From Izvestia, Aug. 11, 2025, p. 6. Condensed text:
The unexpected visit of the US president’s special envoy Steven Witkoff to Moscow, and then the even more unexpected announcement of preparations for a high-level Russian-American summit next Friday, Aug. 15, became one of the main world news items and another zigzag in relations between Moscow and Washington. The end of July and the beginning of August were characterized by a rather gloomy atmosphere. Donald Trump’s plans to supply weapons to Ukraine and his intention to introduce new sanctions against Russia, announced at a July meeting [sic; June – see Vol. 77, No. 26, pp. 8-11 – Trans.] with NATO Secretary General Rutte, led many observers to talk about the end of the honeymoon with the new American leader. Some saw the brief era of diplomatic flirtation and occasional high-level phone calls as ending, with relations returning to a purely confrontational nature and American policy boing back to the [former US president Joe] Biden administration, albeit in a truncated form.
Optimistic observers, including yours truly, were inclined to believe that these political maneuvers were more likely to represent the now-familiar “hit-and-run” tactics of Trumpian politics, or “big stick politics”: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” If Trump retained an interest in resolving the Ukraine situation and improving relations with Russia, then pressure was bound to be replaced by some kind of rebound.
However, no one probably expected a rebound like this. Usually, a summit between two such major powers takes a long time to prepare, and is inevitably accompanied by leaks and some publicity. The meeting of the leaders in Alaska was either prepared in the deepest secrecy, or it was indeed the result of a last-minute decision. In fact, the presidents have plenty of topics for discussion, but in general they can be reduced to two: Ukraine, and Russian-American relations outside of it.
The first topic is undoubtedly the main one – if for no other reason than that without a settlement in Ukraine, or at least without visible progress in this area, the transition to saturating the bilateral agenda with any other aspects of cooperation is politically impossible. Over the past six months, the negotiations process on Ukraine has not shown any serious progress. Trump, who once promised to reconcile Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours, is irritated by this, but apparently does not intend to abandon his intentions yet.
The American leader’s stubbornness is understandable. Subjectively for Trump, abandoning his intentions on the Russia-Ukraine track would mean admitting defeat. A gambler, he views deal-making to some extent as an end in itself. In this sense, achieving peace in Ukraine would be “the deal of a lifetime” for him. The series of peace settlements that Trump lists in his collection of achievements – Congo and Rwanda; Thailand and Cambodia; India and Pakistan; Israel and Iran; and finally, Armenia and Azerbaijan – probably fuels this drive, creating the impression that anything is possible for American diplomacy.
Strategically, the American leadership continues to count on being able to get rid of a source of great military-strategic tension in Europe and normalize relations with a major Eurasian power whose containment could be too costly. Having clearly designated China and Asia as the focus of its interests, the Trump administration initially pursued a course of minimizing its presence in Europe and in the Ukraine conflict in particular, probably even allowing it to continue without [US] participation. However, recent months have shown that Washington cannot simply pass the buck to its European allies and reduce its presence to a minimum. NATO, which worked to consolidate its military-technical dominance, played a cruel joke on the US, limiting its ability to exit conflicts involving allies. This was already demonstrated some time ago by the campaign in Libya, when Washington literally came to the aid of the main initiators of the military operation – the UK and France – when the latter discovered a basic shortage of missiles necessary to continue bombing. Ukraine has shown this imbalance even more strongly: The Europeans simply cannot bear the burden of this conflict and, more broadly, counter Russia’s military might.
All of this motivates the Trump administration to continue efforts to downplay the conflict. However, these efforts may run into the intransigence of the Russian position.
Unlike Trump, who, judging by the above cases, prefers to look at pacification in a purely tactical sense – a ceasefire is good enough – Moscow insists on ending the conflict through fundamental, legally binding agreements, the result of which should be the disappearance of the Ukrainian threat (that is, Ukrainian military-technical capabilities), as well as the settlement of the territorial issue. The fizzling of the Istanbul process was largely predetermined by the unwillingness of Kiev and the Europeans to consider the settlement in these terms. For Russia, though, this is a vital issue – the growth of NATO spending and the EU’s plans to develop its military-industrial capabilities will help to pump up Europe’s military muscles. If Ukraine remains in the orbit of Western influence and retains some of its potential while the Russia-Ukraine conflict remains unresolved, military action could flare up with renewed vigor.