Vladimir Putin Could Be Laying a Trap

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/putin-trump-ukraine-summit-trap/683841/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo

Posted by theatlantic

10 comments

  1. Jonathan Lemire: “Vladimir Putin has had a tough few months. His military’s much-feared summer offensive has made incremental gains in Ukraine but not nearly the advances he had hoped. His economy has sputtered. Donald Trump has grown fed up with Putin’s repeated defiance of his calls for a cease-fire and, for the first time, has targeted the Russian president with consistently harsh rhetoric. Last week, Trump slapped one of Russia’s major trading partners, India, with sanctions.

    “Putin needs to buy time to change the trajectory of the conflict. So the former KGB spymaster has given Trump something that the U.S. president has wanted for months: a one-on-one summit to discuss the end of the conflict. Trump leaped at the chance. But as the two men prepare to meet in Alaska on Friday, foreign-policy experts—and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—are warning that Trump could be walking into a trap that the Russian leader is setting on American soil.

    “‘Putin has already won. He is the leader of a rogue state, and he’ll get a picture on U.S. soil with the president of the United States,’ John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, told me. ‘Trump wants a deal. And if he can’t get one now, he may walk away from it entirely.’

    “Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. His demands to reach an end to hostilities remain maximalist: He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine and the European nations that have rallied to its defense.

    “Having promised an end to the war during his campaign, Trump, above all, is desperate for the fighting to stop, and observers fear that, as a result, he might agree to Putin’s terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. Trump has already said in recent days that Russia and Ukraine will need to ‘swap lands’ (without specifying which ones). But it is not clear that Russia is willing to give up anything. And if Zelensky were to reject a deal, no matter how one-sided it might be, in Trump’s mind, Kyiv would suddenly be the primary obstacle to peace. That could lead Trump to once again unleash his wrath on Zelensky, with potentially disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting the war.”

    Read more: [https://theatln.tc/nAaP0PAn](https://theatln.tc/nAaP0PAn)

  2. Putin going to Alaska to check out his next invasion location 

  4. Putin was never a spy master. He’s certainly built an image around himself that doesn’t match history. 

  5. The Trump/Putin coalition is having this meeting to delay sanctions on Russia and screw over Ukraine. This will be his out. He’ll blame everything on Ukraine and wash his hands of it. Possibly pull out of NATO as well.
    24 hours?
    Sanctions on Russia?
    Why is Russia only country with no tariffs?
    Why is trump running the U.S. into the ground in every way possible?
    Threatening allies?
    There’s a theme here.

  6. A trap you say? I was under the impression a trap **shouldn’t** be obvious.

  7. was that unusual “earthquake” in Kamchatka really a nuclear test? I know they had an “unusual” “earthquake” in Iran a few months before Israel started bombing them.

  8. >Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for instance, invoked the Cold War when he posted on social media on Friday that he was “confident President Trump will walk away – like Reagan – if Putin insists on a bad deal.”

    Apparently Lindsey Graham was born yesterday. Here’s what gonna happen, Lindsey:

    Putin will give Trump some sort of promise and Trump would come back to DC and brag about it on media. Perhaps even a ceasefire so Russian troops could consolidate after their recent gains. Then Putin will create a fake attack on Russian troops to look like Ukraine violated the deal and then will resume fighting. Putin and Trump will blame Zen. End of story.

    >All of which heightens the stakes of the summit in Alaska. “Putin kept pushing Trump and eventually went further than Trump was willing to be pushed. He got mad, so Putin gave him this summit,” Bolton told me. “Now he wants to work his KGB magic on Trump and get him back in line.”

    Oh well John Bolton is the smart guy here, Trump should have kept him, but alas he can’t stand anyone having more than room temp IQ.

  9. Putin owns tRump. He’s coming over to remind him of that. Look for another meeting with nobody else in the room.

  10. Easy answer to the question implied by the article.

    While both of these walking nightmares are terrible human beings, who do you think is smarter? Putin or trump?

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