Russia’s experts care about the KGB agent, now the murderer Putin dictator will play Trump

Washington – When President Donald Trump addresses Alaska on Friday to meet with the KGB agent turned into a dictator for whom he has long had an admiration of adults, Russia’s experts care that the great loser is Ukraine, neighbor Vladimir Putin invaded three and a half years ago.

“There are many ways in which this can go wrong,” said Fiona Hill, an analyst at Russia in the National Security Council during Trump’s first mandate. “I am a little worried about the fact that it is supposed to be one by one.”

Hill’s concern one by one between Trump and Putin was relieved on Friday during the flight to Alaska. White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists aboard Air Force One that the individual meeting with Putin would now be a three against three.

Trump will join the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator was known as an skeptic of Russia and Putin, and Steve Witkoff, a Trump friend of his real estate days in New York to whom critics believe that it has been an easy brand for Putin in his discussions to date.

Trump traveled to the Joint the Mentorf-Richardson in Anchorage for the meeting with Putin, with the declared objective of ending the bloodshed caused by the invasion of Russia. It will be Trump’s first meeting with Putin, now widely considered a war criminal, since Trump returned to office in January. Putin would face an arrest that would travel to most countries and needed a renunciation of US sanctions to set foot on the American soil.

However, Trump’s summit was hurriedly scheduled with small bases, apart from the meetings held by Witkoff, whose last trip generated confusion after Witkoff apparently misunderstood Putin’s demands.

“I think the main thing to see is whether Putin can use his KGB training to bring Trump back under his spell,” said John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor at the time of his only previous summit with Putin in 2018. “And they can be Vladimir and Donald again, the good friends who thought they were until they could not leave Putin’s cessation for the first six months.” “” “” “” “” “” “

It remains to see how much Trump pushes Putin to end his slaughter in Ukraine. In the days after the invasion in February 2022, Trump called Putin a “intelligent” genius “for having done so. When former President Joe Biden gathered a coalition to help Ukraine, Trump began to blame Biden and affirm that Putin would never have invaded if Trump had remained in office.

During most of the last year, Trump promised that the war would end the day he returned to the White House or even before. Two hundred seven days later, the assault of Russia continues, with missile and drone attacks against civilians who only become more mortal and more frequent.

Only in recent weeks Trump has recognized the brutality of Russia’s attacks. He did it again Wednesday when asked if he thought he could persuade Putin to stop. Trump replied that he thought he had presented that case to Putin several times, just to see even more bombing that night.

“So I suppose the answer to that is no, because I have had this conversation,” he told reporters during a visit to the Kennedy center.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the leaders of the European allies of the United States, meanwhile, tried to avoid the potential disaster by preventively organizing a call with Trump on Wednesday to warn him that Putin’s word has little value.

“Is [the] The most important thing that Europe convinces Donald Trump that one cannot trust Russia, “said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to journalists after the call with Trump.

Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz said that leaders “made it clear that Ukraine must be at the table as soon as follow -up meetings are held.”

“Trump has already given Putin the gift of a meeting with the president of the United States in the United States,” said Michael McFaul, former United States ambassador to Russia and now a professor at Stanford University. “I hope Trump has a strategy to get something in return. Until now, I see little evidence that he has a strategy. Anxious to show that he was wrong on Friday.”

However, for Trump, the fact that he is having a summit with an autocratic leader could well be more important than any particular result.

Trump was dazzled by the reception he received when he visited the XI Jinping of China in Beijing in November 2017, sprouting on the food, his trip to the forbidden city, the military exhibition. “My feeling towards you is incredibly warm,” he told XI. “You are a very special man.”

For years, Trump boasted that he was the first president of the United States to meet with the North Korean dictator in 2018. He proudly exhibited a photo in the western wing of himself shaking his hand with Kim Jong a after Trump later traveled to the DMZ during a trip to South Korea. After losing re -election in 2020, Trump took the picture with him and hung it in a restaurant in his Trump tower in Manhattan.

“He likes to pale with them. He believes that Xi Jinping is a friend,” said Bolton. “After the first meeting in Singapore with Kim Jong Un, Trump said they fell in love.”

Trump sought similarly an individual meeting with Putin during his first mandate, although there was no agreement or even a framework to end: the usual previous requirements for a summit. At the end of that meeting in Helsinki, Trump infamously declared that he believed that Putin, a trained spy of the Soviet era, about his own intelligence agencies on Russia’s work to help him win the 2016 elections.

“He likes to pale with them. He believes that Xi Jinping is a friend.”

– John Bolton, former National Security Advisor of Donald Trump

Trump’s statement that he could end war in Ukraine in a single day arose his opinion that “he got along” with Zelenskyy and Putin, a questionable statement, in the best case.

While Trump has been trying to cure Putin since at least 2013, when he was organizing a beauty contest in Moscow: “Will it become my new best friend?” Trump wrote on social networks: there is no evidence that Putin respects Trump.

In fact, addressing Alaska’s meeting, Putin openly insulted Trump and the United States in general by granting a Lenin medal order to a CIA official whose son was killed in Ukraine while fighting for Russia. The 21 -year -old suffered mental health problems, and that medal has been obsolete since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The Putin government also announced this week that the only way to end the war was that Ukraine gave him all the territory that Russia has not been able to take by force after 42 months of trying.

And Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy began with his attempt to extort him to announce an investigation into the then Biden candidate, retaining the military aid approved by Congress as a lever. Trump was finally accused of his actions, but remained in office because all but a Republican senator voted not to eliminate him.

Since then, Trump has belittled Zelenskyy, at a time even calling the leader democratically chosen a “dictator.”

Even if Trump’s personal opinions towards Putin and Zelenskyy did not complicate things, Bolton said he wonders what purpose is a meeting with Putin at this time.

“The Russians understand strength, and at this time, Putin is told that he is winning on the battlefield, and I think that at least for some metric, he is,” he said. “The only way to make Russians negotiate seriously is to do more to demonstrate that their military position in Ukraine is weak, to demonstrate that if they do not negotiate, Ukraine will win the war.”