It’s been painful to observe the wretched state of reporting in the runup to the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska this Friday. Admittedly, the Trump side gaslighted the press with talk of territory swaps, an idea which if it was voiced in the Putin-Witokff talk in Russia, was a US scheme. The Associated Press, early on, was one of the very few mainstream media venues to put paid to this blather. On August 10, from Russia and Ukraine hold fast to their demands ahead of a planned Putin-Trump summit.
The Associated Press pointed out that Russia offered two peace proposals to Ukraine in June, both of which had Russia controlling the four oblasts that it now recognizes as Russia, even though it has yet to secure all of that territory. It indicated that there was no signal that Russia intended to relent on these demands. Separately, many commentators have pointed out that since the expansion of Russia has been enshrined in the Russian constitution, Putin can’t trade that away even if he wanted to. Let us not forget that Putin and Russians generally are almost fetishistic about legal forms.
And if you still harbored doubts, from that article:
Asked Thursday whether Moscow has signaled any willingness to compromise to make a meeting with Trump possible, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov responded that there haven’t been any shifts in the Russian position.
Nevertheless, this notion had become so widely accepted that Lavrov had to rouse himself to address it. Predictably, the interview starts out with a “When did you stop beating your wife?” line of questioning:
Even so, the mere prospect of Trump and Putin making nice to each other resulted in Zelensky rallying the Russia-hating leaders of Europe, which was not hard to do. Note that the summit may have the effect of extending Zelensky’s sell-by date; the press had abandoned its hagiography and quite a few outlets were calling out Zelensky’s plunging popularity and even his likely corruption.
Even if Trump had harbored the fantasy of a mano-a-mano with Putin that might allow him to claim some sort of progress in extricating the US from its Ukraine quagmire, Trump went into full TACO mode. From the Washington Post in White House sharply lowers expectations for Trump-Putin summit:
President Donald Trump expects his encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week to be a “listening exercise,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, sharply downplaying the possibility that a deal to end the war in Ukraine could be imminent despite a warning from the president last week that Kyiv needed to “get ready to sign something.”
“Listening exercise”? As if Putin has not been exhaustively explicit in his many long speeches and press conferences?
And the Trump team seems to have missed that “listening” meetings have negative connotations, witness Hillary Clinton’s 2015 branded and Kamala Harris’ de facto listening tours.
Note that the US is continuing to claim that Putin asked for this session, an idea that Alexander Mercouris and others have debunked.1
Mind you, it’s not as if Trump and Putin are short of topics to discuss, from nuclear arms control to Iran to the spectacle of Russia allowing Western businesses back in. However, the last idea to be more of a tease than serious. Russian businesses have done so well by weaning themselves from dependence on the West that it’s not as if there’s a clamor either from citizens or a big weight of commercial interests to get them back in. FroFrom BNE in March:
Russian President Vladimir Putin told the country’s leading oligarchs that Western companies that “slammed the door” on Russia when they left the country after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine will not be allowed to repurchase their assets cheaply or regain their former market positions.
Speaking at the annual Congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) in Moscow, he said that businesses would not be allowed to exercise option agreements with their partners to buy back companies. These agreements were widely signed as part of a raft of takeovers and MBOs.
“If the niche of a Western company is already filled by a Russian business, then … as we say, that train has left,” Putin said.
Of course, the elephant in the room in terms of not expecting much is the US lack of agreement-capableness. Russians had been grumbling about that for some time as a result of NATO expansion, but that predilection became undeniable due to Poroshenko’s and Merkel’s Holland’s smugness, even glee, over having snookered Putin with the Minsk Accords. Putin has engaged in public self-recrimination. He and Lavrov have also taken to making longer and longer speeches of the history of what a bunch of scheming deceivers Western leaders and negotiators have been.
The US under Trump has reached a new level of fecklessness. Trump changes tariff levels and range of application seemingly at the drop of a hat. He’s refused to commit his trade deals to writing. If the Russian want a faux-friendly cover for continuing to prosecute the war, all they need to do is demand a written instrument.2 Russia could be in Paris before one got done.
Remember that the US and Russia are already in negotiations, and the US has failed to deliver on basic, and not large, Russian requests, like returning Russian diplomatic property that the US seized and restoring flights to Russia.3
Of course, the Europeans have built up Putin into being a KGB mastermind who has Trump in his thrall and could thus extract concessions, even though, as we made clear, the US even before Trump didn’t believe in delivering on commitments. Trump’s increasingly addled state does give cause for pause. USA Today pointed out that Trump said, not once but twice, that he was meeting Putin in Russia:
During President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s sending the National Guard to Washington, DC, to fight a crime wave that isn’t real, it became clear he has caught Sleepy Joe Biden’s much-ballyhooed cognitive decline…
But whatever the cause, hearing the president ramble incoherently during a nationally televised news conference on Monday, Aug. 11, left no doubt: The man’s brain has turned to oatmeal.
For starters, on two occasions Trump told reporters he will be meeting in days with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia. The meeting will be held in Alaska, which, unless Trump has given away one of America’s states to Putin, is very much not in Russia.
The Guardian gives a more traditional version of “ZOMG Trump talking to Putin” pearl-clutching, with the added bennie of reinforcing the falsehood of Russia having interfered in the 2016 election:
The lessons of Helsinki are clear: putting Donald Trump alone in a room with Vladimir Putin is an unpredictable – and often dangerous – affair.
It was 2018 when the two leaders met at the invitation of Sauli Niinistö, the Finnish president, to discuss a collapse in US-Russia relations, accusations of elections interference, and the grinding war in east Ukraine, among other topics.
By the time he came out of the room, Trump looked dazzled by the Kremlin leader. Asked at a press conference about the conclusions of the US intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the elections, Trump said: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”….
European leaders are fearful that Trump could once again emerge from a closed-door meeting preaching the Kremlin gospel.
In the meantime, there are rumors that Ukraine is scheming to sabotage the summit with a false flag attack:
A group of foreign journalists were transported into the city of Chuguev by Zelensky’s secret police – the SBU – yesterday
On the pretext of ‘preparing a series of reports about the residents of the city in the frontline zone’ pic.twitter.com/BAT3ENm26r
— RT (@RT_com) August 12, 2025
Mind you, even if Ukraine executes a dastardly deed like that (the fact that the Western press would repeat it uncritically is a given), Ukraine over-estimates the impact of its stunts, even the bloody ones. It was not Bucha that scuppered the Istanbul draft peace deal but Boris Johnson flying to Kiev and persuading Zelensky to ditch it, with promises of “as long as it takes” military support. And even though Russia had caught Ukraine by surprise, it was merely planning to get Ukraine to the negotiating table. It took some time for Russia even to straighten out its command structure, decide to commit to a bigger war, increase armament and manpower levels, and systematically seek to learn from its mistakes.
As the Trump theatrics and the Zelensky-EU negotiation sabotage operation dominate media coverage, Russia has made a major breakthrough in the critically important Pokrovsk area. Experts have stressed for the last month, and some much longer, that the loss of Povrosk would be a huge psychological and military blow. Even though there is one more defense line in the Donbass, at Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, it’s regularly been depicted as weaker than the ones Russia has already surmounted. And it’s possible that Russia will just flank it.
This video by Daniel Davis at Deep Dive, with Colonel Douglas Macgregor, starting at 18:30. Note that Davis points out there that his Russian journalist sources say the Russian forces are having to temper their pace of advance to keep from getting ahead of their supply lines. Davis and Macgregor then turn to maps and what this advance means:
Moon of Alabama provides more detail:
During the last three days Russian forces achieved a major breakthrough. After the heavy bombardment of Ukrainian positions with over 1,300 FAB bombs Russian detachments moved north of the salient (green) they had built between the semi-encircled cities Pokrovsk and Konstantinivka.
They have reached and breached the well built second Donbas fortification line (in yellow) which had been dug over the last year.
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Ukrainian sources confirm the breakthrough (machine translation):
Yesterday, Ukrainian military telegram channels, as well as AFU fighters, began to write massively about the Russian breakthrough to the north of the Pokrovskaya agglomeration – in the direction of Dobropillia.As a result of an 11-kilometer (according to Ukrainian data) dash, the Russians came out to the northeast of Dobropillya, cutting the road to Kramatorsk and Konstantinovka.
Judging by the reports of Ukrainian publics, the problem is the lack of personnel and “false reports” to the top about the state of defense near Dobropillya. Russian military telegram channels write that this area was covered by [territorial forces] – since more experienced units are holding the front near Pokrovsk.
At the same time, the battles are already taking place in a fairly deep rear, where there is no organized line of defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It should actually be built “from the wheels”, transferring reserves. There are already predictions in the Ukrainian public that if the situation is not urgently corrected, the Russians will be able to break through the front and enter the operational space. And Ukraine will lose hundreds of square kilometers of territory a day, as it did in the first weeks of the invasion.
Now let’s turn to the Ukrainian side to see what their experts are attributing the collapse to. Taras Chmut, head of the Come Back Alive charity for the AFU, says that Ukrainian forces first began to systemically fail at the platoon level, then the company level…and now he says the mass collapse of the battalion level has arrived.
Simplicius also highlighted this early August tweet, which describes how the new fortified lines that Ukraine was rushing to build will be ineffective:
Although there is great work done detailing Ukrainian fortifications, most of the observed positions are constructed in the open and will never be occupied by units. They are easily targeted and destroyed. Ukraine lacks infantry to man most of them in the first place. 16/
— Michael Kofman (@KofmanMichael) July 31, 2025
It is way over my pay grade to forecast what happens next, even before getting to the fact that the Ukraine conflict is now moving into “overly dynamic situation” terrain. But the accelerating disintegration of Ukraine forces and the loss of Pokrovsk will have a huge impact on the morale of the armed forces and Ukrainians generally, particularly those in positions of power. If Zelensky intends to hang on to a pretense of power, the time for him to set up his government in exile is approaching.
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1 Putin’s elaborate pretense that the idea somehow just came up was pinning the tail on the Wiktoff donkey. In addition, the Putin-Witkoff meeting took a full three hours, which suggested a lot of Witkoff arm-twisting and even groveling. The polite-seeming Witkoff was able to bark at Netanyahu in a way that got Netanyahu to reverse himself on refusing to meet Witkoff on Sabbath. I wonder if he has other registers in his repertoire that we have not seen yet, such as Mad Dog Beck-ery (see the bit on the biscuits).
2 One might point out that the US did manage to ink at least one pact, that of its “raw earths” agreement with Ukraine. But this was in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant’s hands, and he allegedly came to Kiev with a contract he tried to get Zelensky to sign on the spot. There are many law firms that work on cross-border investments, so it should not have been hard for Treasury to get one of them to prepare a document. In addition, as it became clear, Ukraine was seen by the US as a terms-taker, and largely was, although Zelensky did appear to dig in his heels on some key points and got concessions. This is not at all what any process with Russia would look like.
3 This would be a big bennie to US carriers, since they now can’t overfly Russian airspace. That has hurt their business with flights to and from Asia, to the advantage of Middle Eastern and Asian operators. Russia would presumably restore transit rights, not just point-to-point rights. It will be amusing to see EU reactions were that to happen.
