BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN
Last Summer, I wrote a lot of nasty things about Trump’s envoy to Putistan, the New York estate agent, Steve Witkoff. And his partnership in dumb with Donald Trump that led to the summit in Alaska - and Ukraine paying for it ever since.”
The Alaska summit was built on a misunderstanding: Witkoff had misunderstood what Putin told him. And because Trump could not admit that the summit itself had been built on a blunder, the blunder became policy.
From my piece one year ago:
Stay focused, folks, because this is truly a unique moment in world history when dumb really rules. This turn of events beggars belief, even for the Trump administration. If I had written this as a film script, Hollywood would have been rejected as too fanciful. (We know the following line of events mainly from the Wall Street Journal and German BILD. But yesterday, sources in the Danish and British governments, who were briefed on the relevant calls, confirmed to me the content.)
After Steve Witkoff’s meeting with Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday, Witkoff, a property developer, briefed his boss:
He told him that Russia was now, all of a sudden, ready to withdraw from two of the southern regions - Kherson and Zaporizhzhia - in exchange for complete control of the Donbass. This was surprising, of course. And, of course, total baloney.
A chest-thumping Trump told his European ‘partners’ that Witkoff’s meeting with Putin had been “even more productive than expected.” Oh, the irony.
Because overnight, it turned out that the only thing that Putin had offered Witkoff was a pause in bombing Ukrainian infrastructure while the Ukrainian army withdrew from the four regions that Putin demanded (and demands).
But by then, the Trump administration had gone public, ‘supporting’ the non-existent Russia ‘peace proposal’, Trump publicly talking about swapping of territories, and declaring that a summit would soon take place.
It turns out, concluded BILD, that “Trump’s special envoy is said to have completely misunderstood some of the Russians’ statements and misinterpreted them as concessions from Putin.”
“He misinterpreted Russia’s demand for a ‘peaceful withdrawal’ of Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian troops from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as an offer of a ‘peaceful withdrawal’ by the Russians from these regions.”
Please read that again. It is, as they say in the movies, a true story.
So, now - on the basis of a mega-blunder, Trump had invited Putin to a much-hyped summit in Alaska. Few presidents in the world would ever admit a blunder of such magnitude and call off a summit, and certainly not Donald “we are winning winnning winnning” Trump.
‘Something’ had to come out of the summit, ‘something’ that Trump could pretend was a ‘result’.
”Ukraine will get hurt,” I warned, "Trump has to agree ‘something’ with Putin – and judging from what we know so far, and as it looks at the time of writing, with no Ukrainians in sight – they will agree on Ukraine handing over 20% of its territory to Russia.”
And since then, Trump and his henchmen have - even when, from time to time, being less than totally enamoured with the Russian dictator - stuck to that as the basis for potential peace or ceasefire negotiations.
The Trump administration fully accepts the principle that Ukraine will have to surrender territory, while proposing a settlement that would leave Russia in possession of much of what it currently occupies.
Trump repeated this in October 2025:
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said about the conflict, “They should stop at the battle line - go home, stop fighting, stop killing people.”
In other words: freeze the war where it is and leave the territory currently occupied by Russia in Russian hands.
Unsurprisingly, since the Alaska summit, one year ago today, Putin and Lavrov have repeatedly invoked what Moscow calls the “Anchorage agreement” or “spirit of Anchorage”
So this - Ukraine effectively surrendering roughly 20% of its territory to Russia - became, in Donald Trump’s mind, the deal that should be pursued.
In the mind of the Trump administration, the question was not whether Russia should be allowed to keep what it is occupying of Ukraine. No. The question is why the ‘damned’ Russians and Ukrainians can’t just agree on the last few details of how that deal will be implemented.
In April 2026, VP Vance said:
“We’re talking about haggling at this point over a few square kilometres of territory in one direction or another.”
“Is that worth losing hundreds of thousands of additional Russian and Ukrainian young men?”
“We think the answer is clearly no.”
The logic was now explicit. Territory was something to haggle over; Russia's occupation was the baseline.
At meeting after meeting since Alaska one year ago, Donald Trump has tried to push Zelensky to give up swaths of territory to Russia.
And at every meeting, the Ukrainian president has flat out refused this.
Therefore, in Donald Trump’s mind, Ukraine is the one blocking ‘the deal.’
The result is that for more than a year, Washington has provided virtually no new military aid to Ukraine, and has been messing about on both sanctions on Russia and Patriot interceptors for Kyiv.
In all of 2025:
U.S. new military aid allocations to Ukraine: €0.4 billion.
Europe’s contribution: €36.8 billion in military aid.
Over the same period, Russia has intensified its ballistic missile strikes. By now, with Ukraine's Patriot interceptors virtually exhausted, the Russian missiles are now getting through almost every time, devastating Ukrainian apartment blocks and lives.
All winter and spring, month by month, Russian missiles have killed more and more Ukrainian civilians, around 200 or more people per month, as Ukraine was running out of Patriot interceptors.
With 437 civilians killed and 2,610 injured, July 2026 was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since May 2022, according to the UN.
My conclusion one year ago:
“More Ukrainians will be killed as a direct result of Steve Witkoff being a Dummkopf, and persuading his boss to stage a summit with nothing to summit about.”
P.S.: Steve Witkoff will be visiting Ukraine next week.
The man whose misunderstanding and lack of knowledge of the conflict helped create the Alaska crisis is now returning to Kyiv to negotiate its consequences.
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