Putting Donald Trump in a room alone with any world leader is a risky affair, more so when the other man is Vladimir Putin. Following a private meeting between the two men in Helsinki, the US president came out to a press conference dazzled by the Russian dictator.
When asked a question about Russia’s role in election interference back in the 2016 election, Trump openly backed America’s adversary against his own intelligence community.
Soon after the press conference, a political firestorm erupted within the US, while Trump’s top Russia adviser, Fiona Hill, said she had contemplated faking a seizure to shut the disastrous press conference down.
That was in 2018, when the stakes were high, but not extreme. This Friday, Trump and Putin will meet at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, located in Anchorage, Alaska.
Suffice to say, the lead up is concerning for anyone who wants Ukraine to survive the war.
First of all, the meeting was called and organized at the request of Putin after a visit by White House special envoy Steve Witkoff. Although there were initial reports that the White House wanted to invite Ukrainian President Zelensky to the Friday summit, Trump later confirmed that it would be a two-person meeting.
Secondly, in the run-up to the Putin talks, European leaders were frantically trying to persuade the US president not to capitulate to Putin’s demands. Despite efforts to put out joint statements supporting Ukraine, reports indicate the White House has mostly sidelined traditional allies from engaging in the diplomatic talks.
Thirdly, and most notable of all, was Trump’s press conference on Monday. Although most were focused on Trump’s DC takeover announcement, he revealed what could be coming up at the Putin summit. Setting aside the fact that Trump confused Alaska as a part of Russia, which is comfortably bad enough if any other president does it (Cough, cough, JOE BIDEN!), he claimed the Friday talks would be a "feel-out meeting. " Trump boasted he would know exactly whether a peace deal could be made within two minutes, saying either he would make a deal or let Russia keep fighting.
What’s most worrying is the terms that are already laid out for Russia to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine. As Bloomberg reports, the terms would hand Putin a diplomatic coup.
Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede its entire eastern Donbas area to Russia as well as Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014. That would require Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv, handing Russia a victory that its army couldn’t achieve militarily since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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Under the terms of the deal that officials are discussing, Russia would halt its offensive in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine along the current battlelines, the people said. They cautioned that the terms and plans of the accord were still in flux and could still change.
It’s unclear if Moscow is prepared to give up any land that it currently occupies, which includes the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.
During the Monday press briefing, Trump said, “Russia's occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We're going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.” Moments later, he warned there would be "some swapping, changes in land" between Russia and Ukraine, claiming it is for the betterment of the two countries.
If land-swapping is part of the ceasefire deal, it essentially locks in Putin’s gains after a grueling three-year invasion effort that he thought would end in three days. By allowing Putin to keep the invaded territory to himself, it is essentially rewarding him for conducting an illegal war and giving the green light to do it again.
In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, which led to the Minsk Agreement in the following year. From 2015 until February 2022, it was billed as the “only path on which peace can be built,” and look where it brought us instead.
At this point, the best possible outcome is for Trump to go into the meeting and then walk away with no deal in hand, including any land-swapping initiatives.
However, we can expect the worst. Putin has a long history of toying and playing with Trump, and he knows how desperate the US president is after promising to end the war once he is inaugurated, in the first 24 hours of his presidency, in the first 100 days of his second term, and so on.
Worst-case scenario? Trump agrees with Putin’s war narrative, agrees to more severe demands of land concessions from Kyiv, drops all sanctions targeting Russia’s already weakening economy, and halts military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukrainian officials.
Zelensky has rejected Russia’s proposal for Ukraine to withdraw from the entire eastern region of Donetsk in exchange for a ceasefire deal, arguing, “For Russians, Donbas is a springboard for a future new offensive.” However, reporting from outlets like the Telegraph suggested Ukraine is softening its position to allow ceding territory currently occupied by Russia to the invading nation. Inside Kyiv, the mood is bleak, as the Kyiv Independent reports.
"It's not entirely clear what happens next," a source in the President's Office told the Kyiv Independent. "But it's clear that we're about to be a little bit sold out."
Earlier in the day, in a closed-door meeting with journalists, attended by the Kyiv Independent, President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed cautious about the upcoming meeting in Anchorage.
"Meaningful and productive talks about us without us won't work," Zelensky said. "I don't know what they (the U.S. and Russia) will talk about without us. Probably, they have their own bilateral track."
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Merezhko fears that the worst case is Trump and Putin cutting a deal behind Ukraine's back, leaving Kyiv powerless and pinning it down to the fact of the agreement between Washington and Moscow.
"He (Trump) is now operating and negotiating within a framework not set by America or its national interests, but by Putin," Merezhko said.
"Putin will try to convince Trump to adopt his point of view so that it becomes a joint demand of both Trump and Putin. Then Putin will attempt to have Trump blame Ukraine, if it does not agree, for derailing the process and see Ukraine as an obstacle to at least achieving a ceasefire," he added.
All of this is giving vibes of what happened with the Munich Agreement in 1938. A leader of a democratic country falsely believes that accepting territorial “land-swaps” and demands of an authoritarian will create “peace in our time,” but later became the prime example of why countries should not appease dictators.
It is possible that the Anchorage meeting could turn out less damaging than expected, but nobody is going to bet on it.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-170841813/comment/144879665
“The main difference: Chamberlain wasn’t working for and/or being blackmailed by Hitler.”