Bryan Zepp Jamieson
August 17th 2025
By just about any metric, the so-called ‘summit’ between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump was an utter catastrophe for Trump. Visually, he looked horrible. He alighted from AF-1 and staggered along the arm of the T-shaped red carpet like a parody of Andy Capp, came to a halt at the intersection, turned, and applauded the approaching Russian dictator. If he had been physically capable, he might have dropped to his knees and kissed Putin’s boot. He may as well have.
Then he let the dictator inside the Presidential limo, something never accorded a visiting foreign leader before. Many commentators suggested the vehicle be swept carefully for bugs following the transport of the ex-KGB agent. One image shows Putin sitting next to Trump and apparently holding his nose.
None of the top people accompanying the two were diplomats. Most were involved in industry and finance, the sorts you might find at high-level trade talks. That creates the impression the top order of business wasn’t Ukraine, but rather a lucrative deal between the world’s two top kleptocrats.
It was accompanied with the extraordinary incompetence that is the hallmark of the Trump administration. Prior to the meeting, some aides printed out a copy of the itinerary, including some fairly sensitive information that assassins or people planting listening devices would find extremely useful, and then left a copy in the printer for some visiting tourists at the hotel to find!
Given how sullen and silent Trump was following their secret three-hour meeting, it was safe to assume Putin ate his lunch, and did so in a way that even Trump couldn’t fail to notice. Trump went on Hannity (the journalistic equivalent of a fascist cum dump) and his bluster was singularly vacuous and vacant. He looked and sounded like a hick who was beginning to wonder if he really should have traded the family cow for a handful of beans.
Putin made the scale of the concessions obvious the next day when he stated that Russia would accept nothing less than absorption of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as a condition for a cease fire.
Trump didn’t disgrace himself—that’s simply not possible. But he did disgrace America pretty badly. But he’ll pay: he’ll return to find California and major cities all but at war with his regime, food costs exploding as the tariffs kick in, and yes, questions about the Epstein files.
But one odd thing occurred that, if true, suggests that Putin slipped very badly. Quoting from the Guardian this morning:
Special US envoy Steve Witkoff has also been speaking to the media. He said on Sunday that Vladimir Putin agreed at the Alaska summit with Donald Trump to allow the US and European allies to offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling Nato’s collective defence mandate (article 5: an attack on one member is an attack on all) as part of an eventual deal to end the war.
Speaking with Jake Tapper, Witkoff told CNN’s State of the Union programme:
We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer article five like language to cover a security guarantee. So Putin has said that a red flag is Nato admission.
And so what we were discussing was assuming that that held, assuming that the Ukrainians could agree to that, and could live with that, and everything is going to be about what the Ukrainians can live with.
But assuming they could, we were able to win the following concession: that the United States could offer article five, like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in Nato, we sort of were able to bypass that and get an agreement that the United States could offer article five protection, which was the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.
If this is true, NATO needs to convene first thing tomorrow and hold a vote on extending Article Five to include the Ukraine. The United States is in the position where they announced this, so they can hardly turn around and veto the proposal without looking like absolute shite. Even Trump’s toerag Hungary would have to go along.
That would effectively end the Ukrainian conflict. Russia would hold their positions, but anything of an offensive nature would risk war with all of NATO, and at that, a war the economically and militarily depleted Russians couldn’t possibly hope to win.
I’ve heard that Putin has severe medical problems, up to and including Parkinson’s, and that mentally he isn’t in much better shape than Trump. Perhaps that is what lay behind this amazing concession. Or perhaps he’s crazy enough to think he could take on a coalition roughly double that of just America and win. I don’t know.
But we have a golden opportunity to end the fighting for now, and a pathway to perhaps getting Russia to retreated from the occupied areas.
Hopefully we won’t waste it.
