A long shot at peace

Trump-Putin summit in Alaska was deemed futile by many, yet it triggered a meeting of European leaders and Ukraine's president in Washington, signalling the beginning of a peace process

- Mridula Ghosh

Ne-LaskAva Alaska! ", which means "unwelcoming Alaska", has become a meme that describes the summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many in Ukraine also recalled a Russian proverb, "there is but a single step from love to hate", pointing to the swing of US-Russia relations along the love-hate pendulum. To cap it all, a Russian tank in the occupied zone of Zaporizhzhia was seen flying both the US and Russian flags until they were shot down.

For decades, Russia poured hatred towards America, threatening to reduce it to radioactive ash. Watching the red-carpet welcome for Putin at a US military base in Anchorage, while fighter planes circled above, it was clear that Putin fears neither NATO nor the US. Rather, he lies awake at night because of Ukraine and the Ukrainians.

Digging into history, no analogy could be found. It was not a new Yalta, where Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill to carve out the future map of Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany, although the USSR had first signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler and started the war by attacking Poland in 1939. Nor was it totally similar to the 1938 Munich Conference, where the fate of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, with its strategic fortifications, was decided without Czechoslovakia being present.

Beyond protocol and procedure, the Alaska summit was unlike the Geneva or Reykjavik meetings of the mid-1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan met and the Cold War began to thaw. There were no clear results and the media corps were visibly upset, as neither Trump nor Putin entertained their questions. Their statements were loud and promising but without detail. So why was this summit needed at all? Certainly not just to discuss Ukraine without Ukraine.