Lazy Caturday Reads: The Putin-Trump “Summit”

Good Day!!

Well, that was just about what most of us expected. Trump practically bowed down to Putin. Uniformed U.S. troops were seen on their hands and knees setting up a red carpet from Putin’s plane to where Trump stood to welcome him.

When he saw Putin coming, Trump clapped his hands. He was obviously thrilled to see his idol again, and he gave Putin a warm handshake while patting him on the shoulder. Then Putin was invited to ride in the Beast where the two men could talk privately. Or perhaps Putin handed Trump a written message–who knows?

The cats are not happy today.

After the meeting, Putin and Trump appeared at a supposed “press conference,” but no questions from the press were allowed. Traditionally the host speaks first, but Trump deferred to Putin, who gave a dissertation on the history of Russia in Alaska. Putin also agreed with Trump that there never would have been an invasion of Ukraine if Trump had been president. Trump spoke only briefly, and he complained about how the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” interfered with his “fantastic relationship” with “President Putin.”

We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.

Trump also noted that he was going to call NATO and Zelensky to let them know what happened in the meeting.

No questions from the press were allowed. You can read the full transcript at CBS News. It’s not very long.

MSNBC’s Peter Alexander reported that Trump’s entourage did not seem happy after the meeting:

Wow. Witkoff was in the meeting. I hope he leaks about it.

Meanwhile, the Trump people committed a terrible security breach. NPR: Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit.

Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.

Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.

At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel’s public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation….

The first page in the printed packet disclosed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the base in Anchorage where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial present.

“POTUS to President Putin,” the document states, “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”

Pages 2 through 5 listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list included phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”

Pages 6 and 7 in the packet described how lunch at the summit would be served, and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the luncheon was to be held “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin.”

A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were supposed to sit across from each other during the luncheon. Trump would be flanked by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would be seated immediately next to his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and his Aide to the President for Foreign Policy, Yuri Ushakov.

During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.

I wonder which side cancelled lunch?

The Russians released embarrassing footage. Sarah Ewall-Rice writes at The Daily Beast: Kremlin Leaks Footage Showing Trump Fawning Over Putin.

The state-run Russian international news network Russia Today (RT) has released behind-the-scenes video from Alaska that appears to show President Donald Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin.

The video shared by the Kremlin shows Trump and Putin standing together backstage near where they delivered public remarks following their three-hour meeting.

Despite walking away without a deal and without sharing any details on progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, the president could be seen laughing as he spoke to Putin.

The only person standing with the two leaders as they spoke was Putin’s translator.

In the video, Trump can be seen offering his hand first to shake hands with Putin. The president then tapped their joined hands with his other hand, embracing Putin with a two-hand shake. He also shook the Russian translator’s hand at the end of the clip.

The Kremlin was quick to release the video. While the White House has been posting a series of clips from the historic visit in Alaska, it has not yet shared any candid video of Trump and Putin together. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

According to RT, the video was taken right after their public remarks, during which neither man took any questions from reporters. It described their behind-the-scenes banter as “light chatter.”

This is also from The Daily Beast, by Farrah Tomazin: Trump Leaves Alaska With Nothing Except a Lecture From Preening Putin.

President Donald Trump has ended his high-stakes Russia summit without announcing a deal to end the war in Ukraine, despite rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin as the first U.S. president in years to invite him to America.

After a ride in the presidential limousine, a military flyover, and three hours of talks, a somewhat subdued Trump told reporters in Alaska: “We didn’t get there—but we have a very good chance of getting there.” [….]

During a press conference lasting only a few minutes, Trump and Putin spoke of an agreement of sorts, but gave no details, took no questions, and made no mention of a ceasefire.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said. “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I’ll, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell them about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”

The lack of an announcement is likely to fuel claims that Putin was using the meeting as a stalling tactic to stave off further U.S. sanctions.

And, of course, Trump used it as an attempted distraction from the Epstein files.

The Russian authoritarian has been frozen out by the West for years, and his visit has been depicted in Moscow as a win for the Kremlin.

At the press conference, Putin addressed the room first, and then spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes about the history of the two nations, his desire for more business ties with America, and flattered the American president by agreeing that the war would not have happened if Trump had been in office.

He also told reporters that he greeted Trump on the tarmac in Alaska by saying, “Good afternoon, dear neighbor—very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.”

But Putin also made the point that in order to make a “lasting and long-term” end to the war, “we need to eliminate all the primary root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine.

This is viewed as shorthand for Putin’s hardline demands, which have repeatedly been rejected: that Ukraine disarms, gives up a large part of its land to Russia, and swears off joining NATO.

Friday’s summit in Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson was the first time Putin has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.

It was also the first time a U.S. president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.

This is hilarious. Trump claims that Putin told him he obviously won the 2020 election, and it was rigged because of mail-in voting. Reuters: Trump says Putin agrees with him US should not have mail-in voting.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk.

Trump, who promoted the false narrative that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, cited his agreement with Putin over absentee voting as he pressed his fellow Republicans to try harder to advance overhauls to the U.S. voting system that he has long sought.

Trump has voted by mail in some previous elections and urged his supporters to do so in 2024.

Putin, who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999, was elected to another term in office with 87% of the vote in a 2024 election that drew allegations of vote rigging from some independent polling observers, opposition voices and Western governments. The most formidable opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.

Imagine taking advice on fair elections from Putin. LOL

Here’s a reaction from Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent: Editorial: That meeting was sickening. Putin loved it.

Sickening. Shameful. And in the end, useless.

Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska Summit unfold.

On our screens, a blood-soaked dictator and war criminal received a royal welcome in the land of the free — as his attack drones headed for our cities.

In the lead-up to the meeting in Alaska, U.S. President Donald Trump declared he wanted a “ceasefire today” and that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would face “severe consequences” if he didn’t go for it.

Yet after a 2.5-hour closed-door meeting, Trump and Putin emerged to share… nothing. “Progress” was made and some “understanding” reached, but the two didn’t come to an agreement on “the most significant point” — clearly, Ukraine.

Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did.

From the moment he stepped off the plane on U.S. soil, the Russian dictator was beaming.

No longer an international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer; Trump offered him a king’s welcome.

Trump greeted Putin with a red carpet, warm handshakes, a flyover of U.S. bombers, and a backseat limo ride.

The chummy display stood in stark contrast to Trump’s hostile reception of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office six months ago.

Ukraine’s president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were disgraceful.

Read the rest at the link.

Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin.

Glasser begins by describing the buildup and aftermath of the meeting pretty much as I’ve already posted here. Her evaluation of the event:

Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.

Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:

Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!

The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.

In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.

But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”

Read the rest at The New Yorker. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.

From Ukraine expert Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic (gift link): Trump Has No Cards. Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.

Applebaum notes that Trump had already destroyed any chance Americans had of influencing Putin.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.

This is rich, from CBS News: Trump says he will meet with Zelenskyy after “very successful day” with Putin.

President Donald Trump said he will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Monday afternoon to discuss an agreement “which would end the war” between Russia and Ukraine.