The full horror of what is happening, and what has been happening for at least six months, may be starting to sink in for a few more people around the world.
As Russia continues its bombing campaign, having launched more than 14 times as many drones and missiles in July (well over 6,000) as it did over the same month last year, President Trump gave war criminal Vladimir Putin the red carpet treatment in the former Russian colonial territory, now U.S. state, of Alaska.
The meaning of this meeting might be analyzed for years, but that it signified a capitulation — if only to Russia’s desire for neo-imperial status — should be clear. It was, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat puts it, a summit to legitimize Kremlin geopolitics — the “make Russia great again ‘summit’,” a “summit” that was primarily “about the breaking of taboos, in this case, the welcoming onto American territory of Putin, who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant out for him for war crimes in Ukraine.”
Or, as Bill King puts it, “For Putin, it was the dream package: red carpet rolled out, a fighter jet flyover, and an American president who treats the job like a time-share pitch. For Trump, it was just another stop in his travelling scam carnival, where the prizes are for him, the bill is for you, and the game is always rigged.”
Despite the protests that made it into some of the media coverage (alongside pro-Trump counter-demonstrations), it also reflects a capitulation of democracy to the kind of multipolar imperial realignment both men desire. That’s perhaps what made it worthwhile for Trump, but much more of a success for Putin. (The body language analyses are also always entertaining.)
In “Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin,” The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser breaks down the background to this meeting:
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the end, the war will continue because Russia will continue to pursue its goals, which it showed no desire to temper. And Ukrainians will continue to die.
Among the more notable ones that died this past week, from injuries sustained on the front lines, were artist, anarchist, and Ukrainian freedom fighter David Chichkan. In “‘For Him Russia Exemplified Modern Fascism’,” The Kyiv Independent‘s Kate Tsurkan has penned a beautiful obituary to Chichkan (also spelled Chychkan). Another nice tribute, with examples of Chichkan’s art, is Amira Barkhush’s “Russia Looted Ukrainian Artist’s Masterpieces and Then Killed His Great-grandson.”
Juxtaposing this one man dying for the freedom of his countrymen and women against the two wannabe emperors meeting in Alaska is perhaps the best way to show what is at stake in this struggle of grassroots democracy against imperialist autocracy.
That struggle is now clearly global.
“Anti-authoritarian defenders of Ukraine,” 2022. Size A4, liner and watercolor on paper. (David Chichkan/Facebook)
David Chichkan, a Ukrainian artist and anarchist known for his political art, who was killed while serving on the front line in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine, in August 2025, in an undated photo. (Anton Parambul/Facebook)
