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Vladimir Putin is coming to Anchorage, Alaska on Friday afternoon to meet with Donald Trump and possibly address a real cease-fire in the war in Ukraine. Trump has said he thinks there is a 25% chance the summit between the two leaders will end in failure; still, the fact that the Russian President even agreed to appear can be viewed as a cautiously optimistic sign. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not be attendance but should be invited to a second meeting if Trump and Putin can lay out some successful foundation towards ending the quagmire that has dragged on for more than three years now.
Kevin Cirilli is the founder of the “Meet the Future” website and has studied U.S.-Russia relations for several years now. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to offer his educated guess at how the summit will go; he says that Trump has the edge in this meeting because, unlike during their 2018 summit, he doesn’t have Russiagate hanging over his head.
As Cirili explained it to host Larry Mendte, there are two other reasons why Trump has the upper hand in Alaska: “Vladimir Putin has lost, in his thuggish war against Ukraine, more than one million Russian lives, the staggering loss of life for his decision to go to war and miscalculate and think the Ukraine would just roll over. It can’t be overstate enough… And then, separately from that, you have these long-term economic implications. The U.S. has deployed significant crippling economic sanctions against Moscow. If you’re Vladimir Putin and you are going to pull a stunt today on U.S. soil in Alaska, President Trump’s finger is on the economic trigger, so to speak, with ratcheting that up even further.”
Cirilli stressed that one other key player will not be in Alaska but will be watching the discussions closely: “The Chinese Communist Party, [specifically] Xi Jinping. I call them the ‘totalitarian twins,’ Putin and Xi, and what they’ve been doing the last few months is running military drills off the coast of Alaska. Think of how brazen that is… The playbook that the U.S. has deployed against Russia, with sanctions and what not, is, I would argue, the same playbook that the U.S. will employ should Xi Jinping pull a Putin and invade Taiwan.”
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