Brutal WSJ story. But rings 100% true.
“Russia Has High Hopes for Trump-Putin Summit. Peace Isn’t One of Them.”
“Expectations in Russia are running high ahead of Friday’s planned summit between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and President Trump.
Moscow sees an opening to reset relations with Washington, with Kremlin officials hinting at the potential for deals with the U.S. on infrastructure and energy in the Arctic and beyond, as Russia’s state media plays up what it bills as a looming entente between two equal great powers.
“Neocons and other warmongers won’t be smiling” when the two leaders meet, said senior Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev. “The Putin-Trump dialogue will bring hope, peace and global security.”
Though the “Ukrainian question” has been declared to be the main item of the agenda, “much more important global issues” would be raised in Alaska, including ambitious plans for economic and infrastructure cooperation in the Arctic, senior Russian lawmaker Sergey Gavrilov said.
Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia’s foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that “settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.”
Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.
But when it comes to Ukraine, where Europe’s bloodiest war in generations has raged for more than three years, there has been little indication that Putin intends to make a meaningful compromise. The Russian president’s offer, as relayed by Witkoff, is a cease-fire if Kyiv agrees to give up territory—including major urban areas that Russian forces have been unable to capture.
Western diplomats and Russian analysts say that Putin thinks he is winning on the battlefield and that his original goal of replacing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet regime in Kyiv might finally be within reach now that Washington has stopped paying for Ukrainian weapons.
“To avoid having a clash with Trump, he may agree to secondary concessions—but he won’t end the war,” predicts Russian political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who now lives abroad and is a critic of the Kremlin.
“The ideal scenario for Putin would be to divorce the issue of relations with America from the issue of Ukraine, hoping that other political and economic matters would make Ukraine of little relevance to Trump,” Gallyamov said.
The very fact of the summit with Trump—and in the U.S., no less—is already a win for Putin, helping restore the international standing of a man treated as a pariah in much of the West and facing an arrest warrant on war-crimes charges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“He can say: ‘Look, you have tried to isolate me, but I am meeting with the American president while you Europeans have to crawl on your knees and call him ‘Daddy,’” said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University.
“The image of standing tall and proud on equal terms with the United States,” Radchenko said, “that’s what Russia has always wanted, and that’s what is really important to Putin.”
Trump has let his self-imposed deadline on sanctions against Russia lapse ahead of the summit, a move European diplomats fear signals to Russia that no serious additional U.S. pressure will be placed on the Kremlin whatever happens with Ukraine.
“Putin is absolutely convinced, as the General Staff continues to tell him, that with a little more pushing, the Ukrainian front will collapse,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a former adviser to Russia’s central bank.
That doesn’t mean that Russia will oppose a pause on its own terms, such as a stop to weapons supplies for Ukraine, that would make its next round of offensives easier, she said.
One possible concession in Alaska, some Moscow-based analysts indicated, would be for Putin to offer a limited cease-fire in the air, ending missile attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in Ukrainian cities in recent months. Such a move would be in Russia’s interest because Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks have caused significant damage to Russian oil refineries and military industries, while also disrupting Russian civil aviation.
Air attacks could resume once Russia stockpiled enough missiles and drones and repaired the damage.
Russian troops this summer have stepped up a ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, aiming to encircle the towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. Meanwhile, protests against attempts to curb Ukrainian anticorruption authorities have also shown widespread discontent with Zelensky.
Still, total Russian advances over the past two years account for less than 1% of Ukrainian territory. No strategic breakthroughs have been achieved, and the much-heralded Russian offensive earlier this year on the northern region of Sumy has collapsed with high losses.
The Russian proposal ahead of the Alaska summit, as relayed by Witkoff to European leaders and Ukraine, calls for Kyiv to surrender to Russia the heavily fortified northern part of the Donetsk region in exchange for a cease-fire. That is an area larger than the entire West Bank, with big industrial cities.
Zelensky has rejected the demand, saying he won’t give away Ukrainian land and pointing to Russia’s long history of violating cease-fires and diplomatic agreements. European leaders backed Kyiv, saying any territorial concessions must be reciprocal and accompanied by security guarantees.
Trump said Monday that his meeting with Putin is meant to “feel out” whether a peace deal was possible. Trump threatened to abandon the negotiations if he sensed no agreement could be made. “I’m going to go and see the parameters now,” he said. “I may leave and say, ‘Good luck,’ and that’ll be the end. I may say this is not going to be settled.”
He added that he will seek a Russian withdrawal from some occupied parts of Ukraine. They have occupied some “very prime territory,” he said. “We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”
What the Russian public has been told to expect is a Ukrainian surrender rather than a cease-fire, let alone a Russian withdrawal.
Alexander Sladkov, a top war propagandist on Russian state TV, wrote on Telegram that any cease-fire with Kyiv would last six months at most. “After that, there will be more war, with a stronger and rearmed enemy,” he said. “A victory of Russia in the special military operation is inevitable.”
Such declarations seem to reflect the dominant message on Russian TV screens. “We need to win. To win. A horrible war is under way, and it won’t end with the meeting in Alaska,” Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s top TV personalities, said in a recent broadcast.
Kirill Fedorov, a Russian military analyst, agreed. “The special military operation is a zero-sum game, and it can only be concluded with total victory,” he wrote on Telegram. “Both the Zelensky folks and the Kremlin understand that—while Trump is a 1990s businessman in a president’s chair, so he just keeps imagining deals.””
Thanks Speedo, my toes are literally curled and tingly.
Totally sounds like a “deal” 47 will jump at. As I said earlier, and this article confirms, 47 has already given Putin and Russia a major win by meeting on former Russian [ now American ] soil. Putin is out of the cold and the Russian crime families are looking forward to hoodwinking American businesses into very bad deals over rare earths, Arctic oils and other things.
The deal on Ukraine will follow suit, and more Ukrainians will die defending their country without US weapons support - as China watches eagerly from the sidelines ...
The credible threat of American secondary sanctions is influencing behavior and calculations globally. Deterrence.
Trump’s ‘Deadly Serious’ Russia Squeeze Shown in Big Tariffs on Ally India
OilPrice.com (11 Aug):
“Trump has doubled tariffs on Indian imports to 50% over New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil.
The move risks nearly 1% of India’s GDP this year but underscores U.S. determination to coordinate with the EU on sanctions to weaken Russia’s economy and deter its geopolitical ambitions.
India, alongside China and Turkey, remains a top buyer of Russian oil, and Washington is preparing similar tariff threats...
“India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits,” U.S. President Donald Trump posted last week on Truth Social. “They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.” These words directly implicate buyers of Russian oil as accomplices in the murder of tens of thousands of Ukrainian people...
...Had these words been said in 2008 when Europe continued to buy Russian oil after it attacked Georgia, or in 2014 when the continent continued to buy Russian oil after it annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region, then the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine might never have happened...
..Slightly in advance of the 8 August deadline imposed by Trump on Russia to make a peace deal with Ukraine, the U.S. doubled its tariffs on India to 50% — a rate that will come into effect on 27 August. The U.S. is India’s top export market, constituting 18% of its exports and 2.2% of its gross domestic product (GDP). Many of the country’s major exporting firms had already stated that they could not deal with the 25% tariffs, as they are too high to absorb, and passing them on to customers makes their products uncompetitive. Initial analysts’ estimates are that 50% tariffs could reduce India’s GDP by nearly 1% this year...
...according to a very senior European Union (E.U.) energy security source who spoke exclusively to OilPrice.com on the day of the new Indian tariffs announcement. “India is known as a key ally of the U.S. globally, and especially in Asia Pacific, and the thinking is that if he [Trump] is willing to do that to India, then he would be willing to do that to anyone else, and this is absolutely the case – he [Trump] is deadly serious on squeezing Russia’s economy...
...The U.S. has already warned China that ongoing imports of Russian oil could lead to huge tariffs being imposed on the country...
...The U.S. has also suggested to China that it may treat Beijing’s assistance to Russia in much the same manner as it has started to treat the same for Iran...
...“More is to come,” the very senior U.S. legal source told OilPrice.com at the time of the sanctions announcement and could include a dramatically increased list of blacklisted Chinese officials, businesses, banks, financial houses, ports, ships, and supportive infrastructure to the facilitation of Russian oil imports.”
Interesting detailed analysis. So perhaps Trump gets a hotel in Moscow, works some development deals in the high Arctic, but they leave the Ukraine situation alone. Putin can happily proceed with his fantasied conquest of Ukraine and then Europe, and Zelensky can continue with his war and the militarization of NATO and EU forces. Overall Trump win with this scenario. More thoughts after dinner, but a comment well worth more thought and evaluation.
One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in Russia's Far East, he was chaperoned from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent, who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything. “The outside world is our enemy,” the agent told him. He was put straight to work building high-rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day, he said.
All six workers we spoke to described the same punishing workdays – waking at 6am and being forced to build high-rise apartments until 2am the next morning, with just two days off a year. “Some people would leave their post to sleep in the day, or fall asleep standing up, but the supervisors would find them and beat them. It was truly like we were dying,” said another of the workers, Chan.
The escapees told us that the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the cold. One labourer, Nam, said he once fell four metres off his building site and “smashed up” his face, leaving him unable to work. Even then his supervisors would not let him leave the site to visit a hospital.
The bulk of their earnings is sent straight to the North Korean state as “loyalty fees”. The remaining fraction – usually between $100-200 (£74-£149) a month - is marked down on a ledger. The workers only receive this money when they return home – a recent tactic, experts say, to stop them running away. Once the men realise the reality of the harsh work and lack of pay, it can be shattering. Tae said he was “ashamed” when he learnt that other construction workers from central Asia were being paid five times more than him for a third of the work. “I felt like I was in a labour camp; a prison without bars,” he said.
The labourer Jin still bristles when he remembers how the other workers would call them slaves. “You are not men, just machines that can speak,” they jeered. At one point, Jin’s manager told him he might not receive any money when he returned to North Korea because the state needed it instead. It was then he decided to risk his life to escape.