Summits have become the common currency of international diplomacy. Think of Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961; Nixon and Mao Zedong in China, 1972; Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, 1986; or Trump and Kim Jong-Un at Singapore in 2018. In between, key meetings of NATO, the G7, EU, WEF, OPEC, the Commonwealth, or of BRICS Western-sceptic nations have also rejoiced under the moniker of summits.

The ease of long-haul air travel means there are many more gatherings of these alphabet soups than there used to be, but Winston Churchill, with his sense of history, was aware they were nothing new. He wrote about the Congress of Vienna, that ran from September 1814 to June 1815, attended in person the January to June 1919 peace negotiations at Versailles, and organised key encounters with Roosevelt and Stalin between 1941 and 1945.

The more significant they are to the world, the more summits require huge stage-management, massive preparation, and exhaustive face-time, still making them relatively rare beasts. Like London buses, none are witnessed for ages, then suddenly three appear. Recently, the world was treated to a Trump-Putin encounter to ‘solve the Ukraine question’ at the Elmendorf-Richardson US military base in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August. This was followed rapidly by a gathering of six NATO, EU and European leaders, plus Prime Minister Starmer and President Zelensky at the White House on 18 August to ‘correct Trump’s perceived pro-Moscow tilt’.

To thrash out the desires of their political masters, on 20 August, Italian Admiral Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, summoned the alliance’s 32 defence chiefs to a digital summit to consider America’s initiatives to end the Moscow-Kyiv antagonism and possibly put boots on the ground in Ukraine. The jury is out on the wisdom of a peacekeeping force. Back in the 1990s, NATO’s Bosnian commitment, with which I served, required at its height more than 60,000 personnel from 32 nations. Generals reckon that Ukraine, a much larger entity, could absorb 500,000, and with risks of an armed showdown with Russia, it would be a mission too far.

Undergoing extensive research, briefing and even wargaming beforehand, summit delegations generally include off-camera platoons of advisers and subject-matter experts, whom I have occasionally joined. The legion of specialists and translators that lubricate summit diplomacy were in evidence in some images from the multinational 18 August gathering. However, for the all-important encounter three days earlier, Trump strode into action with none save a translator, assuming that his six pre-summit White House-Kremlin phone calls and five trips of envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow would be sufficient.

By contrast, when Mr Putin’s Ilyushin Il-96-300PU presidential command aircraft, operated by his Special Flight Detachment ‘Rossiya’, landed on American soil, it was packed with linguists, photographers, officials – and spies. Alaska, of course, was once Russian, bought in 1867 from Tsar Alexander II for $7.2 million, and despite the formal document signed, sealed and printed in Russian, French and English, this hasn’t stopped some Russian politicians from demanding it back.

It is noticeable how Trump leads all foreign policy initiatives himself, sidelining his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, and is obviously not cut from the same cloth as Jefferson, Marshall, Dulles, Kissinger, Haig, Albright, Powell, Rice and other distinguished predecessors. Rubio’s department is also in crisis, undergoing a huge reduction in its ranks. Although employing 78,000 worldwide, of whom 60,000 are locally hired, from 11 July, cuts of seasoned staff with critical language skills, including Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, have been made, seemingly without consideration for their service or expertise.

Fast, chaotic, and seemingly more about grabbing headlines than making the department stronger, reductions to the core workforce of about 17,600 are in the order of ten per cent. Foggy Bottom, the Washington suburb where the State Department resides, has just got foggier. The Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, Office of Science and Technology Cooperation, and International Information and Communications Policy team and most other bureaus have been diminished or dismantled. Even the US Embassy in Kyiv was not spared, causing Senator Angus King from Maine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to lament: ‘It’s like throwing away your umbrella when it’s pouring with rain.’

This mirrors the numerous firings or forced retirements of senior officers at Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, most recently Lieutenant General Jeffery Kruse, head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency on 23 August. Their collective crimes appear to be delivering military assessments that the White House does not want to hear. Thus, in matters of defence and foreign affairs, Capitol Hill favours loyalty over expertise. From Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and Putin’s commanders, history tells us this has never been a wise policy.

Lacking adequate preparation or the ring of advisers usual on such occasions, and instead leaning heavily on Steve Witkoff’s interactions with the Kremlin, the massively oversold Alaska summit failed to produce any tangible outcome, and indeed was terminated early. Putin and Trump talked privately for three hours, lunch was cancelled and the press conference, unusually led and dominated by the Russian, was curtailed. That no date had been agreed for a follow-up meeting was evident when Putin suggested, in English, ‘next time in Moscow’, which caught Trump by surprise.

Of Russian ancestry, Witkoff (born 1957), a New York property developer and presidential golfing partner, has been widely criticised for treating the traditions of diplomacy as another business activity geared primarily towards money, following the inclinations of his master. He takes only a translator with him on his travels, and – here my inner historian recoils – keeps no formal notes.

This shouldn’t necessarily be a problem, for Anglo-American leaders have always employed businessmen to reach out. Winston Churchill used his fixer, the entrepreneur Brendan Bracken, founder of the Financial Times, the Banker magazine, and managing editor of the Economist. Armand Hammer was middle-man to five Soviet general secretaries and seven US presidents, while financier Averell Harriman was the trusted confidant and emissary of FDR and later husband to Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela. However, such envoys need to be interconnected to the mainstream departments of government, which Witkoff and his master are not.

The Trump-Witkoff approach eschews the machinery of briefings beforehand and copious note-taking, and was thus doomed to failure when it came up against the exhaustively prepared Putin and his minions, many of whom once trod, like their master, the bureaucratic corridors of the KGB and its successor, the FSB. Trump has form with grand summits that yield little, having met Putin for two hours in Helsinki (2018) and Kim Jong-Un in Singapore that same year and Hanoi in 2019, without aides, stenographers, or any result. It is clear the US President is impatient with the slow-burn diplomacy of maps and parchment, preferring the red carpet-and-limousine side of great meetings in his pursuit of a Nobel Prize for Peace (an obsession ever since one was awarded to President Obama in 2009, and an accolade his own money can never buy), while his ritzy mix of golf and chummy bamboozlement spectacularly fails to exploit any opportunities presented. In this case, lack of progress will condemn the Russo-Ukrainian war to continuance for some time to come.

So why would the arch troublemaker, Putin, welcome a summit with the arch dealmaker, Trump? From the first minutes of the 24 February 2022 Russian invasion, combat troops have formed the central narrative of Ukraine’s impressive defence against their foes. With Russian losses in Ukraine now assessed by most observers at over one million, a quarter of whom are fatalities, the Kremlin is hurting. Equipment losses include over 30,000 armoured vehicles, including 10,000 tanks, 750 aircraft and helicopters and nearly 30 vessels. Ukraine has lost heavily, too, but nothing on this scale.

At home, by every metric, Moscow’s economy is imploding. Though buoyed up by monthly gas and oil sales to India, China and Turkey, shipped by the ‘shadow fleet’ of around 1,400 tankers, whose murky ownership and inclination to turn off their transponders are essential in evading EU sanctions, most Russians are aware their economy is in dire straits.

According to Rosstat, Russia’s own Federal State Statistics Service, GDP has been hovering at one per cent for much of the year due to the deepening wartime mobilisation of industry. In non-defence sectors, domestic output has slumped: throughout the first half of 2025, production of televisions and washing machines fell by 30 per cent, footwear by 29 per cent and refrigerators by 12 per cent. Huge imports of white goods from China have not reached the Russian public, as the microchips that operate them have been stripped out and repurposed for drones that would be otherwise inoperable due to sanctions. Car production has plunged by 28 per cent, while truck output plummeted by 40 per cent. The building materials sector, particularly of cement, is also in freefall. Russia’s coal industry has just recorded a $3 billion loss as it struggles to cope with the effects of sanctions on exports during three years of war.

In the same period, inflation has been running at ten per cent, with interest rates at a punishing high of 20 and only recently reduced to 18 per cent. To paper over these cracks, Russia is dipping into its National Wealth Fund reserves, but since the start of the 2022 war, roughly half has been spent. Continued drawing at current rates will exhaust the fund in less than two years, when Moscow will have little choice but to raise taxes and increase state borrowing. Fearing another 1917 moment, more of Russia’s armed service personnel are engaged in monitoring and policing internal dissent than are supporting the war against Ukraine. It has just been revealed that Russian cyber-officials are now systematically restricting access of their citizens to the world wide web, social media abroad and international phone calls. Even though he has no plans to scale back military spending, budgeted at 40 per cent of all federal expense for 2025, this is obviously a war Putin cannot continue to fight forever.

Moscow hoped the dark arts of unrestricted cyber warfare would prevail, but the keyboard warriors of Kyiv’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) pursued a winning digital offensive that has never gained the same attention as their armed forces. Ukraine’s cyber soldiers have been battling online since before 2014, when Putin’s troops first illegally occupied the Crimea and Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. The skills Kyiv’s men acquired in eight years of electronic warfare prior to the 2022 invasion explain why  Zelensky’s computer whizzkids still prevent Moscow from gaining the upper hand in the ether.

Elsewhere, in the manner of Britain’s wartime SOE, numerous behind-the-lines sabotage teams directed by Kyiv’s SBU security service have been assassinating Russian commanders, damaging roads, bridges and rail infrastructure, hitting power plants, disrupting a wide range of war-related manufacturing plants and destroying 13.5 per cent of oil-refining capability. Its 30,000 personnel are six times larger than the British domestic MI5 and external MI6 services combined. More recently they have been directing drones and laser-marking targets throughout the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, on 18 August, Zelensky unveiled his FP-5 ‘Flamingo’ missile, already in production. Fitted with a 1,150 kg (2,540 lb) warhead and possessing a range of 3,000 kilometres (1,900 miles), flocks of Flamingos are reportedly already in production and ready to hit Russia as effectively as Putin’s drones and rockets are nightly targeting Ukraine.

One reason for Putin’s faux negotiations, which culminated at Alaska, is to stall and buy time for his economy to breathe and his armed forces to reconstitute, retrain and re-equip. Former prime minister and president Dimitri Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his press secretary Maria Zakharova, and Putin’s spokesman Dimitri Peskov, have been among the most vociferous and rabid in calling for Ukraine to surrender territory, drop its intention to join NATO, adopt neutrality, and massively shrink its armed forces, along with the demand that Zelensky to step down as national leader. They claim that the president in Kyiv, elected in 2019, has overstayed his five-year tenure, and that fresh elections should have been held in March-April 2024.

This overlooks the Ukrainian constitution, which does not allow such processes while the country is under martial law, as Ukraine has been since 24 February 2022. In fact, the president’s position is perfectly legal: martial law is extended every 90 days with parliamentary approval, and Zelensky reaffirmed in post every 18 months by the same body. No individual has the power to surrender Ukrainian territory, especially around the time of Ukraine’s 34th Independence Day, due on 24 August this year. Zelensky’s consistent popularity of around 70 per cent in surveys organised by Kyiv’s ten opinion polling companies is in embarrassing contrast to the unpopularity of Putin and Trump.

Russia’s preconditions, which form the real obstacles to peace, were made because Putin is now nervous of the achievements of his smaller neighbour and its leader, both of which were much weaker prior to the invasion. The real reason the Kremlin demands no NATO membership, and a reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces, is because the latter are now the most effective and best-trained army at conventional warfare in the world. When exercising with NATO troops, my friends in uniform confide it is the Ukrainians with their sheer professionalism, high morale and proficiency, who are teaching them, not the other way about.

Another of Putin’s demands is to absorb the four oblasts (provinces) of Luhansk and Donetsk (together forming the Donbas, which contains the bulk of Ukraine’s coal mines and steel foundries), Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, plus semi-autonomous Crimea. Putin’s men control most of Luhansk, but 30 per cent of the other three oblasts remain in Ukrainian hands and are fiercely contested. In their ignorance, Trump and Witkoff loosely talk of ‘land swaps’, but snaking across the Donetsk front is a Ukrainian-built 30-mile fortress belt of wire, concrete bunkers, deep trenches, anti-tank obstacles and minefields, which form the main block against any further penetration or advance on Kyiv. Running north from Kostiantynivka to Sloviansk, and still being perfected, it tracks a main road and exploits natural features like woods and swamps, and has turned every village and urban area into ‘hedgehog’ defensive nodes of sharpened steel.

Although manning extended features such as the First World War’s Hindenburg Line or the Maginot and Siegfried lines of the Second World War comes with warnings about sinking massive military resources into relatively small battlefield features, observers of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict note that despite breakthroughs elsewhere, Moscow has not managed to capture objectives protected by fortifications. Of course, Putin hasn’t vouchsafed the ploy to Witkoff or Trump, but as Russian forces have failed to overcome this monster engineering project after three years of costly fighting, the man in the Kremlin has now switched to a charm offensive. He thinks that a blitzkrieg of bonhomie on his American counterpart will pressure Zelensky into yielding it.

NATO generals describe this sort of key ground as a ‘centre of gravity’, and recognise that its surrender, as proposed at the Alaska summit, would leave Kyiv – and Eastern Europe – ever more vulnerable to attack, and open to a breakthrough capable of threatening Ukraine’s very existence as a state. Acquisition of the Sloviansk Line now forms part of Putin’s demands to conclude a ceasefire. In 2024 alone, Ukraine sunk nearly $1 billion into building fortifications. To start all over again on new linear defences across less advantageous terrain would be a huge blow to morale and, in any case, probably beyond Kyiv’s stretched finances.

Likewise, Putin demands the Crimea, from where he has already expelled much of the local population, as did his predecessor Stalin. I have fond memories of the diamond-shaped peninsula, once fraternal home to the Russian and Ukrainian Black Sea Fleets, both berthed in Sevastopol to the west. Plied with vodka, blinis and caviar, and serenaded by the balalaika-playing musicians of the Ukrainian Fleet, I visited each corner, from the Crimean War battlefields of the 1850s around Sevastopol and Balaklava, to Yalta, the Tsar’s former summer palace, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin quaffed syrupy local wines while redrawing the map of Europe, and Kerch in the east. Now home to Putin’s controversial bridge to mainland Russia and a vast monument to wartime partisans, I recall old Kerch as a lonely, rusting backwater that never got round to demolishing its statue of Lenin.

With Murmansk, Vladivostok and St Petersburg icebound for part of each year, Crimea’s value to Putin is as Russia’s only warm-water naval base, more important now with the loss of leased facilities at Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. However, Sevastopol’s benefits are currently outweighed by being within range of Ukrainian missiles, and those units of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet not already sunk remain bottled up in its port, afraid to emerge. Turkey is pleased at the current absence of Russian warships in the Black Sea, but any reduction of Ukrainian military might, another Putin demand, would remove the threat to Sevastopol and restore the Kremlin’s naval dominance. Although Crimea’s parliament and government buildings were illegally occupied by Putin’s special forces on 27 February 2014, Ukraine has continued to supply electricity to the region at Kyiv’s expense, to demonstrate their rightful ownership of the region.

This prompts the inescapable conclusion, obvious to all but Trump and Witkoff, that Russia is tottering financially and militarily, while Kyiv continues to hold the upper hand. Both Europe’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and NATO need to shout this message on every possible occasion, reminding the White House that the Kremlin’s narrative is demonstrably false. Yet, with his KGB background, we should not be surprised, for that was Putin’s profession – to lie and deceive, and he remains very good at it. Team Trump was certainly taken in. Team Vladimir’s presence in Alaska on 15 August achieved little except to confirm their apparent domination over President Trump, and was portrayed by Moscow’s media as such. It has temporarily restored Russian morale and buoyed up their leadership.

‘It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit’, said Churchill in 1950 during the dark days of the Cold War, and first use of the term to describe a significant diplomatic encounter. However, in Anchorage the scales were uneven. Drawn as he is to autocrats who exude strength, Trump spent three hours at Alaska fawning over his opposite number to an embarrassing extent. Shedding the sanctions and opprobrium imposed by the International Criminal Court, for Putin the encounter was the moment when, to misquote John le Carré, the spy came in from the cold. Observers were left with the impression that for both, Anchorage was a useful distraction from problems back home. None of it had anything to do with Ukraine. Given that it was merely the annual general meeting of a mutual admiration society, I wonder why Putin and Trump even bothered.