Putin-Trump Talks Shift Focus From Ceasefire To Peace Deal

2025-08-16 03:16:50

(MENAFN- Asia Times) If you read the headlines in American and European newspapers, you would conclude that the Alaska Summit failed. It did not. Washington changed direction and abandoned its support for a ceasefire.

Here is Trump's official statement:

The summit's major outcome was that the push for a ceasefire agreement, a non-starter for the Russian side, has been taken off the table. This will come as a big shock for Zelensky and Europe, although Zelensky has already announced he will be in Washington on Monday to meet with Trump.

The agenda is an actual peace agreement, not a ceasefire. We don't know anything about the terms Trump will suggest, but it will involve territorial adjustments. Trump will try and convince Zelensky to cooperate, but it is a good bet that he won't. Nor will his backers in Europe.

Should the above prediction hold, Trump will have to figure out what to do next. He could go back to trying to squeeze the Russians with more sanctions or other punishments. But that would require yet another reversal and won't achieve anything.

The foreign policy crowd has been betting that the Russian economy is so bad that the whole Russian enterprise might collapse if the West jacks up the pressure on Russia. A good result, in this estimation, would be for Russia to surrender or for Putin's government to collapse.

Even under dire circumstances, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the ruble, with massive unemployment, shut-down factories and crazy-high inflation, Boris Yeltsin, then president, found a way forward, and Russia did not have a civil war, and government institutions started to restore their authority. Yeltsin's administration lasted eight years and was replaced by a more conservative and authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin.

It is very hard to accurately read sentiment in Russia. Generally speaking, the Russians like order and certainty, and dislike war. If there was a hard sense in the Russian public, especially the top echelons of Russian society, that the Ukraine war was a disaster, then one would expect to see evidence that this was the case.

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