“Ukraine – Russia”

“The only way to reach a deal on anything, whether it’s in business or in politics or in geopolitics, the only way to reach a deal is for each side to get something and each side to give something,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on August 17.

Rubio, talking about the war in Ukraine, completely missed the fundamental issue: Should the United States be trying to reach a deal in the first place?

If Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, as urged by President Trump, he will come face-to-face with a man he has spent 3½ years excoriating as an illegitimate leader and puppet.

Negotiating directly with Zelensky would run sharply counter to the narrative Putin has carefully constructed and sold to Russians in an effort to justify his 2022 invasion of Ukraine: that the war is part of a broader conflict with the West in which Zelensky and his country are mere pawns.

Trump’s call for a meeting puts Putin in a bind. If he declines, he risks angering the U.S. president, who has already threatened him with more sanctions. But sitting down with Zelensky could damage him politically with the Russian elite and the broader public.

Trump’s strategy is clear

There are many more ways in which a peace process can fail than succeed. But for either to happen, it first needs to start. And that is often the most difficult step. But after his big summit in the White House, Donald Trump seems to have pulled off the unthinkable: a summit has been organised between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky which would kick-start peace negotiations.

What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.

Would Trump walk away if Ukraine were to violate terms of a peace deal?

President Trump ruled out sending US military forces to Ukraine as part of any US security guarantees to the war-torn nation, but suggested he would provide some form of air protection.

Trump insisted that the American public has “my assurance” when pressed in an interview on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning that there “won’t be American boots on the ground defending that border” in Ukraine.

“Well, you have my assurance,” the president replied. “I’m president and I’m just trying to stop people from being killed.”

The optics could not have been more different this time.

Unlike the shockingly ill-tempered previous meeting in February, US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed determined not to look confrontational – despite their remaining differences.

Zelensky wore a collared suit (although not of the classical variety), and Trump complimented his attire. The Ukrainian president also repeatedly said “thank you”, which must have pleased his host, too.

In the end, the great Anchorage face-off was a muddled affair. But whatever Presidents Putin and Trump did or didn’t agree about the fate of Ukraine over nearly three hours of talks, one thing remains clear: Europe wasn’t in the room.

Sir Keir Starmer and other European leaders were reassured by Trump’s Alaska statement that the US is prepared to give security guarantees as part of a peace deal in Ukraine. The prime minister called this “important progress” and “crucial in deterring Putin from coming back for more”.

But the underlying trend remains: America’s uncoupling from European security continues and it is increasingly apparent that if Europe wishes to be the master of its own fate, it will need to completely transform its approach to defending itself.

Whatever happened in the Trump-Putin meeting, just after this column was written, we are finally getting close to the only satisfactory end to the awful Ukraine war. President Donald Trump deserves credit for being the only western statesman who audibly made the point that the West had two objectives in this war. Of course, Russia could not be permitted to occupy and reabsorb Ukraine. If it had done so, it would in one stroke have regained the largest single piece of what it had lost in its total defeat in the Cold War, which caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of international communism, (and the realignment of the left of the world as spontaneous environmental militants attacking capitalism from a new angle in the name of saving the planet). Ukraine is next to Russia itself the largest and most strategically important component of the former USSR. Apart from being a strategic disaster and a terrible injustice to Ukraine, the Russian conquest of Ukraine would have exposed the Western Alliance as a paper tiger that no aggressive state need take seriously.

And just like that, the highly-anticipated summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska has been and gone, seemingly without very much at all to show for it. The two presidents met in Anchorage yesterday for what Trump had touted as a ‘feel-out’ meeting to lay the groundwork for negotiations to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. But despite Trump rating the tête-à-tête a ten out of ten – ‘in the sense that we got along great’ – on substance, the American president has come away with little to prove that Putin is any closer to stopping his invasion.

Can Trump dictate a “peace”?

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says he has spoken with US President Donald Trump, as well as other world leaders, following Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

Zelensky has also confirmed that he will meet with Trump in Washington on Monday.

Posting on Telegram, Zelensky said he had spoken with Trump for about an hour one-on-one, before European leaders joined for another half hour.

Writing on Telegram, he said, “We support President Trump’s proposal for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, America and Russia. Ukraine emphasizes that key issues can be discussed at the level of leaders, and the trilateral format is suitable for this.

‘Next time in Moscow?’: Five takeaways after Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit

The high-stakes meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin was billed as a vital step towards peace in the Ukraine war.

But with no ceasefire and an invitation to Moscow, the almost three-hour meeting between the two leaders has yielded more questions than answers.

Here are five key takeaways from the Alaska summit.

Dishonoured nations turn violent

Humiliation on the battlefield is one of the most reliable catalysts for an ultranationalist backlash. From the Freikorps in Germany to Russian “violence merchants” — the embittered veterans of the Afghan War and the brutal conflicts of the Nineties — rage, criminality, and organised violence have a habit of spilling back into society when wars end in dishonour. Disappointed, traumatised troops return home with the conviction that only force can redeem the nation, spreading chaos and revanchist politics as they go. And, if Vladimir Putin manages to draw Donald Trump into agreeing to a one-sided peace deal that will reward his war of aggression and leave thousands of Ukrainians stranded under a brutal Russian occupation, history could yet repeat itself in Kyiv.