Falsehoods Swirl Around Trump-Putin Summit
The online falsehoods spreading across tech platforms were muddying the waters around Friday's closely watched Alaska summit, a test of the US president's pledge to end the three-year bloody war in Ukraine.
"Malign actors (have) flooded the internet and social media with falsehoods and distortions" that were "circulating from across the political spectrum and across the globe," disinformation watchdog NewsGuard said in a report.
Among them was the unfounded claim that American soldiers had recently shot and killed a Ukrainian assassin named Stefan Orestovych, a supposed trained sniper for Ukraine's special forces, in the Alaskan city of Wasilla.
There was no evidence that an assassin by that name even exists.
The falsehood, which circulated on X, Instagram, a QAnon conspiracy theory platform as well as a Sri Lankan news website, originated on Real Raw News, according to NewsGuard.
A self-proclaimed "humor, parody, and satire" site, Real Raw News is often mistaken as a legitimate news outlet and has repeatedly been called out by researchers for publishing fabricated claims about the Russia-Ukraine war as well as American officials and politicians.
Trump critics online have also falsely claimed that Putin signed a decree in January last year declaring Russia's sale of Alaska to the United States "illegal," while mocking the US president for hosting a leader who purportedly rejected American sovereignty over the territory.
Putin was "preparing the future annexation of Alaska and Trump fell for it," one user wrote on X, an unfounded claim that has also spread across Bluesky and TikTok.
The United States bought Alaska in 1867 from Russia, and there was no evidence that Putin had signed such a decree.
Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin nationalist accounts on social media were circulating an image of a fake "People's Republic of Alaska" flag, using the summit to assert that the territory rightfully belonged to Russia.
The images were being spread online by Russian nationalist media outlets as well as the Pravda network, a well-resourced Moscow-based operation known to circulate pro-Russian narratives globally.
"The fake flag is the latest instalment in a decades-old narrative pushed by ultra-nationalists in Russia, framing the Nineteenth Century sale of Alaska as a national betrayal," NewsGuard report said.
The swirling misinformation underscores how easily online falsehoods can originate and spread around a high-profile event, especially across tech platforms that have largely scaled back content moderation.
Trump extended the invitation for the summit at the Russian leader's suggestion.
The meeting will be closely followed by European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was not included and has publicly refused pressure from Trump to surrender territory seized by Russia.
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DW
30 minutes ago
- DW
For Ukraine, the Alaska summit was a complete disappointment – DW – 08/16/2025
A red carpet for Vladimir Putin and no results for Ukraine. The Alaska summit, which many had pinned high hopes on, turned out to be a complete disappointment from the perspective of many Ukrainians. During Saturday night, many Ukrainians stayed up and anxiously waited for news from the Alaska summit between US President Donald Trump and Russia's head of state Vladimir Putin. For some, there was hope the talks could lead to some sort of end of Russia's war against Ukraine. Many Ukrainians though feared the price for this might be territorial concessions Kyiv would be pressured into making. But it soon became clear that the summit in Alaska had brought no fundamental changes. "There were no concrete results for Ukraine," Oleksandr Kraiev of the Ukrainian Prism think tank told DW. "Thank God nothing was signed and no radical decisions were made," the North America expert said. "The summit was an extremely successful information operation for Russia. The war criminal Putin came to the US and shook hands with the leader of the free world." According to Kraiev, apart from "Trump's deference toward Putin, there were no final answers to the most important questions." He believes that Putin dealt with Trump "with surgical precision" and told him everything Trump wanted to hear. This way, Putin got everything he wanted out of the summit. According to Ivan Us from Ukraine's Center for Foreign Policy of the National Institute for Strategic Studies, the Russian president never wanted the summit to lead to an end to the war. Instead, Putin's goal was to legitimize himself and end his international isolation. "For Putin, having a joint photo with Trump was the goal of this summit. To show in Russia that the isolation is over, that there won't be new sanctions, and that everything is fine, so that there'd be positive impulses for the markets. And for Trump, it was a moment where he wanted to demonstrate strength. He was walking next to Putin while a US bomber flew above them, the same bomber that recently attacked Iran. This was a signal to everyone not to forget who the most important country in the world is," Us told DW. As if to confirm this, Dmitry Medvedev, chairman of Russia's Security Council, said after the Alaska summit that a "full-fledged mechanism for meetings" between Russia and the US at the highest level had been restored. "Important: The meeting proved that negotiations without preconditions and simultaneously with the continuation of the Special Military Operation are possible. Both sides directly put the responsibility for future negotiation results on Kyiv and Europe," Medvedev wrote on social networks. The term Special Military Operation is how Russia refers to its war against Ukraine. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Ivan Us thinks that the summit did not get Ukraine closer to peace. Instead, it intensified the chaos, as the US and Russia are making contradictory statements about continuing possible trilateral dialogue involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. For example, Moscow says that Trump and Putin did not discuss a trilateral summit with Zelensky, while Washington says the opposite. Zelenskyy himself spoke of receiving an invitation to a trilateral meeting. "We support President Trump's proposal for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the US, and Russia. Ukraine emphasizes: Important issues can be discussed at the level of heads of state, and a trilateral format is suitable for this," he wrote on social media after a phone call with Donald Trump. Zelenskyy shared that he would meet with Donald Trump in Washington on August 18. "Ukraine confirms once again that it is ready to work toward peace as productively as possible. President Trump informed me about his meeting with the Russian president and about the key points of the discussion. It is important that US power influences the development of the situation," the Ukrainian president said. There are fears in Ukraine that Zelenskyy's trip to Washington could result in new pressure from the US on Ukraine. "Any 'no' from the Ukrainian side could be portrayed as [a] lack of willingness to end the war. Trump essentially admitted that it's about an 'exchange of territories for security guarantees,' and he confirmed that agreement was reached on certain points and spoke of a 'chance for success,'" Iryna Herashchenko, Ukrainian MP and co-chair of the opposition party "European Solidarity," wrote on social media. She believes that such formulations allow Moscow to present this as legitimization of its demands. "Putin repeated during the brief briefing once again that the actual causes of the conflict must be eliminated. This means that Moscow will not change its goals - because the existence of an independent Ukraine is seen as the actual cause," warns Herashchenko. Ukrainian political scientist Vadym Denisenko, however, believes that Russia's idea of "doing business with the US in exchange for Ukrainian territory" didn't work. Putin managed to gain time, though. "At Alaska, they agreed to negotiate," Denisenko wrote on social media. Nevertheless, he argues that Putin "lost what was most important: his maneuverability. He drastically restricted his scope for action and is actually rapidly falling into China's arms." Denisenko believes that if no results regarding the end of the war are achieved within two months, the issue will become part of Chinese-American negotiations. "In other words: A new window for negotiations will open earliest at the end of the year, realistically only in spring 2026," he predicted. Judging by discussions among ordinary Ukrainians, what angers them most is the red carpet that was rolled out for Putin at the US military base in Anchorage. Countless angry comments on social media leave little doubt over how this was perceived in Ukraine. "History always remembers not only those who kill, but also those who bestow murderers with honors. This is a special kind of shame and complicity in crime, which is too often confused with diplomacy. Today, this gallery was expanded with a new picture, with a bloody carpet and a parade of honor guard for the architect of Bucha, Mariupol, Izium, thousands of torture chambers, mass shootings, and deportations," said Mustafa Nayyem, former parliament member and ex-head of the State Agency for Reconstruction and Infrastructure.
Int'l Business Times
3 hours ago
- Int'l Business Times
Europeans Try To Stay On The Board After Ukraine Summit
For European leaders, the absence of a Ukraine deal at the summit between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump has at least one upside: They have not yet been completely sidelined in a key strategic moment for the Continent's future. "It's good news that there was no deal, for both Ukraine and the Europeans," said Alberto Alemanno, a European law professor at the HEC university in Paris. He noted a serious risk that "a new European security map" would be drawn up while Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky and Europe's leaders watched from the sidelines. Europe found itself shut out of the summit in Alaska, and tried to weigh in ahead of the meeting with a flurry of calls and urgent meetings between leaders ahead of time. On Saturday, the French presidency said the leaders of Britain, France and Germany would host a video call Sunday for their so-called "coalition of the willing" to discuss steps towards peace in Ukraine. The meeting would come a day before Zelensky travels to Washington for talks with Trump -- five months after the Ukrainian leader was ambushed with a televised scolding during his previous Oval Office visit. European leaders also proposed a three-way summit between Zelensky, Putin and Trump. But it remains unlikely that Russia, hit by 18 rounds of European sanctions since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, is ready for any thaw in its glacial relations with the bloc. Putin made his stance clear on Friday, warning Ukraine and European countries to "not create any obstacles" and not "make attempts to disrupt this emerging progress through provocation or behind-the-scenes intrigues". "Clearly, what Vladimir Putin's intention is, is to keep Europeans out and Americans in," said James Nixey, a specialist in Russian foreign policy. After a debriefing with Trump and with Zelensky on Saturday, European leaders held their own video call on their next steps. Moscow "cannot have a veto" on Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO, they said in a statement signed by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Macron later called for increased pressure on Russia until "a solid and durable peace" had been achieved. But since the beginning of the war, European leaders "have never engaged with Putin", said Alemanno. "And all of a sudden they have to do so, without knowing exactly what are the terms of engagement," he said. "So they're a bit stuck." The risk is all the greater since Trump has clearly indicated in recent weeks that he is ready to walk away from the war, despite his campaign promise to end it within "24 hours". "Each morning when I wake up, my first thought is that we have to re-arm ourselves even faster," Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper on Saturday.
Local Germany
7 hours ago
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European leaders back Putin-Trump-Zelensky meeting
A statement, signed by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, insisted on maintaining pressure on Russia until peace was achieved, including through sanctions. The European leaders also insisted Moscow "cannot have a veto" on Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO. Russia has made clear it will not tolerate Kyiv's membership of the defence alliance. But the leaders said they were "ready to work ... towards a trilateral summit with European support". Friday's Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska ended without the US president extracting concrete commitments from Putin to halt Russia's invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022. "We will continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia's war economy until there is a just and lasting peace," said the European joint statement. European leaders had been uneasy over Trump's diplomatic outreach to Putin, arguing that Zelensky should have been involved in the Alaska summit. In a separate statement, Starmer praised Trump's efforts as bringing "us closer than ever before to ending Russia's illegal war in Ukraine". Macron, writing on X, cautioned against what he said was Russia's "well-documented tendency to not keep its own commitments". He called for any future peace deal to have "unbreakable" security guarantees. He also argued for increased pressure on Russia until "a solid and durable peace" had been achieved. Advertisement The European leaders welcomed what they called "security guarantees" made by Trump without giving details. A diplomatic source told AFP that Trump had offered Ukraine guarantees similar to -- but separate from -- NATO membership. "Strong security guarantees that protect Ukrainian and European vital security interests are essential," European Commission chief von der Leyen said on X. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban -- who has friendly ties with both Trump and Putin -- hailed the summit. "For years we have watched the two biggest nuclear powers dismantle the framework of their cooperation and shoot unfriendly messages back and forth. That has now come to an end. Today the world is a safer place than it was yesterday," Orban said on X.
