FP’s Amelia Lester<newsletters@foreignpolicy.com>
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a trilateral signing with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (left) and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan (right) at the White House in Washington on Aug. 8. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images |
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You can see Russia from Alaska, as then-Gov. Sarah Palin famously pointed out in a 2008 interview. (Even more famous at this point is when Tina Fey, playing Palin on Saturday Night Live, declared, “I can see Russia from my house.”) Yet when Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday, it will be the Russian leader’s first visit to the United States since 2015. Putin, who has intensified strikes on Ukraine’s Donbas region in recent weeks, will surely relish the stagecraft of appearing alongside the U.S. president in a former colonial stronghold. Trump, fresh off the success of settling a longtime dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the so-called Zangezur corridor, may hope that the meeting yields a ticket to Oslo. In reality, a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine will be impossible to strike without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—who, despite murmurings from U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance about getting everyone together, isn’t invited. Ukraine’s approach to how and whether a peace deal happens also differs from that of its aggressor. Kyiv insists on securing a cease-fire before discussing any terms for such a deal; Moscow says that there can be no cease-fire without talks, which must address the “root causes” of the war. That’s a chasm of disagreement, but no matter. After weeks of impatience with Putin, Trump has been lured back into negotiations around the topic he knows best: real estate. On his fifth trip to Moscow this month, Steve Witkoff—Trump’s “Mr. Fix It”—was assured by Putin that the war could end with a land swap. Zelensky has made it clear that he is not interested in carving up his country to assuage Russia, but the Ukrainian leader is besieged at home and, at this point, has zero visibility into what will be discussed in Alaska.—Amelia Lester, deputy editor |
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