As President Donald Trump heads to Alaska to meet with the KGB agent-turned-dictator for whom he has long held a fawning admiration, Russia experts worry that the big loser will be Ukraine, the neighbour Vladimir Putin invaded three and a half years ago.

“There’re lots of ways this can go wrong,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia analyst on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term. “I’m kind of worried about the fact that it’s supposed to be a one-on-one.”

Trump is traveling to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage for the meeting with Putin, with the stated goal of ending the bloodshed caused by Russia’s invasion. It will be Trump’s first meeting with Putin, now widely considered a war criminal, since he returned to office in January. Putin would face arrest travelling to most countries and needed a waiver of US sanctions to set foot on American soil.

Trump’s summit, though, was hastily scheduled with little groundwork, apart from meetings conducted by his friend from his New York real estate days, Steve Witkoff, whose last trip generated confusion after Witkoff apparently misunderstood Putin’s demands.

“I think that the main thing to watch is whether Putin is able to use his KGB training to bring Trump back under his spell,” said John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser at the time of his only previous summit with Putin in 2018. “And they can get back to being Vladimir and Donald, the good friends that Trump thought they were until they couldn’t get a ceasefire out of Putin for the first six months of this term.”

How much Trump actually pushes Putin to end his slaughter in Ukraine........

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