00:00Andrei Kutunov is a political scientist at the Moscow-based think tank, the Valdai Club.
00:05I asked him a little earlier about the reaction in Russia to the meeting.
00:09Well, let me start with saying that there is some kind of magic about U.S.-Russian summits.
00:17People expect a lot, sometimes they expect too much.
00:21And this magic goes back to the old Soviet days, where these summits were really changing the world.
00:27So right now, if you look at the immediate reaction of the public, many people were disappointed because they thought that the summit would end with a kind of peace settlement, with a deal.
00:41And if you look at the reaction of the Russian stock exchange market, you'll see that many stocks went down.
00:50However, this is clearly a rather superficial reaction to what happened in Alaska.
00:58And it seems that the two sides are more or less happy with what they were able to accomplish.
01:07And both leaders maintain that indeed some progress has been reached.
01:12And I think for Putin, it is particularly important that Trump agreed that in order to reach a stable peace, a ceasefire is not sufficient.
01:27It's not enough.
01:28You have to work on the political fundamentals of the peace settlement.
01:33And now it will be up to Trump to talk to President Zelensky and to convince him that a ceasefire with no strings attached is not something that can provide for a lasting peace.
01:48And what would you say the chances are of a trilateral meeting now between the United States, Russia and Ukraine, including President Zelensky?
01:57Well, I think that at some point such a meeting should definitely take place.
02:02The question is when and under what specific circumstances such a meeting can happen.
02:10I think that in any case, it would be important to reach full consensus between Trump and Putin to resolve some of the remaining issues, which stay unresolved.
02:23And then to present this position to President Zelensky and also to European partners of the United States so that they will become shareholders or stakeholders to the final arrangement.
02:38It might say it might take some time, but I hope that it will not take too much time.
02:43You talked about the magic of Russian U.S. summits, and this really was quite extraordinary.
02:50The red carpet literally rolled out for President Putin.
02:54The relationship between the two is certainly unique, described as fantastic by President Trump.
03:00Mr. Putin called Mr. Trump a dear neighbor.
03:03What would you say about their relationship?
03:06And is this essentially the end of President Putin's diplomatic isolation on the world stage?
03:13Well, I think that indeed this is a very special relationship.
03:18I would even say that it's a bit strange relationship because both presidents are political animals, but they are very different political animals.
03:30Still, there seems to be a lot of chemistry between the two.
03:34And they always demonstrated a lot of respect to each other.
03:40So I think that the meeting in Alaska just confirmed this already long-standing personal relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
03:50They apparently really want to preserve these relations, and that might be yet another motivation to reach progress in this very complicated solution of the conflict in the center of Europe.
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