During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.
This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter declared that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The United States was the key guarantor of this principle until Trump took office.
The U.S. has stood against Russian invasions into Ukraine not only on this general principle, but because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions.
Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of Bloomberg reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country recovers its strength.
The plan revealed by the Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House.
Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “‘[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.’ Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongfully imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO.
On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
That plan reappeared in April and, once again, is back on the table.
At the same time, officials from this, the second Trump administration, are working to rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that led to Trump’s first administration. Although it is well established that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016, Trump has consistently tried to undermine that history by insisting that the many findings of Russian help for his campaign in 2016 were a hoax.
Lately, MAGA loyalists have worked to claim that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russian support for the Trump campaign, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. On Wednesday, Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last month overrode the advice of the Intelligence Community when she declassified and released a highly classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The document made reference to sensitive sources and methods, but Trump supported Gabbard’s release of the report.
White House officials appear to be revisiting the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election to try to distract voters from the story of Trump’s relationship to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Their pivot to this position has tied the two stories together in a way that had not previously been suggested. The surprising association has led Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles to speculate that Putin might possess “some form of the Epstein files” that Trump would prefer to keep from seeing the light of day.
Certainly, Putin is behaving like someone who is holding a strong hand of cards. Today Jennifer Jacobs, Margaret Brennan, and Olivia Gazis of CBS News reported that Putin “needle[d]” Trump this week by giving his special envoy Steve Witkoff the Order of Lenin, a Soviet-era award that commended outstanding service to the state, to pass on to the mother of 21-year-old American Michael Gloss, who was killed in 2024 fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia.
The journalists report that Gloss struggled with his mental health and did not appear to have been recruited by Russia. His family did not know he had enlisted in the Russian army or that he was in Ukraine.
Apparently, after he was killed, Russian officials learned that his mother, Juliane Gallina, serves at the CIA. By giving Witkoff an award named for the first head of the Soviet state to pass on to a CIA employee, Putin appeared to suggest that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.
