Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his pre-match assessment of how his bilateral meeting with his Russian counterpart will play out was bullish.
“We’re going to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin,” he told a news conference at the White House. “And at the end of that meeting – probably in the first two minutes – I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made. Cos that’s what I do – I make deals.”
It’s typical Trump: boastful, bereft of meaning and utterly unconvincing.
On Friday, when Trump welcomes the Russian president to talks in Alaska, like a python eyeing a particularly plump suckling piglet, Putin will squeeze the spirit out of him, and then eat him for breakfast, as he has on each and every occasion when this tragically unevenly matched pair have had cause to interact.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s equally hapless envoy, has already served as an amuse-bouche for the predatory Putin. The cunning and ruthless former KGB officer will soon get the better of this hapless real estate bumbler, too – because the central fact about Trump is hiding in plain sight and requires no detailed psychological profiling: The guy’s all over the place.
When Trump heads to Alaska – he actually said he was going to Russia, but it makes no difference – we should be very, very nervous. It’s strange, in a way, because Trump has indicated in recent weeks that he’s “disappointed” with Putin, and suspects he’s being played – but he refuses to be “done” with him.
The White House correspondent was right to ask Trump how he would “probably” know whether a deal was possible within 120 seconds, hardly enough time for Trump to get the bottle of mineral water open. Does Trump really possess some infallible supernatural power that can sense how the immediate future will unfold? If so, where is the evidence for this extraordinary gift?
Certainly not in the mixed success he has had in business. Let us not dwell on the two supposed breakthrough summits with Kim Jong-un, which failed to deliver on Trump’s bizarre desire to build another golf resort, on the North Korean coast.
The last Trump-Putin summit, in 2018, in then-neutral Finland, was marked by the grotesque spectacle of the American president deriding his own intelligence services in favour of taking the word of the Russian leader. There was no Russian interference in American elections, Trump declared: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
When the wilfully naive Trump had one-to-one talks with the Russian strongman, they were accompanied only by a Russian interpreter. Trump got nothing out of Putin on the crisis in Syria, was persuaded that the Russian secret service could interview their own spies caught by the Americans, and at the end of the summit no agreements were announced.
Such was the spectacle that there was much talk of the Russians having Kompromat – dirt – on Trump. The Russian dictator was even asked about it; he joked about what American businessmen get up to in Moscow. Given the pressure he is coming under for refusing to release the so-called Epstein files, Trump might be a distracted man as he negotiates Ukraine’s freedom away.
In other words, it is Putin who understands the art of the deal. He knows what he wants, and he knows he cannot lose. He has already won the propaganda prize of transforming himself from the pariah leader of a rogue state into looking like a co-equal partner of the United States, carving Europe into spheres of influence as Stalin and Roosevelt once did. Then, as now, the smaller nations, and even the British represented by Winston Churchill, had to accept the fait accompli arrived at by Russia and America.
It is no surprise that, in the peace process, President Zelensky, President Macron, Chancellor Merz and Keir Starmer will play but a minor part, if any.
For all the speculation ahead of the meeting, we all know how it will play out. Putin will demand that most, if not all, of the eastern provinces of Ukraine, plus Crimea, become de facto parts of Russia. There will only be a ceasefire if this precondition is met by Trump, secretly or openly. In return, Zelensky might be offered the return of a bit of the Black Sea coast – “oceanside prime real estate”, in Trump-speak. Trump will bully Zelensky into accepting this easy Russian win.
If Zelensky or the Ukrainian people reject the “deal”, Trump will abandon them. Putin can then get on with his slow but unrelenting offensives and, eventually, the Russian meat-grinder will prevail. Ukraine will be extinguished, Putin will be ready for his next meal, and America might just wake up and realise what the hell is going on, even if Trump remains in denial.
Either way – deal or no deal in Alaska – Putin ends up with a lot of Ukrainian territory.
