Red Carpets for War Criminals, Lectures for Democrats

Trump’s Alaska summit turned Putin into a statesman, Zelenskyy into a supplicant, and America into a sanctuary for pariahs

In Anchorage, the scene looked less like a wartime summit than a coronation for a czar. American troops unrolled the red carpet, jets roared overhead, and Donald Trump stood waiting like a blushing debutante to usher Vladimir Putin into the backseat of the Beast. Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court for abducting Ukrainian children, got the full pomp-and-pageantry treatment usually reserved for allies. Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the democratically elected leader fighting to keep his country alive, has learned the hard way that his White House welcome consists of condescension, scolding, and lectures about gratitude. Red carpets for war criminals, contempt for democrats, there’s your foreign policy in a nutshell.

Dr. Yuri Felshtinsky is not some fly-by-night pundit or Twitter thread conspiracist; he is a historian of Russia’s security services and a man who has been chronicling the Kremlin’s dark arts for decades. His books include Blowing Up Russia (co-authored with Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-FSB officer murdered with polonium in London), Blowing Up Ukraine, and From Red Terror to Terrorist State, all of which trace a through-line from the old Soviet KGB to the Putin regime’s current strategy of global destabilization. He has long warned that Moscow’s wars don’t stop at borders they metastasize, because the Kremlin doesn’t seek peace, it seeks control.

In the wake of the Alaska summit, Felshtinsky has voiced a suspicion that should send chills up the spine of anyone with a map of Europe: that Trump is not merely bungling negotiations but actively provoking Putin to widen the war. In his reading,