Day: August 18, 2025

If you’re confused about the aims, conduct and outcome of the summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin held in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025, you’re probably not alone.

As summits go, the meeting broke with many conventions of diplomacy: It was last-minute, it appeared to ignore longstanding protocol and accounts of what happened were conflicting in the days after the early termination of the event.

The Conversation U.S.’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat now teaching at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to help untangle what happened and what could happen next.

It was a hastily planned summit. Trump said they’d accomplish things that they didn’t seem to accomplish. Where do things stand now?

It didn’t surprise me or any experienced diplomat that there wasn’t a concrete result from the summit.

First, the two parties, Russia and Ukraine, weren’t asking to come to the peace table. Neither one of them is ready yet, apparently. Second, the process was flawed. It wasn’t prepared well enough in advance, at the secretary of state and foreign minister level. It wasn’t prepared at the staff level.

What was a bit of a surprise was the last couple days before the summit, the White House started sending out what I thought were kind of realistic signals. They said, “Hopefully we’ll get a ceasefire and then a second set of talks a few weeks in the future, and that’ll be the real set of talks.”

Now, that’s kind of reasonable. That could have happened. That was not a terrible plan. The problem was it didn’t happen. And we don’t know exactly why it didn’t happen.

Reading between the lines, there were a couple problems. The first is the Russians, again, just weren’t ready to do this, and they said, “No ceasefire. We want to go straight to permanent peace talks.”

Ukraine doesn’t want that, and neither do its European allies. Why?

When you do a ceasefire, what normally happens is you leave the warring parties in possession of whatever land their military holds right now. That’s just part of the deal. You don’t go into a 60- or 90-day ceasefire and say everybody’s got to pull back to where they were four years ago.

But if you go to a permanent peace plan, which Putin wants, you’ve got to decide that people are going to pull back, right? So that’s problem number one.

Problem number two is it’s clear that Putin is insisting on keeping some of the territory that his troops seized in 2014 and 2022. That’s just a non-starter for the Ukrainians.

Is Putin doing that because that really is his bottom line demand, or did he want to blow up these peace talks, and that was a good way to blow them up? It could be either or both.

Russia has made it clear that it wants to keep parts of Ukraine, based on history and ethnic makeup.

The problem is, the world community has made it clear for decades and decades and decades, you don’t get what you want by invading the country next door.

Remember in Gulf War I, when Saddam Hussein invaded and swallowed Kuwait and made it the 19th province of Iraq? The U.S. and Europe went in there and kicked him out. Then there are also examples where the U.S. and Europe have told countries, “Don’t do this. You do this, it’s going to be bad for you.”

So if Russia learns that it can invade Ukraine and seize territory and be allowed to keep it, what’s to keep them from doing it to some other country? What’s to keep some other country from doing it?

You mean the whole world is watching.

Yes. And the other thing the world is watching is the U.S. gave security guarantees to Ukraine in 1994 when they gave up the nuclear weapons they held, as did Europe. The U.S. has, both diplomatically and in terms of arms, supported Ukraine during this war. If the U.S. lets them down, what kind of message does that send about how reliable a partner the U.S. is?

The U.S. has this whole other thing going on the other side of the world where the country is confronting China on various levels. What if the U.S. sends a signal to the Taiwanese, “Hey, you better make the best deal you can with China, because we’re not going to back your play.”

At least six European leaders are coming to Washington along with Zelenskyy. What does that tell you?

They’re presenting a united front to Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to say, “Look, we can’t have this. Europe’s composed of a bunch of countries. If we get in the situation where one country invades the other and gets to keep the land they took, we can’t have it.”

President Trump had talked to all of them before the summit, and they probably came away with a strong impression that the U.S. was going for a ceasefire. And then, that didn’t happen.

Instead, Trump took Putin’s position of going straight to peace talks, no ceasefire.

I don’t think they liked it. I think they’re coming in to say to him, “No, we have to go to ceasefire first. Then talks and, PS, taking territory and keeping it is terrible precedent. What’s to keep Russia from just storming into the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – next? The maps of Europe that were drawn 100 years ago have held. If we’re going to let Russia erase a bunch of the borders on the map and incorporate parts, it could really be chaotic.”

Where do you see things going?

Until and unless you hear there’s a ceasefire, nothing’s really happened and the parties are continuing to fight and kill.

What I would look for after the Monday meetings is, does Trump stick to his guns post-Alaska and say, “No, we’re gonna have a big, comprehensive peace agreement, and land for peace is on the table.”

Or does he kind of swing back towards the European point of view and say, “I really think the first thing we got to have is a ceasefire”?

Even critics of Trump need to acknowledge that he’s never been a warmonger. He doesn’t like war. He thinks it’s too chaotic. He can’t control it. No telling what will happen at the other end of war. I think he sincerely wants for the shooting and the killing to stop above all else.

The way you do that is a ceasefire. You have two parties say, “Look, we still hate each other. We still have this really important issue of who controls these territories, but we both agree it’s in our best interest to stop the fighting for 60, 90 days while we work on this.”

If you don’t hear that coming out of the White House into the Monday meetings, this isn’t going anywhere.

There are thousands of Ukrainian children who have been taken by Russia – essentially kidnapped. Does that enter into any of these negotiations?

It should. It was a terror tactic.

This could be a place where you can make progress. If Putin said, well, “We still don’t want to give you any land, but, yeah, these kids here, you can have them back,” it’s the kind of thing you throw on the table to show that you’re not a bad guy and you are kind of serious about these talks.

Whether they’ll do that or not, I don’t know. It’s really a tragic story.

Donald Heflin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Democratic National Committee has fallen far behind in the cash race.

After a brutal 2024 election and several months into rebuilding efforts under new party leadership, the DNC wildly trails the Republican National Committee by nearly every fundraising metric. By the end of June, the RNC had $80 million on hand, compared to $15 million for the DNC.

And the gap — nearly twice as large as it was at this stage in Trump’s first presidency — has only grown in recent months, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data found, fueled by several distinct factors.

Major Democratic donors have withheld money this year amid skepticism about the party’s direction, while the small-dollar donors who have long been a source of strength are not growing nearly enough to make up the gap. And the party has quickly churned through what money it has raised in the first half of the year, including spending more than $15 million this year to pay off lingering expenses from Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

The DNC has less cash this summer than it did at any point in the last five years.

“I understand that donors want some kind of a reckoning,” said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist. “But I also think that the kind of state party building that I think [DNC Chair] Ken [Martin] wants to do at the DNC is really vital to our success. And so I hope people kind of get over themselves pretty quick.”

The fundraising troubles reflect ongoing questions about the DNC’s direction under Martin, who was elected earlier this year, and comes as the DNC has faced months of bitter infighting. Continued cash shortages could limit the party’s ability to rebuild for a new cycle. And the DNC’s money woes stand in particularly stark contrast to Republicans, who have leveraged President Donald Trump’s fundraising prowess to raise record sums.

“Chair Martin and the DNC have raised more than twice what he had raised at this point in 2017, and our success in cycles thereafter is well documented. Under Ken, grassroots support is strong,” DNC Executive Director Sam Cornale said in a statement. “It’s now time for everyone to get off the sidelines and join the fight. Rebuilding a party is hard — rebuilding relationships and programs take time and will require all hands on deck to meet this moment.”

The DNC’s money woes stand out among major Democratic groups, POLITICO’s analysis found: Democrats’ House and Senate campaign arms are near financial parity with their Republican counterparts, and several major donors who have withheld funds from the DNC are still giving to those groups.

“Donors see the DNC as rudderless, off message and leaderless. Those are the buzzwords I keep hearing over and over again,” said one Democratic donor adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly about donors’ approach.

The DNC, on the other hand, touts Democrats’ success in state and local elections this year as proof the party’s investments are paying off. The group also began transferring more funds to state parties this year, and argues it is better-positioned financially than it was at this time in 2017, when it also significantly trailed the Trump-powered RNC.

Some Democrats attribute the slowdown among donors primarily to the need for a break after 2024, and the challenges of being the party out of power. Large donors would rather bump elbows with high-profile figures like a president or House speaker; Democrats cannot put on those kinds of fundraising events right now. The DNC also struggled for cash during Trump’s first presidential term, and that did not stop Democrats from taking back the House in 2018, or winning the presidency in 2020.

Still, the longer the DNC struggles to build up cash, the harder it will be to close that gap heading into the 2026 midterms and beyond. And the fact that other party committees are not seeing the same financial struggles puts more responsibility on Martin and his team to figure out a way to right the ship.

“Obviously, the sooner the DNC and other Democratic-aligned groups can get investment, the better. It’s better for long-term programs on the ground, it’s better to communicate our message early on,” said Maria Cardona, a DNC member and Democratic strategist. “However, I think you’re going to see donors coming into those things because they are starting to see Democrats fighting back, and that’s what they want.”

Just 47 donors gave the maximum contribution to the DNC in the first half of the year, according to the POLITICO analysis of the party’s filings with the Federal Election Commission. Over the same period in 2021, more than 130 donors gave a maximum contribution. (In 2017, when the party was similarly struggling with large donors, the figure was 37.)

That means dozens of the DNC’s biggest donors from early last cycle have not yet given to it this year — accounting for several million dollars the party group has missed out on this time.

Many of those biggest donors have continued to contribute to other Democratic groups and candidates, indicating they are still aligned with the party and willing to dole out cash — though often not as much, and not to the DNC.

In the run-up to the DNC chair election earlier this year, several large donors publicly preferred Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, to Martin, who long served as the leader of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and also led the Association of State Democratic Parties.

“If Ken [Martin] really wanted to impress donors, he’d go do 20 or 30 salon events with donors and let them yell at him,” said the Democratic donor adviser. “If you take that on the chin, make some changes, then I think we could see some movement. But [he’s] not going to do that.”

With large donors lagging, the DNC has touted record grassroots fundraising from online donors. On ActBlue, the primary Democratic online fundraising platform, the group raised $33.8 million over the first six months of the year, up from $27 million over the same time in 2021.

But the total number of online donors was roughly the same in both periods — suggesting online donors are giving more than they were four years ago, but the group’s donor base has not expanded substantially.

Most DNC donors this year were contributors to Harris’ campaign or the DNC last cycle, according to the POLITICO analysis. Another 14 percent of donors had no record of donations on ActBlue last cycle, suggesting the DNC is finding new small donors — but not nearly fast enough to make up for the drop-off among large donors.

In fact, the rate of online giving to the DNC has slowed in recent months. The party’s best online fundraising month was March, when it raised $8.6 million on ActBlue from 254,000 donors; in June, the party raised $4.1 million on the platform from 157,000 donors.

And reaching those online donors comes at a cost: The DNC has spent $5.7 million on online fundraising this year, according to its FEC filings. On Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, it is one of the largest political spenders this year, according to the platform’s data. The total spent on fundraising expenses so far is nearly as much as the DNC has sent to state parties this year.

Another set of major expenses also stands out for draining the DNC’s coffers: continuing to pay off expenses from Harris’ failed 2024 presidential bid.

Her campaign ended last year’s election with roughly $20 million in unpaid expenses, according to people familiar with its finances, although none of Harris’ campaign committees or affiliates ever officially reported debt. The DNC has spent $15.8 million total on coordinated expenses with the Harris campaign this year, including $1.3 million in June. A party spokesperson declined to comment on future campaign-related payments.

Elena Schneider contributed to this report.

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