Donald Trump is hosting the war criminal Vladimir Putin at a US Air Force Base on American soil this week. It looks like he got played just as he did in Helsinki in 2018. Jonathan Lemire at the Atlantic lays out the stakes:
Putin needs to buy time to change the trajectory of the conflict. So the former KGB spymaster has given Trump something that the U.S. president has wanted for months: a one-on-one summit to discuss the end of the conflict. Trump leaped at the chance. But as the two men prepare to meet in Alaska on Friday, foreign-policy experts—and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—are warning that Trump could be walking into a trap that the Russian leader is setting on American soil.
“Putin has already won. He is the leader of a rogue state, and he’ll get a picture on U.S. soil with the president of the United States,” John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, told me. “Trump wants a deal. And if he can’t get one now, he may walk away from it entirely.”
Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. His demands to reach an end to hostilities remain maximalist: He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine and the European nations that have rallied to its defense.
Having promised an end to the war during his campaign, Trump, above all, is desperate for the fighting to stop, and observers fear that, as a result, he might agree to Putin’s terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. Trump has already said in recent days that Russia and Ukraine will need to “swap lands” (without specifying which ones). But it is not clear that Russia is willing to give up anything. And if Zelensky were to reject a deal, no matter how one-sided it might be, in Trump’s mind, Kyiv would suddenly be the primary obstacle to peace. That could lead Trump to once again unleash his wrath on Zelensky, with potentially disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting the war.
“Clearly Putin’s strategy is to delay and play the president: string him along, concede nothing, exclude Zelensky,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, told me. “My preeminent fear is a bad deal that Zelensky rejects, and then he becomes the bad guy, and that then Trump, once again in his classic mixture of vengeance and vanity, will turn against Ukraine.”
He’s already making it clear that he’s about to turn on Zalansky again. He said again yesterday in his press conference that Zelensky started the war by which he means that he should have immediately surrendered to the alpha-male Vlad when he invaded. He’s responsible for it because he didn’t immediately recognize the manly, manliness of his mighty superior Vladimir Putin and bow down as he should have done.
Lamire noted:
[I]f history is any indication, Putin might be able to use the summit to again curry Trump’s favor. Several times in both his first and second terms, Trump followed up a meeting or call with Putin by repeating Kremlin talking points. Most infamously, this occurred during a 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki, when I asked Trump if he believed U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. And yesterday, after Putin had signaled his interest in the summit, Trump took a swipe at Zelensky, who has strenuously objected to giving any territory to Russia and has noted that the Ukrainian constitution requires that any cession of land must be done by national vote.“I get along with Zelensky. But you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody.”
John Bolton said od Putin that he had made Trump nervous with his defiance but, “now he wants to work his KGB magic on Trump and get him back in line.”
I have no doubt that he will succeed. They’re going to have more of those “one-on-one” meetings with no notes.