Three meetings between delegations from Moscow and Washington between February and June resulted in prisoner exchanges, but failed to bring a ceasefire in Ukraine any closer. Now, Donald Trump hopes that a face-to-face meeting between himself and Vladimir Putin will turn the tide.

But will it?

In June, at the meeting in Istanbul, the Kremlin presented its memorandum of demands for a “final settlement,” which were unchanged from previous statements: Ukraine’s ceding to Russia the regions of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia; agreeing to accept a position of neutrality; giving up its long-stated goal of membership in NATO; rejecting foreign military involvement; and calling for new elections. In other words, Ukraine would become a shrunken, toothless nonentity, defenseless and completely vulnerable to Russia’s future goal of reabsorbing the former Soviet republic into Putin’s new Russian Empire.

And those demands have remained unchanged, as reiterated numerous times by Putin himself (as recently as last week) and confirmed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the Russian Security Council’s notoriously hot-headed Dmitry Medvedev.

According to Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya:

“The Russian side can frame this in a dozen different ways, creating the impression that Moscow is open to concessions and serious negotiation. But the core position remains unchanged: Russia wants Kyiv to surrender.” [Laura Gozzi and Vitaliy Shevchenko, BBC, August 7, 2025.]

So why should we expect a different result this time? Does Trump know something — perhaps gleaned from one of his phone calls with Putin — that he hasn’t revealed? Is Putin at last willing to offer a compromise on one or more of his demands? Or is he simply buying time, as he has done so often in the past, in order to continue his brutal attacks on Ukraine until total surrender becomes their only option?

Following Wednesday’s meeting in Moscow between Putin and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington now has a “better understanding of the conditions under which Russia would be prepared to end the war.” [Id.]

But what does that mean?

At this point, only one man knows for sure.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
8/7/25