No Zelensky, no Brussels, no problem: Here’s how Putin and Trump’s Alaska power move will play out
The Russia-US summit could reshape the Ukraine war – and leave Europe watching from the sidelines
By Dmitry Suslov

 

On Friday, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will meet in Alaska. This will be the first full-scale Russia-US summit since June 2021 in Geneva, and the first official visit by a Russian president to American soil since Dmitry Medvedev’s trip in 2010 at the height of the “reset.”

It will also be the first time the leaders of Russia and the US have met in Alaska, the closest US state to Russia, separated only by the narrow Bering Strait, and once part of the Russian Empire. The symbolism is obvious: as far as possible from Ukraine and Western Europe, but as close as possible to Russia. And neither Zelensky nor the EU’s top brass will be in the room.

The message could not be clearer – Moscow and Washington will make the key decisions on Ukraine, then inform others later. As Trump has said, “they hold all the cards.”

From Geneva to Alaska: A shift in tone

The Alaska summit marks a sharp departure from the Biden years, when even the idea of such a meeting was unthinkable and Washington’s priority was isolating Russia. Now, not only will Putin travel to Alaska, but Trump is already planning a return visit to Russia.

Moderate optimism surrounds the meeting. Summits of this type are rarely held “just to talk”; they usually cap a long process of behind-the-scenes negotiations. The idea for this one emerged after three hours of talks in Moscow on August 6 between Putin and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff. Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov described Washington’s offer as “very acceptable.” That suggests Putin and Trump will arrive in Alaska with a preliminary deal – or at least a framework for a truce – already in place.

Why Trump needs this

Trump has good reason to want the summit to succeed. His effort to squeeze Moscow by pushing China and India to stop buying Russian oil has backfired badly. Far from isolating Russia, it triggered the worst US-India crisis in 25 years and drove New Delhi even closer to Moscow. It also encouraged a thaw between India and China, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi now set to attend the SCO summit in Tianjin.

BRICS, which Trump has openly vowed to weaken, has only grown more cohesive. The Alaska summit is Trump’s chance to escape the trap he built for himself – trying to pressure Moscow through Beijing and New Delhi – and to show results on Ukraine that he can sell as a diplomatic victory.

Why Russia does too

For Moscow, a successful summit would be a powerful demonstration that talk of “isolation” is obsolete – even in the West. It would cement Russia’s standing with the “global majority” and highlight Western Europe’s diminished influence. The transatlantic split would widen, weakening Brussels’ claim to be Russia’s toughest opponent.

Most importantly, Washington today has little real leverage over Russia, especially on Ukraine. If the summit yields a joint Russian–American vision for a truce or settlement, it will inevitably reflect Moscow’s position more than Kiev’s or Brussels’. And if the Western Europeans try to derail it, the US could pull the plug on all aid to Ukraine – including intelligence support – accelerating Kiev’s defeat.

Resistance at home and abroad

Not everyone in Russia is cheering. Many prominent “Z”-aligned war correspondents see the war as unfinished and oppose any truce. But they have been asked to stick to the official line. If the Alaska meeting produces a deal, they will be expected to back it – or at least use “cooling” language for their audiences. The Kremlin is betting it can manage this dissent.

Western Europe, for its part, will be watching from the sidelines. Its leaders are “scrambling” for scraps of information via secondary channels. The optics will underline a humiliating reality: for the first time in almost a century, decisions about Europe’s security will be made without the likes of Italy, France and Germany in the room.

Beyond Ukraine

The location hints at other agenda items. Arctic economic cooperation, largely frozen since 2014, could be revived. Both sides stand to gain from joint development in the far north, and a deal here would be politically symbolic – proof that the two countries can work together despite the baggage of the last decade.

Arms control will also be on the table. Moscow’s recent decision to end its unilateral moratorium on deploying intermediate-range missiles was almost certainly timed to influence the talks. Strategic stability after the New START Treaty expires in February 2026 will be a central concern.

The stakes

If Alaska delivers, it could reshape the conflict in Ukraine and the broader Russia-US relationship. A joint settlement plan would marginalize Kiev and Brussels, shift the diplomatic center of gravity back to Moscow and Washington, and reopen channels for cooperation on global issues – from the Arctic to arms control.

If it fails – if Trump bends to last-minute EU pressure – Moscow will continue fighting, confident that US involvement will fade. Either way, Russia’s position is stronger than it was two years ago.

What’s different now is that the two powers with “all the cards” are finally back at the same table – and Western Europe is on the outside looking in.

https://www.rt.com/russia/622859-why-both-sides-want-succeed/

 

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

The Problem of Ukrainian Nationalist Nostalgia
Uncritically glorifying Ukraine’s troubled past isn’t just wrong—it’s counterproductive.

 

BY Ben Sixsmith

 

There has been no shortage of provocative flags being displayed at the National Stadium in Warsaw. The building, after all, has played host to all kinds of domestic and international football rivalries.

A flag displayed at a concert of the Belarusian rapper Max Korzh, though, has provoked a different kind of controversy. One member of the crowd held up the red-and-black flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). 

This would have been a bad idea anywhere—but it was especially bad in the heart of the Polish capital.

 

The UPA was formed in the early 1940s to fight against the Nazis and the Soviets. At the same time, though, it persecuted Poles living on the Polish–Ukrainian border. In his magisterial book God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Norman Davies writes about how the Ukrainian nationalists “seized the opportunity…to eliminate the Poles”:

Armed gangs toured the towns and the villages, usually at night, burning Polish homesteads, slaughtering Polish men, women, and children without mercy, murdering Catholic priests, forcing the remnants to flee, and terrorising all non-compliant Ukrainians.

Davies’s estimate that the victims “must be numbered in the hundreds of thousands” is controversial, but tens of thousands of victims have been individually documented. Even the founder of the UPA was appalled by the massacres. In his paper “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army: Unwelcome Elements of an Identity Project,” the historian John-Paul Himka quotes the Ukrainian nationalist leader Taras Bulba-Borovets as saying,

 

The “hatchet men,” to their shame, butcher and hang defenceless women and children ... We must take into account that England will surely win this war, and it will treat these “hatchet men” and lynchers and incendiaries as agents in the service of Hitlerite cannibalism, not as honest fighters for their freedom, not as state-builders.

Bulba-Borovets’s wife was murdered by more hardline Ukrainian nationalists. These militants, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), were led by a man named Stepan Bandera. In the 1930s, amid disputes over Polish and Ukrainian territory, Bandera had been jailed for his part in the assassination of the Polish Minister of Interior Bronisław Pieracki. “Millions of victims [had] to be sacrificed” for the sake of the Ukrainian cause, claimed Bandera. 

During the war, Bandera worked with the Nazis to pursue his goals, with the OUN proclaiming that Hitler was “forming a new order in Europe” before dedicating itself to pursuing “a sovereign and united State and a new order in the whole world.” While his involvement in atrocities was limited by the fact that the cautious Nazis had detained him, they were very much enacted in the spirit of his “national revolution.” He never condemned them.

 

Still, many Ukrainians celebrate Bandera and his men. Marches honour them. Soldiers brandish their flag. This is a cause of understandable outrage in Poland. Polish politicians have protested when Bandera has been commemorated in the Ukrainian Parliament—and when, perhaps even more insultingly, the UPA’s flag has decorated vehicles supplied by the Poles. 

Such controversies have also erupted within Poland, even before Max Korzh’s concert. In 2022, Polish police officers removed a UPA flag from a Wrocław balcony. It had allegedly been hung there by a Ukrainian migrant. Last month, a memorial to the victims of the UPA’s massacres, which had been erected in the Polish village of Domostawa, was vandalized with a painting of the UPA’s flag, though the perpetrators have yet to be caught.

Exacerbating Polish resentment has been the peculiar intransigence of the Ukrainian authorities when it has come to permitting the exhumation of Polish graves in Ukraine. Granted, the Ukrainians allowing Polish archaeologists to begin exhuming graves near Lviv this spring was a welcome step forwards.

It would be childish not to understand why Ukrainians might find it difficult to accept criticism of men who fought and died for their country. It would also be small-minded not to understand why Ukrainians might find it hard to think about people who died in the Second World War while their compatriots are being killed today. Finally, it is opportunistic in the extreme for Vladimir Putin to use the specter of “Banderites” to excuse his invasion when he engages in his own Second World War revisionism—as well, of course, as when his soldiers are carrying out war crimes. 

That there is some extent to which we can understand many Ukrainians’ mistake in glorifying the UPA, though, by no means prevents it from being a mistake. Most importantly, it is a moral mistake—obscuring vast and systematic injustice in the name of their own cause. Additionally, it is a practical mistake. Poland led the way in supporting the Ukrainians—militarily and in humanitarian terms. To celebrate the killers of their forebears is a good way to exacerbate the recent decline in support.

It would be an appalling shame for the self-indulgence of a minority of the most stubborn or blinkered Ukrainian nationalists to sever links between peoples who have both faced such horrendous oppression. Certainly, it must be hard for the Ukrainians to address their past while coping with such dangers in the present. But this is no excuse for waving the symbols of murderers in the faces of their victims’ descendants.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-problem-of-ukrainian-nationalist-nostalgia/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.