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View all search resultsDonald Trump’s peace in our time
The US-Russia Alaska summit sent a clear message to European leaders: They are on their own and as such, Europe must now emerge as a superpower in its own right.
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United States President Donald Trump (right) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the end of their press conference on Aug. 15, 2025, following the US-Russia summit on the Ukraine war at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. (AFP/Drew Angerer)
S
o now, United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have met again, this time in the former Russian territory of Alaska.
As an outside observer, one could almost get the impression that time had turned back to before the end of the Cold War, when the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, still determined the fate of the world in haughty unity.
But the meeting was much more than a historical reminiscence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wore a startling garment that he thought appropriate to the occasion and to Putin’s purposes: a sweatshirt emblazoned with “CCCP” (the Soviet Union’s Cyrillic abbreviation) across the chest. If it was a joke, there was a menace behind it.
Anyone who knows the longtime Russian foreign minister knows that he is not exactly known for his sense of humor or for overlooking details in the serious business of summit diplomacy. Lavrov’s sartorial choice was intentional: He intended to signal that Great Russia has returned to the top table of world affairs. The collapse of the USSR and its East European empire between 1989 and 1991 has been overcome; the empire is back, and it is reclaiming its lost territories.
The most important of these territories is, of course, Ukraine. As former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski famously pointed out in 1994, “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire”. Lavrov’s sweatshirt was not about the Cold War, but about the world as Russia intends it to be.
Trump’s invitation to Putin, an indicted war criminal, to meet on American soil endorsed that vision. Putin’s joint appearance with the US president, shaking hands on the red-carpet tarmac and sharing a limousine, announced to the world that Russia, without having backed down one iota from its maximum demands about Ukraine’s future, was recognized once more as an equal partner.
And with that, Putin broke more than three years of diplomatic isolation.
