Alaska’s summit “Munich” was not new, but it might be “New Yalta” | Russia’s war of Ukraine

These days, the Russian army faces difficulty in registering any great successes. Its soldiers face tension in Ukraine, they die on hundreds, and sometimes they only advance a few hundred meters or not at all.

On the diplomatic front, however, the situation is different. Russian President Vladimir Putin won a great diplomatic victory by holding a summit with US President Donald Trump.

In the joint base Elsind-Richardson in Alaska, everything was Bonhomie. Trump clapped as Putin clashed his way to the red carpet to get a handshake before Trump accompanied him to his presidential Limott while the Russian leader smiled like a Chechere cat. The two came away from their meeting nearly three hours without saying much. Both talked about an agreement on a set of matters. Putin called Trump to Moscow, who was currently involved.

Few has yet leaked what Putin and Trump discussed. The Russian leader sought a proposal in his statements to the media that the talks were on his conditions, which raised the security concerns of Russia and praised his American counterpart for his attempt to “understand the history” of the conflict.

According to the Russian ambassador to the United States, Alexander Darchiv, regardless of Ukraine, there were some concrete bilateral issues that were discussed. he Claim Two major diplomats were raised: “The return of six Russian diplomatic real estate was the confiscation of reality” during the administration of former US President Joe Biden and “Restoring Direct Air traffic” between Russia and the United States.

Trump, for his part, appears to have dropped the demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine – something he called publicly before the summit. Instead, he agreed to request the Kremlin request for a complete settlement of the conflict instead of the ceasefire on Ukraine and its European allies. Later, it was posted on the social media platform, Truth Social, that the European Union and Ukraine agreed with it that “the best way to end the terrible war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to the peace agreement.”

Although Trump seemed to take the Russian position in the ceasefire, the worst possible result of the summit was still avoiding it. The meeting did not turn to “New Munich”, where Trump was just satisfied with Putin like French and British leaders Adolf Hitler at a meeting in the German city in 1938 by agreeing to the German seizure of part of Czechoslovakia. The American president did not forget the Russian regional demands.

However, for Putin, the summit was a tactical victory because it was broadcasting to the world that the US President himself was starting from the assumption that the Kremlin gained due to his unilateral invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent war crimes that referred to it. The Russian president was treated as a “superpower” leader – a situation that has long been obsessed with Russia’s return to – who had to negotiate with his conditions.

So, where does all of this leave Ukraine and its European allies?

Trump is clearly unwilling to change his position on Ukraine. Putin – his personality and ruling style – admires greatly.

But Brussels, London and Kiev cannot abandon it. The truth is that the continuous support of the United States is indispensable for Ukraine to maintain its defense. Europe has moved to capture more financing because Trump opened for his second period, but its military capabilities and supply chains in the defense industry cannot replace US chains anytime soon, even if they have increased investments significantly.

Trump wants peace by name and is interested in detail. For Kyiv, the details are very survival, and for the rest of Europe, the fate of Ukraine is the ability to be the next goal of Putin’s aggression in his balanced geographical world.

This does not mean that there is no way to transform Trump. There is – Ukraine and Europe that can use a page or two of Putin’s playing book in dealing with the American president.

It is clear that Trump loves the ego to be beaten, which Putin has repeatedly done in his statements on the media, echoing, for example, Trump’s claim that if he was president in 2022, the war will not occur in Ukraine.

Continuous diplomatic participation is the way forward, as it seeks to change the framework in which Trump sees the Ukrainian conflict.

The US President is interested in the future of US energy exports, American competition with China, and its challenge to US economic dominance and the exploitation of the Arctic more than he does in Ukraine. Trump’s choice was to host the meeting in Alaska, after all, and his obsession with Greenland – the strange thing for European allies in the United States – is more logical in this context.

The key is to persuade the American president that Russia is a threat to Washington’s interests in all these matters.

Sanctions can be seen liquefied natural gas projects (LNG) in the market and controls the price of liquefied natural gas exports. Putin reshaped Russia’s economy to rely on mineral exports to China, which enhances his economically competition thanks to cheap inputs. Putin has also repeatedly sought to push Beijing to be more assertive in economic competition by inviting it to empty the dollar and pay new business frameworks and funding that excludes the United States. Russia hopes to control the Arctic by expanding its fleet in the Arctic with ice sweepers and new nuclear energy submarines.

For Putin, his war in Ukraine was never at the lines of Donbas or his oppression supported by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a war to reshape the world. On the other hand, Trump sees the war as distraction and withdrawn his own efforts to reshape the world.

Only if Kyiv and the broader West understand Trump’s approach, can they convince him of what is at stake. They should focus on how Putin painful American interests and depicts Trump. If they fail to do this, while Alaska may have proven that she is not “New Munich”, her legacy may be one of the “new Yalta” in which the future of Europe should be formed through new exclusive areas of influence that Moscow and Washington drew.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.