that Putin is interested in peace is simply delusional. He is a dangerous wee man whose only interest is to wipe Ukraine from the planet.
In between he's just having a good old fashioned chuckle at everyone including Trump.
Not sure if short man's syndrome has anything to do with it but there was a story about him wearing platform shoes to his meeting with Trump.
His short man syndrome has got everything to do with it AND,regardless of what he is interested in, he's going to have to accept the deal Trump gives him or else...
or else...
What?
Putin is playing Trump; he is not going to accept any deal. Putin is panicking about secondary tariffs, so he asked to meet Trump.
Putin won the Alaska meeting on the world stage, a stage that Trump allowed him onto by hosting the event.
SB
I never agreed with some of your viewpoints - but I never thought you were a total and complete idiot, in other words i thought you suffer from brainwashed problems witth ideas influenced by TDS.
However - the above is so far down BS lane that i have to start thinking of changing my mind,
I have a question for you though. Who i leading the negotiation program iro of the Ukraine War and why is Putin suddenly looking for a way ot of the War? Alternatively do you think lie Stav that Zelenskyy was leading the process and that te Western leadership came to Washington that it was on Zelenskyy's invotation to come to the WH meeting esterday?
The latter is total BS and never happened in world history before - so it is a farce supeme. The only person that can invite other leaders to such a meeting in his capital city is Trump in this case, It would be he first time in history that heads of Govenments are invited by any person to come to another coiuntries capitol for such a meetong. No leader would accept such an invtation to go to Washington - such an invitation as breach of diplomatic protocol, If Trump want them heir they will only accept his invitation to the meeting - not anybody elses,
Months ago Starmer was in Washington for a meeing wth Trmp on relationship issues relating to his nitiative to implement a peace process for Ukraine/ He consequently called a meeting of leaders of NATO and gave Zelenskyy an opportunity to address. Before the final statement of the resolutions at the London meeting wa smade public St armer himself said he phoned Trump 3 times to wnaure that a statement to get Trump to go ahead with his peacemaking efforts.
Unlike the BS spread by Stav the top EU leaders agree with Trump's ideas on the way he wa going to discuss at the Alaska meeting and they were the first people to be informed what Putin came up with and he informed them his next step would be a meeting with Zelenskyy to try and find a unified approach to deal with the issue of further negotiation basis.
So obviously the decision was to go ahead for Trump to arrange a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy and who shpud attend the said Summit - but ony real idiots would believe that Trump will attend the meeting all on his own
since it was a joint decision at the Washington meeting for Trump to arrange such a meeting and that definitely the NATO leaders who attended the Washington meeting,
Based on efforts by Turkey to reach a ceasefire in April 2022 and the NATO member with the strongest army after the USA in NATO coupled to Italy with the third strongest army in NATO = it is obvious that the meeting will tkae place in Istanbul, The potential to have such a meeting in March fell flat and in that case Istanbul was also the suggested place,
It put Erdogan as Presdent of Turkey in a position where he would prevent the meeting from turning it into a farce by mutual squabbling about personal issues that could ld to falling apart of the negotation process.
The other part of the issue that World leaders know is that when Trump said he is going to do somehing - he would do it. Putin nows that from self-experience as well. If Trump said he would put sanctions on Rusia it would happen and the sanctions will unlike in the case of the Autopen Presidency, will ensure it is applied effectively. So when Trump said he is going to introduce sanctions against Russia - Putin asked him for the meeting which ended up being held in the USA, Trump knew that if open hostility applied to such a meeting it would not work out and there was zero difference about what he did or say at the Alaska meetig and what he did in om the case of the Washngton of Zelenskyy on Monday, At the Press briefing before the meeting took place their were no differeces between what Trump said and what Zeenskyy said, Zelenskyy in one response made a joke about which everybody laughed. It looks like a normal diplomatc meeting and that is the end of the story.
But the next step in the process is on ts way and if Turkey is to be the agreed venue arranged by Trump Erdogan will liaison with Trump as to the prganization of the meeting and invutations he would think wold enhance the peace negotiation process and the procedures to be followed, Erdogan will issue the imvotaations as to who should be represented at the meeting and invite the other representatives to the meeting.
It looks like that meetng will take place within the next 14 days, What will happen after that meeting.is a formal peace agreement will be compiled by expers and send to the various leaders to ratify within a certain period, If teir are issues of disagrement coming from that process - it will be cleared up by the various leaders involved/
All the Lord Hee Haw statements of the media will not change the situation and your sources will go into hysteria - like seems to be the case wih you anyway. .
In a way agree with you - when Trump says to other leades jump - their question is "How High?" That is not what is healthy iro of democracy in the World - a more co-operative scenario would is safer - but to get there is in iself a problem.
, , .
.
Putin has been playing Trump from the get go, I've said so many times. Trump even admitted that Putin was 'tapping me.' Putin continues to 'tapping Trump' with ease, hell if he was a Chess player he'd be world champion, plays with a poker face keeping his cards close to his chest even making Donnie fawn allover him with no reciprocal motions of his own.
When it mattered most, I'm thinking Kim Junk Pong and now Putin......Donnie failed......he's been humiliated on the world stage.
Russia is interested in peace. Russia wants to put an end to the war on its terms. This is the part liberals seem to struggle with. Since the peace terms are not dictated by them, they dismiss a peace resolution given by Russia as peace. And also, it is very unlikely that Russia looks for wiping Ukraine, Russia has shown no signs of this so far and it is not Israel empowered by liberal countries. Russia has not the political ground to afford wiping a country. Only liberals through their monopoly on humanity through their human rights scam has this advantage. Liberals determine so far who is human and who is not, which has allowed them to get away with mass slaughters and genocides.
In a way agree with you - when Trump says to other leades jump - their question is "How High?" That is not what is healthy iro of democracy in the World - a more co-operative scenario would is safer - but to get there is in iself a problem.
The ability of liberals to dismiss their immediate surroundings is golden. Nope, the US have been running a scheme of extorting the weak and farming the poor since 1776. Coercion is central and right now, due to Trump's bluntness, the hierarchy of who can be coerced and how much has been revealed in real time.
At the moment, Russia has been coercing the US way more than the opposite and this, without applying any sanctions to the US, which is alarming for the liberal countries. Russia is taking severe blows from the liberal country clique and still is dictating its terms to the US. Liberals have dismissed like 1/8 th of humanity... But it can be assured that this part of humanity has been watching.
Liberals have fewer and fewer options, they will have to kill a lot of people, hundreds of millions people.
Trump “idolises” Putin for his autocratic leadership ...
Trump’s Affinity for Putin Grows More Consequential Than EverPresident Trump’s admiration for President Vladimir Putin of Russia has been endlessly dissected, but the American leader’s policy shifts since taking office again could have profound effects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/us/politics/trump-putin-russia.html
Mark Mazzetti, who reported from Washington, has written about Donald J. Trump and Russia since 2016.
" Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” he said.
FFS, get a grip!
BS
As per normal newsmedia allegations are BS supreme and based on lies spread since 2016. There never was any such "affinity" and is based on shitspreading and lies by the Obama Administration and in fact also the 2016 election campaign as has been exposed in recent documents released by the CIA and the FBI - but earlier confirmed by the Mueller Spcial Council report, the Inspector General report on the Durham Special Council report,
The BS was so rotten that Clinton now - knowing she could go to jail for illegal election practices and bankruptsy due to libel claims against her is now pleading wth Trump to forgive her. Aside from that an investigation of corrupt activities of her through the Clinton Foundation will be also follow. The problem Clinton and the other conspirotirs - inclusive of Obama, Pelosi, Schiff and a string of other ex-CIA. Justice Department and CIA officials face are becoming more and more irrational and bound to end up in jail, Obama may be pardoned by Trump - but the others will not be.
Facts indicate that the relationship was based on business-like decisions taken by Trump that indicate there were no peronaal affinity at all. Trump banned the completion of the Baltic Sea pipeline and the pipeline was only completed by the Autopen Presidency after Trump left office a well as Trump tearing up the Nuclear Arms Treaty at the Helsinki meeting between Putin and Trump because Trump was accusing Putin of cheating and not adhering to the Agreement.
Incidentally at the Alaska Putin offered to enter into a revised agrement tthat would allow for monitoring of the situation to ensure the revised agreement are adhered to.
The other joke the media in the USA ignored was that Putin and the Russia media supported both Biden's election in 2020 and Harris in 2024 and even used advertisements on the internet to support the two. Both Biden and Harris were corrupt, weak amd mental shit and it is in the interest of Russia and enemies of the USA to have them in charge in Washington.
Putin knows perfectly well that if Trummp said something he will act on what he said and when Trump sent two nuclear powered and armed submarines to the Baltic Sea and threaten a total ban of Russian foreign trade he knew what Trump said would be implemented effectively. So it was a case where Trump saud Jump and Putin's response was "How high?". That was the reason why Putin asked for the Alaska meeting and why he suddenly change his tune about the Ukraine War.and is now open to negotiations with Trump on the issue. .
So have fun living in Cloud Cuckoo land,
FFS, get a grip!
Go sit on your thumb & go for a spin.
A red carpet for a genocidal renegade ...
If Putin refuses to meet with Zelensky soon, hit him with all the secondary sanctions that you can....
If they do meet ...
There'll be no red carpets, hugs or handshakes. Hannibal Lecter restraints compulsory.
I really hope they do meet, because it means that something good could potentially come out of it, and it very clearly shows that Zelensky is also serious about ending this war
However, if Putin refuses to meet, then Russia should face the maximum sanctions or penalties available, from all over the world, not just the US
I still believe that Trump has tried to handle this the correct way, in not pushing or pressuring Russia to commit to something so soon after him taking office, and also to some degree with Trump treating Putin with the respect that he has, because as disgusting as what Putin is, if Trump doesn't show Putin any kind of respect at all and just insults him like Biden did, then why would Putin ever be motivated to meet with Trump to begin with.....to negotiate anything
But Trump needs to tighten the screws on Putin properly now
So, I end where I began: Trump and Witkoff are not wrong to want to stop the war and all the killing. And it is not wrong to be in regular communication with Putin to do that. I am all for both. But to stop this war in a sustainable way, you have to understand who Putin is and what he is up to. Putin is a bad guy, a coldblooded murderer. He is not the friend of the president. That is a fantasy that Trump chooses to believe is real.
Mr. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel). He also won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
extract from a brilliant analysis (probably best avoided by DbD & other sensitive Tpanzees)
Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump IsAug. 19, 2025, 4:53 p.m. ET
I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it — including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.
For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.
I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I never seen one when where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.
When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?
Especially when every bone in my body tells me that Trump does not get what this Ukraine war is truly about. Trump is unlike any American president in the past 80 years. He feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law — an alliance that has produced the greatest period of prosperity and stability for the most people in the history of the world.
I am convinced that Trump looks at NATO as if it’s a U.S.-owned shopping center whose tenants are never paying enough rent. And he looks at the European Union as a shopping center competing with the United States that he’d like to shut down by hammering it with tariffs.
The notion that NATO is the spear that protects Western values and that the European Union is possibly the West’s best modern political creation — a vast center of free people and free markets, stabilizing a continent that was known for tribal and religious wars for millenniums — is alien to Trump.
Indeed, I agree with Bill Blain, a British-based bond trader and economic analyst, who wrote on Monday: “However much European leaders pile on their flattery of Trump, it’s clear the fundamental bond of trust that underlay the 80-year success of the trans-Atlantic economy, that served the U.S. so favorably for decades, is now ruptured. The end of the trans-Atlantic economy will change the global economy utterly — favoring Asia and new trade relationships.”
So, it is also no wonder to me that Trump doesn’t feel any gut need to bring Ukraine into the West or understand that Putin’s invasion was just his latest march to break up the West as revenge for its breaking up the Soviet Union.
How do I know that Trump is deaf to all that? Just listen to the interview that his special envoy to Putin, Steve Witkoff, gave to Tucker Carlson in March, after Witkoff’s second meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Here is just an excerpt:
Carlson: “What did you think of him?”
Witkoff: “I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me …. By the way, how would we settle a conflict with someone who is the head of a major nuclear power unless we establish trust and good feelings with one another?
“In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment. And [Putin] told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kinds of conversations?
“And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?”
It gets worse. Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”
Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”
Sorry, if Putin really prayed for Trump’s life, it is because he knows that no other American president could possibly be manipulated as easily as Trump has been. Putin is not and never has been looking for “peace” with Ukraine. He is, as I have written before, looking for a piece of Ukraine — in fact the whole piece if he can get it.
That is both the “root cause” of the war in Ukraine, to borrow one of Putin’s favorite phrases, and the “root cause of Trump’s meandering and floundering efforts to arrange peace in Ukraine — his inability to understand that Putin wants not peace but victory,” Leon Aron, a Russia scholar and the author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” said to me. “Putin must have Ukraine for all sorts of ideological and domestic political reasons. And he will not stop seeking it and sacrificing for it — unless the West makes the cost of the war prohibitive, militarily and economically.”
So, I end where I began: Trump and Witkoff are not wrong to want to stop the war and all the killing. And it is not wrong to be in regular communication with Putin to do that. I am all for both. But to stop this war in a sustainable way, you have to understand who Putin is and what he is up to. Putin is a bad guy, a coldblooded murderer. He is not the friend of the president. That is a fantasy that Trump chooses to believe is real.
Once you understand those things, they lead you to only one conclusion: The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart. The United States also must provide the security guarantees that would deter Russia from ever trying this again and encourage our European allies to promise that Ukraine will one day be in the E.U. — forever anchored in the West.
Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.
But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?
Who will tell him the truth? No one.
No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.
And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever.
More on Trump and the war in Ukraine
The Real Meaning of the Zelensky Summit Was Not as It Appeared
All Russia Needs to Do Is Go Home
Two Decades of Putin Playing the West
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the
Putin must be a one of a kind president or individual if he has been playing all the presidents of the West for the past two decades.
I mean, Putin has completely fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden
This guy must be something special and the US must have had complete and utter idiots in charge for the last 20 years
Sure
He's not particularly special, it's just the west didn't want to acknowledge what he was. They believe if they just acted nice to him and ignored Russian transgressions then eventually Russia would moderate and join the western rules based international order.
It was a joint collective failure of the west. Wishful thinking and naivety.
Putin must be a one of a kind president or individual if he has been playing all the presidents of the West for the past two decades.
What's important right now is whether Putin is playing Trump.
Do you believe he is?
Forget the past, it's irrelevant.
Do you believe he is?
No, I genuinely don't
Trump is playing the long game, and even if I really don't like that option, I can often see why when looking at who he is dealing with here.
I believe that Trump is giving Putin every conceivable way to make this work, and save face, without making it worse ... but it might not work.
I don't agree with all of it, but I can understand why he is doing it that way.
One can obviously think that Trump is getting played, or being made fun of by Putin, but I don't see it that way at all.
I also think that when Trump finally decides that he has given Putin more than enough time and opportunities to try and bring his part to end this war, he will come down on Russia very hard.
Trump has a huge ego, and I believe that he will want the world to know that he did anything and everything possible to end this war, before it possibly escalates to another more serious level, where Trump's reasoning would then be..... "there really was nothing more that I could do for Putin"
I will gladly admit it if I get it wrong, but that is what I believe is happening at the moment.
I believe that Trump is giving Putin every conceivable way to make this work, and save face, without making it worse ... but it might not work.
Save face for whom? In front of whom?
However, if Putin refuses to meet, then Russia should face the maximum sanctions or penalties available, from all over the world, not just the US
What is that world? The EU is already striking Russia as hard as possible in various manners, it has always been ramping the sanctions. So what world is that is?
Putin must be a one of a kind president or individual if he has been playing all the presidents of the West for the past two decades.
I mean, Putin has completely fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden
It is better to state that Russia has outplayed the West for decades now... It is unlikely that liberal leaders have not seen how Putin has been maneuvering (especially as the world of commentators is so large that they have documented and speculated successfully about the outcome) Now knowing where it was going to is different from being able to stop it or change the course of it.
By the way, nothing to do with Putin in particular, Putin is nothing by himself, there are forces behind him and that is how it works. Trump has taken pages from Nixon's playbook, which is outdated now. The world have changed and it is no longer possible for the US to act as they used to.
Well Russia will be forced to stop the fighting in Ukraine...the easy way or the hard way...
Well Russia will be forced to stop the fighting in Ukraine...the easy way or the hard way...
Yep, that's the way I am leaning
Russia probably is the most eager to sign a peace agreement. The main problem is that liberal countries have a hard time accepting a peace agreement could strengthen Russia instead of weakening it.