Appeasement In Anchorage

You may think Trump got rolled by Putin in Anchorage. But I think it was appeasement (giving someone whatever they want to end a problem). Red carpet for Putin? Why? Putin is a mass murderer. Everybody knows Putin never keeps his word, he only understands strength. This what I think happened, and how it will play out. Putin got Trump to go along with a land for peace deal because Trump wants out of Ukraine badly, and Trump was willing to throw Ukraine under the bus to do it (Sudetenland). and then tells Trump all he has to do is to get Zelensky to go along with it, with Putin knowing Z has said he will never go along with land for peace (because Russia would just attack in a few years to finish the job). So, Trump bullies Z into a bad deal. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. How disappointing of Trump, he just wants out at any cost, it reminds me of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich. PG 4 CGR

Update, 8-17-25, it was just announced that half a dozen European leaders will be with Z in the WH, and Z said today Land For Peace Is Impossible!!!!

Trump Rolled Out the Red Carpet for Putin. He Got Little in Return.

Story by Lara Seligman, Thomas Grove, Meridith McGraw WSJ

ANCHORAGE, Alaska—President Trump welcomed his Russian counterpart to Alaska with the former showman’s signature extravagance: a red carpet, a military flyover and a ride in the presidential limousine.

But Trump headed back to Washington with little to show for all the pageantry.

The U.S. president and Russian leader Vladimir Putin ended their highly anticipated meeting without announcing a breakthrough, leaving the path toward ending the war in Ukraine unclear. By Friday evening, Trump, who had taken a risk in inviting the sanctioned Kremlin leader to the U.S., was stuck in the same predicament he faced days prior: Putin remains unwilling to end the 3½-year war without concessions on Ukraine’s future.

Both men staked their political reputations on a successful summit, and Putin appears to have gained the upper hand. The Russian president was treated as an equal on U.S. soil, managed to sidestep any potential American sanctions for now and announced no battlefield concessions. Trump, who vowed on the campaign trail to end the war on his first day in office, failed to secure even a temporary cease-fire.

The site of a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine.© Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

Early Saturday morning, Trump dropped his previous demand for a cease-fire, writing on social media that the best way to end the war is “to go directly to a Peace Agreement.” That strategy echoes Putin’s preferred approach and would allow the fighting to continue until a deal is reached.

WBTrump said he would meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Monday. He told European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One that he is more willing than before for the U.S. to provide direct security guarantees to Ukraine, according to people familiar with the content of the conversation.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump told reporters at a news conference after the summit. The typically talkative U.S. president took no questions from the dozens of journalists assembled before him. He said the delegations made progress on key issues, but added, “We haven’t quite got there.”

Putin, in remarks following the meeting, gave no indication he was prepared to agree to a cease-fire, repeating that Moscow wanted the root causes of the conflict addressed—a phrase that refers to Moscow’s demands to demilitarize Kyiv and block its hopes for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Russian leader, however, offered Trump a political fig leaf, echoing the U.S. president’s assertion that Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if the Republican was in office instead of former President Joe Biden. “I can confirm that,” Putin said.

In contrast to the handshakes and smiles that characterized the start of their meeting on the taxiway at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Putin and Trump looked stone-faced during much of the news conference. Putin spoke for roughly eight minutes. Trump then spoke for three minutes, before they both left.

Following the summit, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, said she was “cautiously optimistic” that some progress was made, despite few public details.

The meeting underscored the challenge of bringing the conflict to an end. Even as the delegations met, Russian military forces launched new attacks targeting Ukraine’s eastern regions, according to the Ukrainian air force.

In an interview with Fox News after Friday’s summit, Trump said he would hold off for now on imposing new sanctions on Russia. “We don’t have to think about that right now, I think, you know the meeting went very well,” he said, adding that he may reassess whether sanctions are needed in two to three weeks. Asked by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity if the war would end with Russia gaining more territory and Ukraine getting security support, Trump said: “Those are points that we negotiated, and those are points that we largely have agreed on.”

Trump, in the interview, offered advice to Zelensky: “Make a deal.”

“Russia is a very big power, and they’re not,” Trump said of Ukraine.

Even before the meeting officially began, Putin, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and largely snubbed on the world stage, racked up a series of symbolic wins.

Trump waited onboard Air Force One for 30 minutes before the Russian president’s plane touched down. The U.S. president greeted his Russian counterpart warmly, applauding as he walked down a red carpet and shook his hand. After posing for photos, both men got into the U.S. president’s armored limousine, known as the Beast, giving Putin the one-on-one time with Trump that some of the American president’s advisers sought to avoid.

Photographers caught the Russian leader smiling as he sat next to Trump in the limo. It isn’t unusual for an American president to invite a foreign leader for an intimate ride in the president’s motorcade. But Putin has repeatedly thumbed his nose at Trump’s calls to stop the war in Ukraine, which has killed or injured more than a million people on both sides.

“Flattery doesn’t work to change Putin’s mind. He sees it as weakness,” said Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official during Trump’s first term. “And therefore something to be exploited.”

Trump’s reception of Putin was markedly different from the way the U.S. president treated Zelensky during a February visit to the Oval Office. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated the Ukrainian president for not, in their view, showing sufficient gratitude for U.S. support in the war. Relations between Trump and Zelensky have subsequently improved.

Trump, a former reality-television star who focuses intently on stage-managing his public events, also sent a message to Putin about America’s military might. Trump and Putin walked down a red carpet flanked on either side by F-22 stealth fighters and, as the two leaders stepped onto a riser with the words “ALASKA 2025,” a nuclear-capable B-2 bomber and four F-35 jet fighters roared overhead.

Russian and American delegations in Alaska.© Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

The apparent absence of any binding steps for the Russian side to follow out of the meeting gives Putin a chance to continue prosecuting his war in Ukraine, where Russian troops are gaining crucial footholds in the eastern part of the country.

Putin’s broader goal of trying to put Russia on an equal footing with the U.S., however, was already achieved just by clinching the meeting, particularly in Alaska, which Russia sold to the U.S. in 1867.

“This meeting elevates Russia in some ways to an equal status to the United States, which is what he has craved,” said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former top State Department official on European affairs.

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, wrote on Telegram that the meeting signaled to the media a shift in relations between Moscow and Washington. “For three years, they have been reporting that Russia is in isolation, and today they saw the red carpet laid to greet the Russian president in the United States,” she wrote.

In the days leading up to the summit, Trump played down the prospects for a breakthrough, calling his first face-to-face meeting with Putin in six years a “feel-out meeting.” He didn’t rule out the possibility the talks could fail, and he said he was prepared to walk away entirely if Putin refused to work toward peace.

The summit was initially set to begin with a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin, but it was expanded to include top advisers from each delegation at the U.S. president’s request. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff represented the American delegation, while Putin was joined by Yuri Ushakov, his longtime foreign-policy adviser, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

While Trump and Putin have spoken several times in the last six months, the meeting in Anchorage was the first time they met in person since the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.