviet geopolitical chessboard. By closing the chapter on the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in the Caucasus – a confrontation dating back to the collapse of the USSR – Washington has engineered a settlement tailored to its own strategic script. Next up are other “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union.

Georgia wants to peacefully “reintegrate” Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway territories in the Caucasus that split from Tbilisi after bloody conflicts – the first in the early 1990s, the second in 2008. They are, in effect, the “Kosovos” of the Caucasus.

In Moldova, the president and government have made deepening ties with the US and NATO a top priority. Like Kiev in years past, Chisinau sees this as its ticket to security guarantees against Moscow – and, more importantly, as its “golden opportunity” to retake Transnistria.

A Karabakh-style “blitzkrieg” would be hard to pull off against territories hosting Russian military bases. But Washington doesn’t seem in a rush – even if events are moving at a dangerously fast pace.

NATO in the wings?

It hasn’t gone unnoticed that NATO military exercises have included scenarios simulating a crisis in these “Kosovos” of Georgia and Moldova.

One telling example: Agile Spirit 2025, the 12th such exercise hosted jointly with Georgia, ran from July 25 to August 6 with participants from 13 countries – including the US, Türkiye, Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Ukraine – not counting observer nations.

Adding fuel to the speculation, online rumors claim that during joint “Fiery Shield-2025” drills with the US and Romania, which began August 4, Moldovan troops fired at targets depicting Russian soldiers.

Military ties between Greece and Romania – and between Greece and Moldova – have been strengthening. On June 26, 2025, Greece’s chief of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff, Dimitris Choupis, awarded Moldova’s deputy chief of the General Staff, Brigadier General Sergiu Cirimpei, the Medal of Merit and Honor.

Diplomatic contacts are also on the rise. Deputy Foreign Minister Charis Theocharis recently visited Moldova, adding to a string of earlier meetings.

Finally, the former US ambassador to Athens and later Biden-era deputy secretary of state for energy, Geoffrey Pyatt, has repeatedly emphasized the “Vertical Gas Corridor” – a network that would allow bidirectional flows from south to north, specifically from Greece through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Ukraine, via both existing and new European natural gas and LNG infrastructure

by Paul Craig Roberts

A couple of days ago Trump said it wasn’t worthwhile meeting with Putin, but suddenly ordered his aides to arrange a meeting with Putin in a week. The explanations we have been given for this is that Putin said Trump’s negotiator Witcoff had made an acceptable proposal. Putin’s negotiator Kirill Dmitriev declared “a historic meeting in which dialogue will prevail.” One dreamer proclaimed that Putin and Trump “may reconfigure the world order.”

These premature declarations of agreement and success have led to further romantic theorizing. One Russian commentator declared that Alaska was chosen for the historic meeting because it “so clearly embodies the spirit of neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation lost during the Cold War.” The Russian Atlanticist-Integrationists whose hearts and interests are in the West are hopeful that their declarations of bliss, even if involves Russian surrender, will prevail over Russian nationalism.

For example, Putin’s negotiator is Kirill Dmitriev, nominally a Russian, but in fact a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School–entrances into the American Establishment–who began his career at Goldman Sachs, an establishment member. He is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. His long list of honors and directorships of Russian companies is provided by the WEF. Currently he is chief of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Putin’s Special Envoy on International Economic and Investment Cooperation. Could Putin have chosen a more conflicted person to negotiate with Washington?

Among these and other highly hopeful statements, what is the reality of the situation? Does it conform to the expressed expectations?

No. As far as I can tell, Trump is headed into a “historic meeting” with his Russian counterpart and still has no idea what Putin’s position is. Trump most recently spoke of a peace deal based on a “swapping of territories,” which Zelensky’s European supporters say must be a “reciprocal” swap of territory. Zelensky’s position is that all territory must be returned to Ukraine. Putin’s position is that all territory now incorporated into the Russian Federation must be accepted as Russian by Ukraine and the West. Otherwise, Russia has to repudiate its military victories in a war that was provoked by Washington.

But the main problem with Trump’s approach is that he is thinking of the meeting in a very limited context of ending the military conflict with a land swap, whereas Putin wants a mutual security agreement with Washington and NATO that gets NATO off of Russia’s borders. The war that Putin wants to end is the West’s hostility toward Moscow. The war in Ukraine Russia can take care off.

Putin’s objective is a highly desirable goal, because the worsening provocations of Moscow will eventually result in nuclear war. But how realistic is Putin’s goal?

I would say it is not realistic.

First, the Wolfowitz Doctrine is in the way. The Wolfowitz doctrine declares the principal goal of US foreign policy to be to prevent the rise of any power that can serve as a constraint on American unilateralism. The neoconservatives who originated this doctrine are still very influential in US policy-making circles. No US president or Secretary of State has repudiated this doctrine. Trump himself recently declared the policy when he said “I rule America and the world.” That is a hegemonic statement.

Indeed, the current military conflict in Ukraine is entirely the product of Washington’s hegemonic foreign policy. Washington orchestrated the “Maidan Revolution” in order to overthrow a Russian-friendly democratic government and to install a Russophobic puppet. The puppet government then attacked the people in the Russian territories of Ukraine until they forced a Russian intervention after the West used the Minsk Agreement to deceive Putin and after the West refused the Kremlin’s request for a mutual security agreement during December 2021-February 2022. At this point Putin was forced to intervene in order to prevent the slaughter of the Russians in the independent Donbas republics by a large Ukrainian army trained and equipped by Washington. If Putin had had the foresight to accept the Donbas republics’ request in 2014 to be reunited with Russia like Crimea, the war would have been avoided. But Putin, badly advised, confused a defense of Russian people with a provocation to the West. In 2014 the Atlanticists-Integrationists, whose interests are in the West, not in Russia, still intended for the Kremlin to crawl on its belly back into Western acceptance by being a good subject of Washington’s hegemonic rule..

The entire point of Washington’s orchestrated conflict in Ukraine was to destabilize Russia. Has Washington abandoned this policy goal?

Second, there is the interest of the US military/security complex. The power and profit of the military/security complex depends on having enemies. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the creation of the “Muslim Threat” used to sustain the military/security’s profits and powers with Washington’s 21st century wars that destroyed, so far, five Muslim countries, while supporting with money, weapons, and diplomatic cover Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and Washington is now being aligned with Israel to destroy Iran. A few days ago President Trump bragged that he had negotiated a deal with the EU to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of US weapons to send to Ukraine. What happens to this deal if peace comes to Ukraine? How does the military/security complex see the loss of its Russian enemy? Has Trump promised them an Iranian war and/or a war with China as replacements?

Third, if Trump favors peace with Russia, why did he just reinstall in Europe the US intermediate-range nuclear missiles that President Reagan had removed, and in addition deploy two submarines with nuclear missiles closer to Russia?

More importantly, why has Washington suddenly struck a massive blow against Russia, China, and Iran in the South Caucasus by obtaining for 99 years the Zangezur Corridor that runs along Iran’s northern borders with Armenia and Azerbaijan? This move by the Trump regime is a strike at the heart of China’s New Silk Road, BRICS, and Russia’s influence in former Soviet provinces, and it completes Washington’s encirclement of Iran. Washington is opening more points of military confrontation with Russia and its allies while Russia backs away, thereby inviting more provocations

This audacious Washington strike against Russia, Iran, and China should shatter the Russian illusion that a mutual security agreement is obtainable with Washington. Washington has made a decisive move against three powers which indicates Washington’s seriousness about its hegemony.

Russian commentators downplay the loss of the corridor as they fight to keep reality out of their hopes that Russia will become part of the West.

Before Putin goes to Alaska, Putin should ask Dmitrive how Washington’s takeover of the Zangezur corridor fits in with the “acceptable American proposal” about Ukraine.

And someone, if there is anyone, should ask Putin, XI, and the Iranians why they were yet again asleep at the switch.

Will Putin also be asleep at the switch in Alaska, lulled into illusionary dreams by the likes of Dmitrive?

In his two masterful histories, The First World War and The Origins of the Second World War, A.J.P. Taylor explains the triumph of delusion over reality when governments are confronted with conflict. We are watching it again in our time.