Putin has such an arrangement with Belarus and might be satisfied with a Ukraine that’s not fully sovereign, militarily weak and outside of NATO. At the Alaska summit, Putin not only mentioned Ukraine as a “brotherly nation,” but also emphasized that “the situation in Ukraine has to do with fundamental threats to Russian security.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered this line in response to criticism of President Trump inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to U.S. territory: "He displayed a huge amount of military hardware and then did a flyover.

President Donald Trump has taken aim at MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace in a bizarre social media rant. The drama started when 79-year-old Trump kicked off his Sunday morning with a cryptic post on Truth Social. “Bela,” he wrote, leaving his followers to debate the meaning of the word.

Trump met with Putin in Alaska last Friday. The leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Italy and the European Union and NATO then agreed to descend on Washington along with Zelenskyy, after Trump appeared to abandon a stance favouring a ceasefire be agreed to before work on a comprehensive peace deal.

Suddenly, after Alaska, Trump claimed that “mere ceasefires” were unreliable and that only a “final peace agreement” would do. In other words, in exchange for nothing, Putin got a propaganda victory and convinced Trump, at least for now, to adopt his preferred path to “negotiations.”