Next Stop Alaska

The Lead With Jake Taper

August 6, 2025

This is a moving story, but my CNN hits on Thursday and Wednesday still provide good context. Where we are now. It looks like Trump and Putin are meeting on Friday, 15 August. The President says that the deal they will discuss involves land swaps, which sounds similar to proposals they floated and Putin rejected this spring. The Admin is apparently working the phones to convince Ukraine and Europe. It will be hard to imagine either agreeing to permanently ceding territory in Ukraine proper, although some formulation on Crimea might be possible, but neither side will want to appear to be the first to reject. That could put us right back to where things stood during and immediately following the disastrous Oval meeting with Zelenskyy. Putin will try mightily to persuade the President that Ukraine is the recalcitrant party and “they have no cards.” It also appears that this meeting has been worked by the Administration for some time, using Belarus as the intermediary, suggesting that the President is quite determined to get a deal. Let’s hope that concerns about his legacy outweighs racking up another peace deal regardless of terms. This could get ugly fast.

Meanwhile, the Administration deserves credit for brokering a framework deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There is still much work to do; some key issues, like the fate of Armenians displaced from Nagorno-Karabach when Azerbaijan seized that territory in 2023, have not been addressed at all. But there are good aspects for everyone involved, including the US presence and development of a corridor through Armenia that connects Azerbaijan to their enclave on the Iranian border. Best of all for us, this is a geopolitical coup; Russia in particular has been the traditional powerbroker in the Caucasus, and Turkey more recently. This opens things up a lot in the region, and should help Armenia manage pressure from Moscow.