Two weeks after the historic summit meeting between American President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin at an American military base in Anchorage, Alaska, the apparent progress towards the convening of direct negotiations between Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to end the war in Ukraine has stalled, despite Trump’s highly public efforts to encourage both sides to sit down and work out their differences, either with or without an interim ceasefire to halt the deadly fighting on the ground in Ukraine.
In comments to reporters Monday in the Oval Office during the visit of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, Trump blamed the refusal of the Russians to agree to the first Putin-Zelensky meeting that Trump has proposed to get peace negotiations started on Putin’s personal dislike for the Ukrainian president. “He doesn’t like him,” Trump said of Putin in an effort to explain the reason why his efforts to start a face-to-face dialogue between the Russian leader and Zelensky have bogged down after Trump’s encouraging meeting with Putin in Anchorage on August 15, during which Trump said he believed that Putin shared Trump’s desire to end the continuing bloodshed.
Trump has repeatedly said that his top priority is to stop the fighting, which has led to a weekly casualty count of more than five thousand dead and wounded, as soon as possible. The war in Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition, characterized by bitter World War I-style static, trench warfare on the ground, in addition to massive ongoing Russian missile and drone attacks, which have inflicted widespread destruction and civilian casualties across Ukraine.
After three and a half years of fighting in Ukraine, the total casualty count has now exceeded a total of more than 1 million soldiers on both sides. The staggering death toll is largely due to the Russian army’s tactic of repeatedly launching human wave attacks, regardless of the huge number of casualties that the Russian troops suffer from the stubborn resistance put up by the outnumbered and outgunned, but well-fortified Ukrainian defenders.
Zelensky’s stubborn and courageous leadership in the face of Putin’s raw military aggression has won Ukraine extensive military and economic support from both the United States, especially under President Biden, and its European allies, who realize that they are on Putin’s list of future invasion targets once Ukraine has been vanquished. The American and European support has enabled Ukraine to continue to withstand repeated Russian attacks and hold its defensive lines, especially in Ukraine’s strategic eastern Donbas region. This has frustrated Putin’s efforts to conquer and absorb Ukraine as the first step in his announced intention to rebuild the Soviet-era Russian empire in Eastern Europe.
THE UNEXPECTED THREE-YEAR STANDOFF
When Putin first ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine in February 2022, practically everyone, including President Joe Biden, anticipated the rapid defeat of Ukraine’s defenses followed quickly by the collapse of Zelensky’s government in a matter of a few days at most. No one at that time would have believed that Ukraine would be able to fight off the Russian army for more than three years.
Russian forces have been concentrating their attacks all year long on Ukraine’s well-established fortifications safeguarding the cities in the last 2,500 square miles of the Donbas that Ukraine still controls, in the northern part of the Donetsk region. The fighting there has resulted in very heavy casualties on both sides, but little movement in the battle lines, in part because of the widespread use by both sides of surveillance and attack drones that have made all troop movements near the front lines very difficult and dangerous.
A few weeks ago, an attack by a small group of Russian soldiers on foot reportedly managed to outflank the Ukrainian defenders of the embattled Donbas city of Pokrovsk and advance by a few hundred yards. However, arriving Ukrainian reinforcements were eventually able to push the Russians back and stabilize their front lines, leaving the military and strategic situation on the battlefield still deadlocked.
PUTIN DOESN’T CARE HOW MANY RUSSIAN SOLDIERS GET KILLED
In a New York Times interview, Ukrainian Colonel Dmytro Palisa, who commands a Mechanized Brigade defending Pofrovsk, said that “He [Putin] doesn’t care how many Russian soldiers die or how much equipment is lost. What matters to him now is to seize as much of the Donetsk region as possible. This, in turn, could have a negative consequence for us, because it would force us to enter any negotiations from a weaker position.”
Trump had hoped that his meeting with Putin in Alaska, followed just three days later by a meeting Trump hosted in the Oval Office with Zelensky and more than a half dozen other leaders of American allies in Europe who have pledged their support for Ukraine would lead to rapid progress toward a negotiated settlement of the war in Ukraine involving territorial swaps between the two sides and credible security guarantees for Ukraine against the possibility of another Russian attack.
Trump had previously said he believed that Putin had agreed in Anchorage to a face-to-face meeting with the Ukrainian president, and that the planning for that meeting was actively “underway.” But the Kremlin never confirmed any such commitment by Putin to a meeting with Zelensky, with or without Trump’s presence and participation.
Now those hopes for serious peace negotiations, possibly starting with a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine, have been dashed, first by Putin deliberately dragging his feet on making arrangements for the proposed sit-down with Zelensky, and second by comments over the weekend from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He made it clear that Putin will only agree to meet with Zelensky to discuss an end to the fighting in Ukraine based on the full acceptance of Russia’s terms, which would amount to a Ukrainian surrender.
In a televised interview with NBC News that was recorded late last week, Lavrov said that “Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda is ready for a summit, [but] this agenda is not [yet] ready at all.”
He also said that Russia would oppose the stationing of troops from any NATO member country on the ground in Ukraine, as part of any proposed international peacekeeping force. He also demanded that Russian troops be part of any such force, and for it to be under the control of the U.N. Security Council, even though such arrangements would clearly be unacceptable to any independent Ukrainian government.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has reiterated its demand that any peace agreement include the return of an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children who were abducted and deported to Russia from the parts of Ukraine that the Russian army conquered during the first months of the war. In 2023, the International Criminal Court in the Hague issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest for committing the war crime of ordering the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.
TRUMP NOW VOICING FRESH DOUBTS ABOUT PUTIN’S SINCERITY
In his Oval Office comments on Monday, President Trump conceded that whether or not the meeting he has proposed between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia will take place is “going to be up to them.” He reiterated that he thought that “they should meet,” but also conceded he didn’t “know that they would meet.”
“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. . . I said ‘You guys ought to work it out. It’s between you. It’s not [up to] us,’” Trump said.
Trump also warned that there could be “very big consequences” if Russia continued refusing to come to the negotiating table and threatened to “step in” if nothing happened to break the diplomatic deadlock in the coming two weeks.
Putin personally requested the summit meeting with Trump in Anchorage shortly after Trump announced that he was imposing a punitive tariff on India for its continued purchase of large quantities of Russian oil, which has been helping Putin to finance the Russian war in Ukraine, despite the punitive European and American sanctions on the Russian economy.
Before the Anchorage summit, Trump had also threatened to impose fresh sanctions on the Russian economy and to exclude its banks and companies from conducting financial transactions with the U.S.-run international banking system if the fighting in Ukraine continued. However, despite Putin’s foot-dragging since the Anchorage summit, Trump has yet to follow through on those threats.
Trump indicated that he had been speaking to Putin following his meeting last week with European leaders, including Zelensky, in an effort to convince the Russian leader to participate in the peace summit that Trump was proposing. But without providing any details of their latest conversation, Trump admitted that he found talking to Putin to be a frustrating experience.
“Every conversation I have with him is a good conversation. And then, unfortunately, a [Russian] bomb is loaded up into Kyiv or someplace [else in Ukraine], and then I get very angry about it,” Trump said.
TRUMP STILL REFUSING TO GIVE UP ON ENDING THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Still, Trump said he was optimistic that “we’re going to get the war done.”
Trump also said that he had spoken to Putin about other issues, including a possible new nuclear-arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia.
“We would like to denuclearize. It’s too much power, and we talked about that also. That’s part of it, but [first] we have to get the war [in Ukraine to be] over,” Trump said.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Zelensky has said that he expects to unveil the security guarantees for any peace agreement with Russia that would be backed by commitments from the U.S. and its European partners “in the coming days.”
“At present, the teams of Ukraine, the United States, and European partners are working on the architecture of those guarantees,” Zelensky said in a social media post.
While Trump admitted that he was no longer certain that the meeting between Putin and Zelensky that he had proposed would ever actually take place, during a televised interview with NBC News late last week, Vice President JD Vance reiterated his belief that administration efforts to broker a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia could still succeed, despite the recent lack of progress. Vance also added, hopefully, that the Trump administration believes “we’ve already seen some significant concessions from both sides, just in the last few weeks.”
ZELENSKY AND THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE HAVE MENDED THEIR FENCES
Vance was far more respectful of Ukraine’s prerogatives during his NBC News interview than he was during a heated televised Oval Office meeting in February, when Trump ripped into Zelensky, and the vice president demanded that the Ukrainian president show more respect and gratitude for Trump’s peacemaking efforts.
“I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said at the time. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
When NBC host reporter Kristen Welker asked Vance if he thinks the Russians were just stringing Trump along, playing for time while the Russian army steps up their attacks on Ukrainian positions in the Donbas region, Vance responded, “No, not at all. I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in 3½ years of this conflict. They’ve actually been willing to be flexible on some of their core demands,” Vance said, without revealing any further details.
Trump has also continued to insist that Putin is ready for peace, even as the Russian dictator has continued his bombardment of Ukraine. Putin also continues to demand that Kyiv make sweeping, painful territorial concessions to stop the war, including giving up the strategic territory in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which has been serving as an effective barrier to further Russian military advances. Putin’s demands have remained largely unchanged since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.
WHAT WILL SECURITY GUARANTEES FOR UKRAINE LOOK LIKE?
When the leaders of seven European nations joined Zelensky in the Oval Office meeting with Trump last week, they appeared to be encouraged by Trump’s offer to have the U.S. play a significant but undefined supporting role in the new security guarantees for Ukraine, despite any objections that Putin might raise. However, Trump ruled out stationing any U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine, and he was also deliberately vague about what exactly he would offer Ukraine to bolster its defense as part of any larger peace deal with Russia. Presumably, that would include the superior U.S. capabilities in the areas of air support, intelligence, and logistics that none of its European allies can match.
On the other hand, the leaders of France, Britain, and Estonia have said that they would be willing to supply their own troops as a peacekeeping force on the ground in Ukraine once a peace agreement has been reached.
Back in early 2024, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron began calling for the deployment of a mostly European military force that would number about 15,000 troops to provide Ukraine with “Article 5-like” security protection to enforce any peace or ceasefire agreement that is eventually reached with Russia.
But the level of security protection that such a force would provide to Ukraine would stop short of the guarantee provided to each of the 28 countries in the NATO alliance. Under Article 5 of the NATO charter, the U.S. and its nuclear arsenal would automatically be committed to protecting any other NATO member in response to another Ukraine-style Russian ground invasion.
ZELENSKY AND EUROPEANS ON THEIR BEST BEHAVIOR IN THE WHITE HOUSE
In last week’s Oval Office meeting with Trump, Zelensky and the seven European leaders were much more mindful of Trump’s feelings than Zelensky had been during his February White House meeting.
The European leaders, one by one, carefully lavished praise on President Donald Trump’s leadership and peacemaking efforts, while Zelensky was careful to upgrade his wardrobe so as to avoid being criticized by Trump for not being properly dressed, as happened during the February meeting. The Ukrainian president also expressed his gratitude for U.S. help for Ukraine since the Russian invasion 11 times in under five minutes during last week’s Oval Office meeting.
As a result, by the end of that meeting, Zelensky and the other European leaders appeared to be relieved by Trump’s declaration, reassuring them that during his conversations with Putin, he did not make any unilateral concessions to Russia on behalf of Ukraine.
On the other hand, several foreign affairs experts, including Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, expressed disappointment that Trump’s summit meeting with Putin in Anchorage generated so little real progress towards an agreement to end the fighting in Ukraine, despite all of the hype and media attention that it generated. Bergmann was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “It reminds me a little bit of when I go to the playground with my kids and I spin them around on a merry-go-round. There’s a lot of movement. You get a little sick. It’s dizzying. And then you end up at exactly the same place you started.”
PUTIN CONVINCED TRUMP TO DROP HIS CEASEFIRE DEMAND
Trump went into his meeting with Putin demanding a ceasefire and warning of “severe consequences” if the Russian leader did not agree to one. But Trump came out of the meeting with Putin saying that a ceasefire would not be necessary. “It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often do not hold up,” Trump wrote on social media.
However, it is hard to imagine that Zelensky would be willing to meet with Putin while hundreds of deadly Russian missiles and drones are still raining down on Ukraine’s civilian population centers, causing random death and destruction.
Trump also claimed that during their summit meeting in Anchorage, Putin had agreed to the “very significant step” of accepting security guarantees for Ukraine, including the possibility that European countries could put “boots on the ground” there. Trump’s special envoy and chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, went so far as to call Putin’s agreement to security guarantees for Ukraine a “game-changing” move in which Russia would allow the United States and Europe to offer “Article 5-like protection” to Ukraine — in a reference to the collective defense clause in NATO’s charter that stipulates that any attack on any NATO member country will be treated as an attack on all of them, including the United States.
But after the initial surge of optimism following the Anchorage meeting subsided, it became clear that Russia has not budged from its prior insistence that it be granted a veto over any security guarantees involving the presence of troops from any NATO member on Ukrainian soil, which would render the security guarantee worthless.
A UKRAINIAN WITHDRAWAL WILL MAKE PUTIN’S NEXT INVASION EASIER
Nor has Russia backed down from its demand that Ukraine surrender the strategically important territory it still controls in the Donbas region. Any such withdrawal would enable the Russians to reposition their troops inside Ukraine’s most well-fortified defensive lines. That would leave the rest of Ukraine open and largely defenseless against another Russian invasion sometime in the future, when Putin feels strong enough to try it again.
Yet Trump still appears to be operating on the assumption that he can bring Putin around on the strength of their personal relationship. At last week’s White House meeting with European leaders, a hot mic captured Trump telling French President Emmanuel Macron: “I think he [Putin still] wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds.”
But by the end of the week, Trump sounded less confident that his rapport with Putin would be strong enough to make the face-to-face peacemaking meeting with Zelensky actually happen, as Trump acknowledged how little progress had actually been made toward that goal.
Trump is now trying to lower expectations for a peace deal that would end the war in Ukraine, in sharp contrast to his repeated promise during last year’s presidential campaign to bring peace to Ukraine if he wins the election “within 24 hours.”
At the end of last week, Trump described the openly hostile relationship between Putin and Zelensky as being “like oil and vinegar a little bit.” He also acknowledged that making peace between the two hadn’t turned out to be as simple as he had expected. “This one I felt would have been in the middle of the pack in terms of difficulty. [But] it’s turning out to be the most difficult,” he said.
WILL TRUMP COMMIT TO UKRAINE OR WALK AWAY?
Trump and his military advisors are also well aware that even with the support of seven European nations that will be buying U.S.-made weapons for Ukraine’s use against the Russian army, Ukraine simply doesn’t have enough manpower to win an extended war of attrition against Russia. Trump has said once again that within two weeks, he will be forced to make a difficult choice, either to commit the United States to Ukraine’s survival or to walk away, allowing Russia to grind its way to a victory on the battlefield through the exhaustion of Ukraine’s army.
“Not choosing [either option],” James Lindsay, a senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained, “eventually becomes a choice in and of itself.”
Eric S. Edelman, a former ambassador and counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and David J. Kramer, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, warned in an opinion column published by the Dispatch, that, “Given that Putin has been unable to secure this [part of the Donbas] land militarily, pressuring Ukraine to willingly hand it over would be a complete farce and outrage. Not only would doing so present security risks for Ukraine, it would encourage and reward aggressor nations — say, China toward Taiwan — to seize the land of other [countries] by force,”
Meanwhile, Russia struck Ukraine with another large missile attack late last week, which targeted a U.S.-owned business on Ukrainian soil. Zelensky said that the attack, which came just three days after he met with Trump in the Oval Office, was more evidence that Russia is not really interested in any peace agreement short of surrender right now.
Vice President Vance also told the NBC reporter that he did not like that Russia hit the American business in Ukraine, but dismissed its significance as an unavoidable casualty of war. He also continued to insist that Americans should be proud “that we have a president who’s trying to stop the killing.
“We’re going to keep on doing what we have to do to bring this thing to a close,” Vance continued, but then conceded that, “I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight.”
VANCE SAYS NEW SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA ARE STILL ON THE TABLE
In his NBC interview, Vance added that new U.S. economic sanctions on Russia are not off the table, and that it will ultimately be up to Ukraine to “make the determination” over where to draw new territorial lines in any peace agreement with Russia.
The vice president also reiterated that although the United States wants to bring the war in Ukraine to a close, the Trump administration is not going to force anything on Ukraine, “because it’s not our country.”
Meanwhile, in Kyiv last Sunday, which was Ukraine’s Independence Day, Zelensky addressed the nation and vowed to restore its territorial integrity.
“Ukraine will never again be forced in history to endure the shame that the Russians call a ‘compromise,’” he said. “We need a just peace.”
He also listed some of the regions of Ukraine now occupied by Russian troops, including Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, and said that “no temporary occupation” could change the fact that the land there belongs to Ukraine.
UKRAINE IS STRIKING BACK AT RUSSIA WITH ITS OWN DRONE ATTACKS
That same day, Ukraine carried out attacks using some of the advanced drones that it has been manufacturing itself against strategically important Russian energy facilities. Including an oil refinery in western Russia and a Russian port on the coast of the Gulf of Finland.
Since the start of August, Ukrainian drones have attacked eight Russian oil refineries and have done enough damage to disrupt around 10% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. This was in addition to the long-term reduction in Russian oil refinery capacity due to an earlier wave of Ukrainian drone attacks carried out during the winter months of this year. Since most of the oil facilities targeted by the Ukrainian drones serve the domestic fuel market, several areas of Russia, particularly in the Far East, have been experiencing gasoline shortages this summer in addition to a sharp spike in fuel prices due to high seasonal demand for summer vacation travel and farmers beginning to harvest their crops.
For example, Russian motorists living in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok have faced hours-long waits in line for gasoline over the past two weeks, as well as the closure of some local gas stations for a lack of supply.
Because the last Russian gasoline shortage in 2018 triggered public protests across the country, Russian government energy authorities have extended a ban that they imposed on fuel exports in August through September, in an effort to ensure sufficient domestic supplies and avoid price gouging at the pump.
Nevertheless, the Ukrainian drone attacks have not yet triggered a full-scale nationwide Russian fuel crisis because most of the oil refineries targeted are still operating, although at reduced rates, and there is enough excess refining capacity in the rest of the country to redirect fuel shipments to the most affected regions.
In the southern Russian province of Kursk, adjacent to the border, a Ukrainian-made drone targeting a nuclear power plant was shot down, but nevertheless detonated upon impact, causing a fire which was reportedly quickly extinguished, as well as damage to an auxiliary transformer. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that radiation levels near the reactor remained normal despite the drone attack.
TRUMP IS ALSO PUTTING LIMITS ON UKRAINE’S USE OF AMERICAN WEAPONS
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that this spring the Pentagon quietly imposed new restrictions on Ukraine’s ability to use its supply of American-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to attack targets deep inside Russia. For the first two years of the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration refused to supply Ukraine’s military with the missiles, which have a range of about 190 miles, for fear that Putin would view their use by Ukraine as an American-engineered escalation in the war. The number of ATACMS missiles that Biden finally approved for shipment to Ukraine last year was sharply limited, and many of them did not arrive until earlier this year, after Trump took office. Under the new Pentagon restrictions on their use, Ukraine needs to request permission for each use of the missile at targets inside Russian borders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The timing of the Wall Street Journal report was ironic because Trump made a public comment last week criticizing former President Biden for having placed heavy restrictions on Ukraine’s use of other American-made weapons against targets inside Russia. According to Trump, the Biden restrictions significantly hampered earlier efforts by Ukraine to step up the military pressure on Putin to put an end to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Trump wrote on his Truth Social account, “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invader’s country.” He also criticized Biden for limiting Ukraine’s ability to use certain American-made defensive weapons.
Reportedly, the same Pentagon permission requirements on Ukraine for the use of the ATACMS also apply to certain European-provided missile systems in Ukraine’s arsenals, including the British-made Storm Shadow long-range cruise missile, because its guidance system relies upon American-supplied intelligence for targeting information.
UKRAINE IS DEVELOPING ITS OWN WEAPONS FOR USE AGAINST RUSSIA
The restrictions that the U.S. has imposed on the longer range weapons it has delivered to Ukraine has prompted Ukraine’s government to make a major investment in the domestic development and production of weapons with similar capabilities, like the FP-1 drone and the newly introduced Flamingo cruise missile, both of which Ukraine’s leaders can use to strike deep inside Russia without having to first seek U.S. approval.
The FP-1 is Ukraine’s answer to the Shahed drones that Iran has been supplying to Russia for use in large numbers on Ukraine’s battlefields. Ukraine has stepped up the rate of domestic production of the FP-1 to thousands of units per month. While these one-way attack drones fly relatively slowly, they have been credited with doing major damage to Russian infrastructure targets while testing the limits of Russia’s air defenses.
Ukraine’s most impressive new domestically designed and produced weapon is the Flamingo cruise missile, which went into battlefield use less than nine months after it was first designed by a Kyiv-based startup defense company called Fire Point. It can carry a 2,500-pound warhead and strike targets up to 1,800 miles away. In a major breakthrough for Ukraine’s efforts to achieve military independence from foreign weapons suppliers, the Flamingo has already entered mass production with an expected output capacity of 200 units per month. Fueled by a combination of military necessity and restrictions on the use of Western-made weaponry, Ukraine is now spending around $10 billion annually to jump-start the expansion of its domestic armaments industry.
According to an interview with Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh published by Politico, the curious Flamingo name for the weapon originated from the fact that, due to an early manufacturing quirk, the first test missiles to be produced were all pink in color. Fire Point executives also emphasized that, in addition to being entirely Ukrainian-made, the Flamingo is also highly resistant to jamming from current Russian electronic warfare systems.
U.S. SELLING UKRAINE 3,350 LONG-RANGE U.S. GUIDED BOMBS
In addition, the Trump administration has recently approved the sale of 3,350 U.S.-made air-launched standoff missiles known as the ERAM (Extended Range Attack Munitions), which have the added advantages of being relatively cheap and quick to produce. The ERAM order is said to cost a total of $850 million, most of which will be paid for by Ukraine’s European allies under the recent agreement with President Trump. The first deliveries of the ERAM weapons to Ukraine are expected in about six weeks.
The weapons, which have a range of between 150-280 miles, can strike targets relatively deep within Russia. They pack an explosive punch equivalent to a 500-lb. bomb and can be launched by several different types of planes being flown by Ukraine’s air force, including Soviet-era MiG-29s, Su-25s, and Su-27s, as well as the American-made F-16s, which have been donated to Ukraine by various NATO countries as they are replaced by newly arrived U.S.-made F-35 stealth warplanes.
For diplomatic reasons, the Pentagon’s announcement of the sale of the ERAMs to Ukraine was delayed until after President Trump’s summit meetings with Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
PUTIN WON’T STOP THE WAR BECAUSE HE BELIEVES HE IS WINNING
Meanwhile, it has become apparent that any hopes for a quick peace settlement in Ukraine in the wake of the August 15 meeting between Trump and Putin in Anchorage have been dashed by Putin’s unreasonable peace demands. Putin clearly believes that he is winning the war of attrition with Ukraine, whose army is now clearly exhausted, despite the recent pledges of increased military support for Ukraine from seven European heads of state.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that in any conceivable peace agreement with Russia, despite the vehement denials from Zelensky, Ukraine will ultimately be forced to give up at least some of the roughly 20% of its territory that it has lost to Russia in battle, probably starting with the Crimean Peninsula, which Putin invaded and then annexed to Russia back in 2014
ONLY TRUMP CAN STOP THE FIGHTING
The only real threat to Putin that might convince him to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine short of total victory and the replacement of Kyiv’s independent government was the warning issued by Donald Trump last month that, without at least an agreement on a ceasefire in Ukraine, he was prepared to declare economic rather than military war on Russia. Trump said that he would impose punitive secondary economic sanctions on any country, starting with India, that was buying large quantities of embargoed Russian oil, whose proceeds Putin has been using to finance his war in Ukraine, and to cut off the access of all Russian banks and corporations to the international banking system which is controlled by the United States, further isolating Russia’s already struggling economy.
Getting Trump to back off from that threat was Putin’s main motive for proposing the August 15 summit meeting in Anchorage. At the summit, Putin was able to massage Trump’s ego well enough to convince him to put that threat back on the shelf, at least for now. But less than two weeks later, it has become apparent, even to Trump, that Putin is not yet ready to order his troops in Ukraine to stand down.
All Putin believes he needs to do is find a way to convince Trump and America’s European allies to walk away from Ukraine long enough to allow its stubborn defenses to collapse from the weight of its huge material and human losses after the last three and a half years of brutal warfare.
