Pursuing Peace—The Alaska Summit

Successful First Step in Building Trust

Transcripts of Putin and Trump Alaska Speeches

The Alaska Summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin far exceeded my expectations of the pursuit of peace. This was despite unwelcoming media coverage by such media as Fox News. Fox News Neocon coverage of the Alaska Summit reflected their abysmal ignorance of and mind-locked ideological bent against anything Russian and especially against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been Russia’s leader for 25 years.

The expectation of the Fox Neocons seemed to be that Trump would compel Putin to accept an unconditional cease-fire in Ukraine. That expectation was irrational for several reasons, but it reflects the Neocon proclivity to look at negotiation as successful bullying. But successful negotiations start with building trust, and the Alaska Summit was a tremendous success because it made an excellent start at building trust.

There are several Fox commentators who have built a reputation for disrespectful assumptions and ignorant or slanderous false witness against Putin. Most of their disinformation comes from CIA, British MI6, and Hillary Clinton demonization campaigns. This is standard information warfare for regime changes.  Such foreign policy techniques are the road to international distrust and continuous war, maybe even World war III. US Foreign policy and ethical journalism don’t need that kind of defamation, especially when a foreign dignitary is visiting our country. Listening to some of the Fox commentators lowered my expectations to just hoping to somehow avoid World War III.  Trump fortunately lifted that.

I was particularly pleased with Trump’s defusing of Sean Hannity in an interview later in the day of August 15.

Most of the Fox rhetoric compared assumed US economic and military strength with assumed relative Russian weakness. Yet a contrary thread warned that Western Europe was in imminent danger if Russia was seen as victorious in Ukraine. This is contrary to actual evidence and reasonable analysis but opium to Russophobes and Cold War addicts stuck in 1938.

Fox’s Brian Kilmeade led a panel focusing on Russian economic weakness and vulnerability to a 19^th set of sanctions. To his flustered surprise, one panel member was not in lockstep with the false Fox narrative of Russian economic weakness. Christian Whiton, a former diplomat and prolific national security commentator pointed out that the US dollar had fallen 30 percent YTD against the Russian ruble.

I recently pointed out that the Russian GDP growth rate in 2024 was the highest in Europe at 4.3 percent, while Germany and the UK are experiencing economic decline. Much of the decline is due to sanctions that were supposed to bring down Russia. German, French, UK, and Dutch (Rutte) leaders have public approval ratings in the 20s. Russian economic growth may be only 1-2 percent, however in 2025 and 2026. In May 2025, the Russian Federation hit a record low unemployment rate of 2.2 percent.

 Kilmeade was quick to disagree with Whiton, but the facts were with Whiton rather than the Fox narrative. Within minutes, Whiton disappeared from the Panel.

Russia’s national debt to GDP ratio is only 20 percent despite the war compared to 123 percent for the US at the end of FY 2024.  The Russian inflation rate for 2025, however could run between 7 and 8 percent due to war spending and labor shortages. US annual inflation rate had risen to 3.1 percent on July 21, 2025. The impact of tariffs is not yet fully reflected.

With attractive new pay levels, the Russian military is getting 35,000 new recruits per month, while Ukraine is having to draft men over 60 and cannot replace its losses. In fact, according the a Ukrainian Member of Parliament, Ukraine has had 400.000 desertions during the war and is now losing 500 a day to desertion.

A constant propaganda theme of the Ukraine General Staff with US CIA and British MI6 input is that the Russians are losing more casualties.  If you know the one sided military situation in favor of the Russians, lower casualty rates for Ukraine are transparently absurd but it was repeated by US politicians and Fox heavy-weights.  According to US Army Col. (ret) Douglas Macgregor, Ukrainian military dead may be as high as 1.8 million, while Russian military dead are probably not much over 100,000—I think it is probably less. Retired US Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Saff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and William and Mary professor, believes on the basis of body recovery exchanges that the most recent ratio of Ukrainian military deaths to Russian may be 17 or 18 to one.

According to an August 7 Gallup poll, Ukrainian support for the war is collapsing. In areas still under Ukrainian control, 69 percent favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible. Only 24 percent believe they should fight until victory. It should be noted that about 38 percent of the residents of Ukraine withing 2010 borders are essentially Russian-speaking Russian ethnics. These are a strong majority in southern and eastern Ukraine. Few of these favor remaining under the control of a Ukrainian government.

Since few people could hear clearly Putin’s 12-minute speech at the end of the Summit, I thought it would be edifying to publish Putin’s salutation and the most important last 12 paragraphs, in addition to Trump’s closing paragraphs.  

From Putin/Trump Transcript Alaska 8-15-2025:

PUTIN: “Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, our negotiations have been held in a constructive atmosphere of mutual respect.” 

Last Putin paragraphs:

“It is known that there have been no summits between Russia and the U.S. for four years, and that's a long time. This time was very hard for bilateral relations, and let's be frank, they've fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that's not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. It is apparent that sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from the confrontation to dialog, and in this case, a personal meeting between the heads of state has been long overdue, naturally, under the condition of serious and painstaking work, and this work has been done.

In general, me and President Trump have very good direct contact. We've spoken multiple times. We spoke frankly on the phone. And the special envoy of the president, Mr. Witkoff, traveled out to Russia several times. Our advisers and heads of foreign ministries kept in touch all the time, and we know fully well that one of the central issues was the situation around Ukraine. 

We see the strive of the administration and President Trump personally to help facilitate the resolution of the Ukrainian conflict, and his strive to get to the crux of the matter, to understand this history, is precious. As I've said, the situation in Ukraine has to do with fundamental threats to our security.

 Moreover, we've always considered the Ukrainian nation, and I've said it multiple times, a brotherly nation. How strange it may sound in these conditions. We have the same roots, and everything that's happening is a tragedy for us, and terrible wound. Therefore, the country is sincerely interested in putting an end to it. 

At the same time, we're convinced that in order to, to make the settlement lasting and long term, we need to eliminate all the primary roots, the primary causes of that conflict, and we've said it multiple times, to consider all legitimate concerns of Russia and to reinstate a just balance of security in Europe and in the world on the whole, and agree with President Trump, as he has said today, that naturally, the security of Ukraine should be ensured as well. Naturally, we are prepared to work on that. 

Scruggs Commentary: Most Americans, including many members of Congress, are dangerously weak or misinformed on the root causes of the Ukraine War. Besides the NATO threat to Russian security beginning in 2008, they need to be familiar with the war’s beginning in 2014 with a US-backed regime change; the civil war that followed; final betrayal of the 2015 Minsk II agreement;  the ethnic and cultural cleansing of the Russian minority by the Ukrainian government and army; Ukrainian artillery attacks against Russian ethnic civilian areas in early February 2022; and US and British rejection of the Istanbul peace agreement in late March and early April 2022, and Ukrainian government shutdown of the largest religious denomination, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  

Scruggs Commentary: I am a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. I am not a pacifist or an isolationist. I believe we need a substantial but reformed military-industrial complex. I even believe we need to increase our military budget because we are falling behind the Russians and Chinese in military technologies and our ability to sustain our arms production and logistical systems. However, I am especially concerned that a huge proportion of Congress is mainly informed by Military-Industrial behemoths that contribute to their campaigns.

PUTIN: I would like to hope that the agreement that we've reached together will help us bring closer that goal and will pave the path towards peace in Ukraine. We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive that constructively and that they won't throw a wrench in the works. They will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress. [False flag operations etc.]

Incidentally, when the new administration came to power, bilateral trade started to grow. It's still very symbolic. Still, we have a growth of 20%. As I've said, we have a lot of dimensions for joint work. It is clear that the U.S. and Russian investment and business cooperation has tremendous potential. Russia and the U.S. can offer each other so much in trade, digital, high tech and in space exploration. We see that arctic cooperation is also very possible, in our international context. For example, between the far east of Russia and the West Coast of the U.S. 

Scruggs Commentary: Some Fox reporters mistakenly thought Putin was saying Russian annual growth was 20 percent. No, he said US and Russia bilateral trade had increased 20 percent since Trump took office in January 2025.

PUTIN: Overall, it's very important for our countries to turn the page to go back to cooperation. It is symbolic that, not far away from here, the border between Russia and the US, there was a so-called International Date Line. I think you can step over, literally, from yesterday into tomorrow, and I hope that's- will succeed in that, in the political sphere. I would like to thank President Trump for our joint work, for the well-wishing and trustworthy tone of our conversation. 

It's important that both sides are result-oriented and we see that the president of the U.S. has a very clear idea of what he would like to achieve. He sincerely cares about the prosperity of his nation. Still, he understands that Russia has its own national interests. 

I expect that today's agreements will be the starting point, not only for the solution of the Ukrainian issue, but also will help us bring back business-like and pragmatic relations between Russia and the U.S. 

And in the end, I would like to add one more thing. I'd like to remind you that in 2022, during the last contact with the previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague, it should not- the situation should not be brought to the point of no return, when it would come to hostilities and accept it quite directly back then, that is a big mistake. Today, when President Trump is saying that if he was the president back then, there would be no war, and I'm quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that. I think that overall, me and President Trump have built a very good business-like and trustworthy contact, and have every reason to believe that moving down this path, we can come and assume it better to the end of the conflict in Ukraine. Thank you. Thank you.

TRUMP: Thank you very much, Mr. President, that was very profound, and I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them, I would say, a couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway. So there's no deal until there's a deal. 

I will call up NATO in a little while, I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I'll of course, call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today's meeting. It's ultimately up to them. They're going to have to agree with what Marco and Steve and some of the great people from the Trump administration who've come here, Scott and John Ratcliffe. Thank you very much. But we have some of our really great leaders. They've been doing a phenomenal job. 

We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here. And I think, you know, everybody wants to deal with us. We've become the hottest country anywhere in the world in a very short period of time, and we look forward to that. We look forward to dealing- we're going to try and get this over with. 

We really made some great progress today. I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir. We had many, many tough meetings, good meetings. We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he's probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He's seen- he's seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we'll have a good chance when this is over.

So just to put it very quickly, I'm going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened. But we had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there. I would like to thank President Putin and his entire team, whose faces who I know, in many cases, otherwise, other than that, whose- whose faces I get to see all the time in the newspapers, you're very- you're almost as famous as the boss, but especially this one right over here. [Probably Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.]

But we had some good meetings over the years, right? Good, productive meetings over the years, and we hope to have that in the future. Let's do the most productive one right now. We're going to stop, really, 5, 6, 7 thousand, 1000s of people a week from being killed, and President Putin wants to see that as much as I do. So again, Mr. President, I'd like to thank you very much, and we'll speak to you very soon, and probably see you again very soon. Thank you very much, Vladimir.”

PUTIN: “Next time in Moscow.”

“if it is possible, so far as it depends upon you, live at peace with all.”—Romans 12:18