Trump – Putin meeting in Budapest is now officially canceled by the U.S. side

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Trump – Putin meeting in Budapest is now officially canceled by the U.S. side

Many laymen and a good many experts who are well known to the Community from their regular appearances on major interview podcasts will deeply regret the news that Washington has canceled, not postponed the Trump-Putin summit planned for Budapest, per today’s Financial Times and carried by Reuters. I am not among them, because in his present posture of subservience to Trump, it is best if President Putin is not given an opportunity to sacrifice core Russian interests and to overlook the loss of 150,000 Russian soldiers’ lives by accepting the ‘American conceptualization’ of what the end of the war will look like. That last remark on conceptualization was issued by Putin just a few days ago before it was withdrawn by Sergei Lavrov in a lame-looking acknowledgement that the American president has gone back on his words to Putin at their Anchorage summit and now is pressing for a cease-fire without addressing the root causes of the conflict.

I still maintain that Trump has been messaging Putin in various ways that he must end the war as soon as possible and that he, Trump, does not care if this means wreaking total destruction on Kiev here and now. This is what all the delays in applying secondary sections on Russian oil exports were all about. The sanctions themselves will start to bite very soon and that is heavy pressure on Putin to do what is needed. Sooner or later this issue will be resolved at the top in Russia, either by Putin or by his successor if he is pushed aside.

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I close this essay by sharing the video link from yesterday’s interview with NewsX World (India), the content of which I partly discussed in an essay yesterday.

https://youtu.be/wWepGQ4GJl0?si=8wlw5VH9TBPDOqBV

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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