From the Telegraph / Yahoo!News:
"Putin has received yet another gift from Trump
Instead, far from being punished, Putin has received yet another gift from Mr Trump: a bilateral summit, without any other party present.
The agreement to hold this meeting was the only public outcome of the talks between Putin and Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, in the Kremlin on Wednesday.
At first, White House officials had been cited as saying that the Russian leader would have to meet Volodymyr Zelensky for talks with Mr Trump to go ahead – a gracious gesture given that the whole future of the Ukrainian president’s beleaguered country will be the main subject of discussion.
Yet, within 24 hours, this condition had been vetoed by Mr Trump, who said he would happily meet Putin regardless. With the fate of Ukraine on the table, no Ukrainian should be allowed to get in the way.
Mr Trump could have set another condition: a ceasefire on the front line or at least a moratorium on Russia’s missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. Instead, he has set no price for the summit and gained nothing in return. When it comes to handling Putin, all the rules of the “art of the deal” seem to go out the window.
Why does Putin place such store on occasions of this kind? In his mind, the ideal outcome of the war would be a replay of the Yalta conference of February 1945, when Stalin secured the acquiescence of Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to Soviet dominance over central Europe.
In the same way, Putin wants to win Mr Trump’s approval for Russian dominance of Ukraine. He believes that his best chance lies in dealing with the US president on equal terms, as one great power to another, solving problems by deciding the fate of a smaller country, which must simply obey whatever the big men agree on.
In Putin’s mythology, Ukraine is not a sovereign state that makes its own decisions but rather a helpless plaything of the Western alliance, by which he means the US, resisting his invading forces only on the orders of its masters.
Sergei Karaganov, who combines the roles of Russian foreign policy thinker and frothing demagogue, expressed this view by saying: “We are at war not with Ukraine and the unfortunate and stupefied Ukrainians, who have been thrown by their corrupt elites and their masters into the meat grinder: we are at war with the West.”
Such a war, in Putin’s view, can only be resolved by dealing directly with the leader of the West, and the less that “stupefied” Ukrainians like Mr Zelensky have to do with proceedings, the better.
So it was entirely logical that as soon as Mr Witkoff had finished his meeting with Putin, Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s foreign policy adviser, should have roundly dismissed the idea of a trilateral meeting.
“As for a three-way meeting which, for some reason, Washington was talking about,” said Mr Ushakov, “this was just something mentioned by the American side during the meeting in the Kremlin. This was not discussed. The Russian side left this option completely without comment.”
You bet they did...
Putin will turn to Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a former Goldman Sachs banker who studied at Harvard. Mr Dmitriev specialises in tempting Americans like Mr Witkoff with vast schemes to develop Russia’s natural resources and exploit its critical minerals, which would yield enough riches to pave Washington in gold if only small problems like Ukraine and the security of Europe could be disposed of.
Putin will probably arrive at the summit with grand plans for America and Russia to join hands in the noble task of making money from nature’s munificence.
He will present Ukraine as being an irritating obstacle to the appealing goal of the US and Russia burying their differences and prospering together.
In Putin’s dream scenario, Mr Trump will then agree to a Kremlin-drafted peace plan, whereupon Russia and America could begin their new era of co-operation by ruthlessly imposing that plan on Ukraine and stuffing it down Mr Zelensky’s throat, perhaps literally..."
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