Trump has invited Putin to meet in Alaska on Friday, August 15, to discuss a "peace agreement" between Russia and Ukraine. Reportedly, the framework for an agreement includes, in Trump's words, "some swapping of territories" between Russia and Ukraine.
News and social media have largely panned the initial, vaguely expressed terms of an agreement. Any agreement on these terms is seen as putting Ukraine at risk of further Russian aggression and undermining the US's credibility, given the US's previous guarantee to protect Ukraine's territorial integrity under the Budapest Memorandum.
An additional consideration is that, although the US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Putin due to human rights violations for Russia's forced transfer of Ukrainian children from the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian military. The optics of Putin, an indicted war criminal subject to arrest, visiting American soil (and former Russian territory) are anything but good.
Here is The Economist's take on the sudden development,
"Donald Trump had billed August 8th as deadline day for Vladimir Putin: stop fighting or face crippling sanctions. But as the day wore on, it seemed the ultimatum had come and gone without event. Then, around 6pm, the White House announced there would be a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr Putin on August 15th in Alaska. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, apparently will not attend. Mr. Putin seems to have achieved this diplomatic triumph simply by skillfully playing his recent negotiations with American envoys. It was a familiar pattern for Mr. Trump--hard rhetoric, then soft climbdown and more breathing space for the Kremlin."
Other prominent commentators were even more dismissive. Shankar Narayan on Medium.com writes on the purported framework, "The optics alone would hand the Kremlin a propaganda victory — the image of a U.S. president conceding part of Ukraine to secure a handshake with Putin...Trump is likely walking into his August 15 meeting with Putin believing he can force an agreement and claim the title of dealmaker. Putin, by contrast, enters with every option open. He can agree to stop the war and simply restart it when it suits him. He can secure sanctions relief while demanding Ukrainian territories that improve Russia’s military position for the next round. He can refill his dwindling National Wealth Fund until the U.S. midterms are over — and then send “little green men” back across the border.
Another commentator, Dylan Combellick, also on Medium.com, was even more dismissive: "According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump seems to have agreed to surrender to Putin...Putin, a war criminal, will fly to Alaska to accept the full and unconditional surrender of Donald Trump and the West, and will even be granted territory in return for his ‘reasonableness.’ If this happens, this will be the date that we will look back on in a hundred years and say, “This was the end of the West.”
...
"Trump is promising Russia something that it doesn’t have any right to have stolen, giving it more that it doesn’t have, and getting nothing in return. Ukraine has signed dozens of cease-fires with Russia, and Russia has violated every single one of them. From a historical perspective, this looks more and more like Chamberlain meeting with Hitler in 1938, giving Germany the Czech land, and declaring “peace in our time.”
So much for initial reactions.
With Zelenskyy and Western Europe out of the picture, the August 15 meeting between Trump and Putin seems a doomed initiative. Any draft agreement would be dead on arrival and could greatly complicate more realistic peace initiatives that respect Ukraine's boundaries and future prospects as an independent country.
We all wait to see what Trump and Putin come up with and whether they can sell.
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