This Friday, August 15, 2025, President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin will sit down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska for what the White House bills as a new round of peace negotiations. On paper, it’s an effort to halt the bloodshed. In reality, it looks more like another act in a long-running play: the stalling game Moscow has perfected since 2014.

I’ll make my position clear now—this isn’t a breakthrough.

I’ve seen this pattern before: in late March 2022, I was in Moldova, helping process waves of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the early battles, while Russian negotiators in Istanbul smiled for the cameras. That was the round of talks Turkey hosted on March 29, when Moscow pretended to scale back attacks around Kyiv while quietly shifting forces east. I

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