Putin enters Trump to talk about a strength position

Russian President Vladimir Putin Can already feel like a winner when he sits in Alaska on Friday with his American counterpart Donald Trump.

Putin, who mercilessly obtained an unprecedented power at home, saw her army ultimately extinguish a slight advantage over the battlefield in Ukraine After years of brutal back and forth fighting. Now, invited from the diplomatic cold, the Russian chief headed for anchorage full of praise for Trump’s “energy and sincere efforts” before talks, who will see him set foot on American soil for the first time in a decade.

Trump warned that there will be “Very serious consequences” Unless he accepts to stop the war and said on Friday that Putin “will not play with me”. But for the Russian leader, the tête-à-tête seated with Trump can already look like a victory.

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“Putin has already marked a success by being invited to meet Trump on American soil,” said Keir Giles, principal researcher at Chatham House, a thinking group based in London.

“Trump facilitated Putin’s acceptance of international diplomacy, despite the fact that he must have trouble traveling, given his status as an internationally wanted war criminal,” Giles in NBC News said in a telephone interview on Thursday, pointing to the score arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in March 2023.

In the streets of Moscow, there was also a feeling of positivity on the meeting and confidence in their leader, who has been continuously president or Prime Minister of Russia since 1999.

Pavel Grbenyuk, 45, told NBC News that the summit with Trump was important because “there should be a link between Russia and America, two of the most main powers” and “there should be a dialogue”.

But Grbenyuk, who said that he was working in a window manufacturing plant, added that he thought he was “unlikely that everything changed considerably”, after the talks to end the war, who entered his fourth year of February.

“I don’t expect anything,” he said.

Elena Ionova, a soloist from Moscow’s Operetta Theater, also said that it was “although this meeting occurs”, but that it did not “trust people on the other side”. She added that she was “worried about Putin’s fate”.

“Of course, we would all like it all to end and end, at least, without any major disaster,” she said.

It is difficult to obtain a precise feeling of the weight of public opinion in Russia following Putin’s repression on dissent, which has stifled political opposition and freedom of expression.

A recent investigation carried out by the independent survey Levada Center showed that the level of support for the Russian armed forces in Ukraine has remained high at 75%, but that almost two thirds of respondents supported the peace talks.

The place of these discussions is itself significant.

Trump and Putin will meet at Elmendorf-Richardson joint baseA military base that was crucial for American efforts to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

It is just outside anchorage, the country’s capital that the United States bought in Russia for $ 7.2 million in 1867 – a sale that has since been considered naive by the Russians after Alaska contains large natural resources.

Putin helps Yuri Ushakov reported on Thursday that if the main objective of the summit would be Ukraine, the economic ties between the two nations would also be on the agenda. Putin suggested that a nuclear weapon control treaty can also be discussed.

Ukraine and its allies may fear that Putin will offer other incentives to distract from his hard position on the war he launched by invading his neighbor.

“Stripping competing political accounts and interests, and on the basis of Putin’s declarations and actions, its basic requests have not changed,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a main scholarship in Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a reflection group based in Berlin.

These requests previously included Ukraine by giving up all the land that Putin claims to have annexed and accept permanent neutrality, with the ban on Ukraine which joins NATO. Putin claims four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as the Crimean Black Sea Peninsula, which he annexed in 2014, although the Russian forces do not fully control the whole territory in each region.

Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have long declared that they would not concede any territory that Russia has illegally annexed. Ukraine has also insisted that any agreement must include “security guarantees” of its allies so that Moscow is unable to launch a future aggression.

Stanovaya added that she thought that Putin intended to “offer Trump that war was put to an end, and would support the point that he really wants him to stop”.

“Its main objective is to persuade Trump that current Ukrainian Europe and Ukrainian management are the obstacles at the end of the conflict, and that a cessation of hostilities is possible if there is that Ukraine will not use any break to rearm,” she said on X, adding that the Russian president “will strongly promise local conflicts.”

Back in Moscow, Ionova said that she hoped “everything will be fine”, adding “we want this summit to succeed for us, for Russia”.