Latest news with #Yuri Ushakov
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Mutual inconvenience: why Alaska for the Trump-Putin summit on Ukraine?
It is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will arrive in Alaska on Friday to present Donald Trump with a territorial demand for the 49th state, sold by Tsar Alexander II to the US for $7.2m (£5.4m) in 1867. The Russian president, after all, has another land deal on his mind – to persuade Trump of the merits of swapping parts of Ukrainian territory in return for him perhaps agreeing to the ceasefire the US president so desperately wants, but does not know how to get. Putin's influential foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Alaska was an 'entirely logical' location for the summit, as if the hop across the Bering Strait that divides the countries is a simple trip. The gap between the US and Russian mainlands may be 55 miles, but it is roughly a nine-hour flight from Moscow to the state capital of Anchorage. Even for Trump, travelling from Washington DC on Air Force One, it will be not much less than eight hours. Alaska is a location of mutual inconvenience, which indicates that other factors are at play. The remote state is a long way from Ukraine and its European allies, and risks pushing both into the distant background. Though Trump seems open, in theory, to letting Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, attend, it is hard to imagine Putin being so welcoming. His prize, after all, are private talks with the occupant of the White House about sanctions, trade, the reach of Nato in Europe – negotiating tracks far beyond his latest proposals for dominating Ukraine. Above all, Alaska is a safe place for the Russian leader to visit. Putin is still wanted by the international criminal court, accused of war crimes in relation to the forced deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia in March 2023. There is an arrest warrant out, but neither Russia nor crucially the US recognise the court. Nor are there any unfriendly countries to overfly. A trip around the top of the globe is unlikely to run into unexpected difficulties that might make travelling over the Black Sea to Istanbul in Turkey unattractive. A casual recollection suggests US-Russia or, going back further, US-Soviet summits, have been held in cooler locations, loosely reflecting the two countries' more northerly positions. Easily the most notable is Helsinki. It was in the Finnish capital in 2018, the last time Trump and Putin met while in office, that the US leader declared that he trusted Putin more than his own intelligence agencies when it came to allegations of interference in the 2016 US election. Those with cold war memories will recall the Reykjavik summit of 1986, where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev discussed eliminating nuclear weapons, but couldn't quite agree. Gorbachev wanted Reagan to give up testing on the star wars missile defence initiative, but the then US president would not agree to do so and the summit broke up in failure. But in the 1990s when summit meetings between the two countries were more frequent, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin even met in Birmingham and Shropshire in 1998, a time when Russia had just joined what then became the G8. Today, however, nuclear disarmament and G8 cooperation are quaint messages from a different era – one in which the group is again the G7. The Alaska meeting is only the fourth US-Russia summit since 2010 and, while it remains possible that the discussions will lead to a ceasefire in Ukraine, there are few grounds for optimism when the war continues to be fought so bitterly on the frontlines and in the rear, with Russia repeatedly bombing Ukrainian cities, trying to force its democratic neighbour into submission.
Fox News
7 days ago
- Business
- Fox News
Witkoff meets with Putin over war in Ukraine, no ceasefire agreements announced
White House envoy Steve Witkoff landed in Russia on Wednesday for his fifth visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin as President Donald Trump looks to force a peace deal and bring an end to the three-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine. Little seems to have been accomplished from the three-hour meeting in the way of securing a peace deal, or even circumventing the threatened sanctions by Trump that Putin now stares down, though according to Russian foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, the meeting was described as "useful and constructive." Ushakov said Putin "received some signals from Trump" and "sent some signals," but he did not elaborate on any specifics. The advisor also told reporters that Putin and Witkoff had discussed developing the "strategic partnership" between the U.S. and Russia but did not elaborate how. The comment came after Witkoff was spotted earlier in the day taking a walk near the Kremlin with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's envoy for investment and economic cooperation. Witkoff and Putin met shortly before noon in Moscow, according to the timestamp released by the Kremlin which accompanied an image of Putin and Witkoff smiling and shaking hands as Russian foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov looked on. Witkoff's team did not respond to Fox News Digital's questions on what the envoy was hoping to accomplish in his meeting with Putin, though some reporting this week suggested he may look to secure a moratorium on air strikes. Witkoff traveled to Moscow in a last-ditch effort to get Putin to capitulate to Trump's and Western calls for an end to the war, though the Kremlin chief was not expected to make great concessions in ending his war ambitions ahead of the trip. In mid-July, while seated next to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump promised to enforce "very severe" tariffs on Russia if Putin does not enter into a deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy within 50 days. "Tariffs at about 100%, you'd call them secondary tariffs," he had said, implying that nations who trade with Russia will see 100% tariffs slapped on them when trading with the U.S. He then pushed the date up to within 10 days of July 29, forcing the new deadline for Friday. But on Tuesday Trump walked back his 100% tariff threat amid tough trade talks with India and China, and said, "I never said a percentage." "We'll see what happens over the next fairly short period of time," he added in response to questions from reporters. "We have a meeting with Russia tomorrow. We're going to see what happens. "We'll make that determination at that time," he added. The tariffs would most drastically target China and India, which are the largest purchasers of Russian oil, though high tariffs on those nations, both of which are major traders with the U.S., would also mean higher prices for the American consumer.
