Trump Was Working With Putin The Entire Time
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Finlandization
14 min read
The Cold War policy of a smaller country aligning with a larger neighbor's foreign policy while maintaining nominal independence - a model often discussed as a potential fate for Ukraine and relevant to understanding 'fait accompli' pressure tactics
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Kirill Dmitriev
11 min read
The Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO mentioned as Putin's negotiator - readers likely don't know his background, his previous back-channel roles with the Trump administration, or his connections to Russian intelligence
Well, the story is out and the fait accompli to screw Ukraine (and Europe) will soon be delivered to Kyiv. All the talk of Trump pivoting to Ukraine, of Trump being angry with Putin, of Trump wanting to be an honest broker, all of it is finally dead and revealed to be the nonsense it always was. The tragedy, of course, is that people ever believed this self-destructive fantasy in the first place.
In the last few hours the story has been breaking across Washington DC, that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have been negotiating in secret to come up with a US-Russian “peace” plan without any Ukrainian input. There was this article in Axios which included these nuggets.
And the Politico morning playbook reported things similarly.
The similarity in reporting is so strong, that we can say that the White House is making sure this story gets out, and is expecting to move soon to get this plan shoved down Ukrainian and European throats. What does all the reporting agree on.
This is a detailed deal (28 points is a large number if true) that has been worked out over weeks, and probably months.
The negotiations were handled by Steve Witkoff (who though people make fun of him, needs to be seen as The Mouth of Trump) and Kirill Dmitriev—so Trump and Putin are deeply invested.
Ukraine has had no input into the process
European states have had no input into the process
The Trump-Putin plan will soon be presented to Ukraine and other European states as a “fait accompli” and they will be expected to back it under enormous pressure from the White House.
This has been something that has been coming since Trump came back to the White House.
The timing of it seems to have been dictated by the course of the war in 2025. Putin might wanted to spend the summer and fall taking as much Ukrainian territory as he could (while sacrificing hundreds of thousands of his soldiers) while blasting Ukrainian cities and civilians as much as possible—thinking this will get him the best deal he can.
Regardless, here we are. The deal seems close and Trump and Putin are behind it. The details of the deal will probably leak out soon, but we can assume they will not be
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