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,

Trump’s vision of “making America great again” depends on Europe being broken, torn apart by conflict, weakened, or even destroyed. Only then, in Trump’s fantasy, could the United States regain the kind of global dominance it enjoyed after World War II.

Felshtinsky notes that the “joint military exercises” Russia is preparing in Belarus this September look eerily similar to the ones that in 2022 morphed into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He warns that these drills could be the prelude to another strike, either deeper into Ukraine or westward into the Baltics, with Lithuania a likely first target. And he fears Trump’s secrecy with Putin, his willingness to sideline NATO, and his relentless pressure on Zelenskyy to “take the deal” may add up to something catastrophic: an implicit U.S. green light for Russian expansion.

For Felshtinsky, the horror is not only that Ukraine may be forced to surrender territory, but that Europe itself may be next in line. In his words, unless Ukraine has the arms and air defenses to strike Moscow directly, Putin will never stop; he will bleed Ukraine dry, then move on to Moldova, the Baltics, perhaps even Poland. What Trump calls “deal-making” looks to Felshtinsky like catastrophe-seeking, a deliberate gamble with global stability.

Reuters confirms that Putin left Alaska with more than good optics: he convinced Trump to drop the demand for an immediate ceasefire, to shelve the threat of sanctions on China, and to embrace Moscow’s “comprehensive peace” framing language that just happens to involve Ukraine making territorial concessions. Putin floated freezing the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for Kyiv withdrawing from Donetsk and Luhansk. Zelenskyy rejected it, of course, but Trump, ever eager to play dealmaker, dutifully told European leaders that recognizing Russian control of Donbas might “get a deal done.” And if Kyiv balks? Well, Trump said it himself: “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”

It’s the kind of posture that has Europe in a panic. Leaders are now dispatching their own “Trump whisperers”, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, into the Oval Office alongside Zelenskyy in hopes of babysitting Trump and preventing another February-style humiliation, when Zelenskyy was berated over his wardrobe and his supposed lack of gratitude. Macron and Starmer are convening war councils, Baltic leaders are praising Trump’s vague mutterings about “security guarantees,” all in the desperate hope of restraining him from unilaterally signing away Ukraine’s future on Putin’s behalf. In the polite language of diplomacy, they call this “bolstering Kyiv’s chances.” In plainer terms: they don’t trust Trump not to sell them out over dessert.

And dessert, it turns out, was actually on the schedule. Because in what may be the most emblematic detail of Trump’s kakistocracy, government staffers left eight pages of summit prep lying in the printer of an Alaskan hotel business center. Guests at the Hotel Captain Cook found the documents waiting like a complimentary continental breakfast: the meeting agenda, staff phone numbers, phonetic pronunciation guides (“Mr. President POO-tihn”), and a luncheon menu “in honor of His Excellency Vladimir Putin.” Filet mignon, halibut olympia, crème brûlée, all laid out in black and white for anyone to pick up before heading to the gym. Trump’s ceremonial gift was also listed: an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” as if to say, “Here, take the symbol of our national independence, please keep it on your desk while you annex your neighbors.” The White House later insisted these were nothing more than “a multi-page lunch menu.” Which is true, if your menus typically come with State Department contact lists.

This is how Trump’s world works: a hotel printer leaking state secrets, ICE agents accidentally looping strangers into fugitive manhunts, national security officials adding journalists to chats about airstrikes, and a U.S. president rolling out the red carpet for a war criminal while telling Ukraine to “take the deal.” It’s not diplomacy. It’s a clown show staged at the edge of a live minefield. Putin left Alaska with legitimacy restored and the U.S. president parroting his script. Zelenskyy will arrive in Washington flanked by nervous Europeans praying their presence can keep Trump from turning the Oval Office into a closing scene of The Apprentice: “Volodymyr, you’re fired. Donbas, you’re hired.”

The Alaska summit was less about ending a war than about rehabilitating a tyrant. Putin got his red carpet, his military flyover, his place in the Beast, and a U.S. president parroting his language about “land swaps” and “new world orders.” Zelenskyy, by contrast, faces another Oval Office lecture about gratitude, wardrobe, and why his nation should “take the deal.” Europe is reduced to sending in babysitters, desperate to keep Trump from signing away Ukraine’s future over crème brûlée. And the American people are left watching their commander-in-chief stumble through diplomacy like a reality show contestant trying to bluff his way through Final Jeopardy.

It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. But satire has a way of cutting to the truth faster than policy briefings. Andy Borowitz quipped recently that since returning to the White House, the only deal Donald Trump has actually managed to close is with Ghislaine Maxwell. And really, what else needs to be said? The great “dealmaker” rolls out the red carpet for a war criminal, scolds a democrat fighting for survival, and saves his one true art of negotiation for cutting favors to a convicted trafficker. That, in the bleakest sense, is the Trump Doctrine: dictators, predators, and pariahs get honored; allies get humiliated; democracy gets trashed in the hotel printer with the lunch menu. The world calls it a summit, history will call it a farce.