Putin's Strong Hand in Alaska Poker Game

By Rhod Mackenzie

The long-anticipated meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is finally going to take place. On Friday, the two presidents will meet in Alaska and finally be able to talk face-to-face.
Now lets remember that over the last 3 years the US has introduced some 30 thousand sanctions against Russia to destroy its economy and spent $300 billion on the military effort on the Ukraine in an effort to destroy Russia militarily and bring about a change of president and government. Their efforts on both fronts have failed miserably with Russia's economy doing well and its forces continuing to gain territory in the Ukraine. So Vladimir Putin goes into this meeting with a strong hand while the US president is on the back foot,never sure if the information he is getting from his so called intelligence services is accurate and their reports are true.
After all they have been telling him that the Russian economy is going to collapse every week for the last few years and that the Ukraine is winning the battles and all they need is more missiles,tanks and air defences. None of which we know to be true.
Now lets not forget that this will be the first time the two Presidents have met so for some time, and to understand this, it is worth recalling the history of their relationship.
Now They first communicated on 14 November 2016. It was a telephone meeting: Putin congratulated Trump on his election as US President. Since then, they have spoken on the phone numerous times (17 times officially during Trump's first term and six times during the first six months of his second).
They shook hands for the first time on 7 July 2017 in Germany at the G20 summit. They also had their first personal conversation, which lasted two hours. The two presidents had planned to maintain regular contact, but fate decreed otherwise.
However now that the Tulsi Gabbard US Director of National Inteligence has released the files to show that the allegations of Trump's so called Russia collusion,its hacking of the Democratic party servers andits election interference have been shown to be complete and utter fabrications it is Vladimir Putin who goes in to the meeting from a position of strength.
Throughout the last 8 years he has consistently denied all of the allegations by the US Deep State and now their lies have been shown it shows Trump that its not Putin that is his enemy but his domestic opponents in the Neo Con Uniparty
In the eight years since their first meeting, Putin and Trump have only met physically five times, and all of these meetings took place within the first two years. Of these meetings, only one was a real summit, i.e. a specially organised bilateral event: the talks on 16 July 2018 in Helsinki.
There they spent five hours in dialogue, after which the American press accused Trump of betrayal of the USA for saying that he believed Putin, rather than American intelligence reports, regarding 'Russian interference in the elections'. For the record none of the these so called intelligence operatives or their media lackeys have ever appologised to Russia for their lies and smeers.
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In other words, the only full-fledged summit during Trump's first term was used as a pretext for further criticism of him and the now conpletely debunked and discredited Steele Dossier and the Russiagate hoax .
All Trump's other meetings with Putin took place on the sidelines of international events: one in Ho Chi Minh City in November 2017, and two in Paris and Buenos Aires in late 2018.
However these could not even be called official meetings; the presidents spoke briefly while on the move or at official receptions. It was not Putin who wanted to conspire; it was Trump who did not want to “show the light”, fearing the reaction of the American press.
In June 2019, he decided to shake hands with Putin again in front of TV cameras in Osaka. There, on the sidelines of the G20 summit, they held a separate official meeting. To date, it was the last one.
In total, they met six times, and six years have passed since the meeting in Japan — during this time, Trump lost and then won the presidential election.
Even before his victory, he promised to meet with Putin and 'end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours'. Now more than six months have passed, and the meeting has finally become a reality.
The two presidents will, of course, discuss Ukraine, but not only that. Moreover, the meeting's main significance will not be a breakthrough on the Ukrainian issue — this is extremely unlikely given the real chances of ending the conflict.

The most important thing will be that Trump and Putin will be able to talk frankly about everything they want, without the press looking over their shoulders and lying yet again claiming that Putin controls Trump. This is a fundamentally important moment for Trump:however he feels much more confident now in his second term than in his first.
This confidence concerns both the balance of power in Washington and the mass media's (and their owners') attitude towards Trump — he now sets the agenda himself. You only have to look at the composition of the US delegation at the last meeting in Helsinki : Trump was accompanied by Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Fiona Hill, everyone of them were Russaphobic war mongering neo cons.
Now none of them work with Trump, and its not surprising that both Bolton and Hill are openly criticical of him in the media.
However Trump in 2025 is much more confident and experienced than the Trump of 2018, and this will undoubtedly affect the course of negotiations with Putin.
Of course, there is and never was a 'bromance' between them (which was one of the ways in which they tried to discredit him during his first term), and Putin has no compromising information on the US leader.
Now Trump is neither a 'useful idiot' nor a Putin fan boy. However, they have something even more important than mutual undertanding: they respect each other, they want to clearly grasp each other's position and arguments, and they want to find a way to reach an agreement in good faith.
They also have a great mutual interest — not political, but human — which is naturally difficult to satisfy through telephone conversations alone.
If they were left alone together for a couple of days, the consequences could be very serious — and positive for the world. Even a one-day summit could be a significant event and the beginning of major geopolitical changes.
Despite all the differences between Russia and the United States in terms of character and interests, both presidents understand that the current world order, built by the North Atlanticists, no longer serves their countries' interests or works. They are trying to change it, and these changes do not necessarily have to be multidirectional and uncoordinated.
The choice of Alaska as a meeting place is unexpected but symbolic: to discuss problems in the west, Russia is turning to the east, and the future of western Russian lands will be debated on former Russian territory. However, Trump and Putin will not only discuss Malorossiya — Alaska is larger than Ukraine. In every sense.