He’ll think it is a Russian Weeble…then spend the entire day knocking it over in glee to show how much smarter he is than all those other people are that can’t knock a Weeble over.
Sergei Lavrov - their foreign minister / Secstate guy - showed up wearing a CCCP t-shirt.
He’s already there so must have flown on the plane that flew the short Great Circle route and was not shot down.
This thing starts in about two hours, and it takes just over four hours to fly between Magadan and Anchorage. Yet I haven’t heard Putin (and likely a few decoy planes) have left yet, to basically fly over the area of that king crab fishing show, “Deadliest Catch”
Methinks someone is a little paranoid. He ought to be, of course. Those crab guys often bring nets & SAMs with them.
Well he has arrived and shook hands. Not sure if they’ve gotten down to “business” yet.
CNN said that it isn’t going to be a one-on-one meeting but that Secretary of State Marco Rubio (aka Little Marco) and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff will be there. My thinking is that no one trusts Trump not to give up everything to Putin, especially if Putin flatters him.
He certainly didn’t show himself to be particularly immune to Putin’s requests, previously:
It’s like sending in a toddler to negotiate with Genghis Khan.
i was surprised that Sergei Lavros (the equivalent of SoS) was attending ad not Marcos.
I have to admit I have a bit of respect for Lavros. He’s really smart, speaks a bunch of languages and looks a bit like my (Norwegian) father. And there’s got to be some sense of humor in that he probably flew the efficient Great Circle plane route that could have been shot down while wearing a CCCP t-shirt.
Is this stuff live? Montenegro causing WWIII?
Russia getting back into the G8 was a given.
Can Trump loan Putin an F-22? Just for a little while.
CNN: Putin’s English is good enough to correct his own translators, according to Kremlin
Anybody who doubted that was duped. He was a fucking East German spy in his previous career. Like Lavros, he is smart (yet in a more diabolical way). He knows more than the 400 words trump knows. He knows he’s dealing with a certifiable moron and it’s to his advantage.
Press conference starting soon.
So far, it’s the Putin Show!
Well what the everloving fuck was THAT? Australian press are particularly scathing of Trump’s responses in the conference, with it essentially boiling down to, Trump: “I’m going to ring NATO. Oh, and Zelenskyy”. Whoop-de-do.
A distraction from Epstein and the plunging economy and ratings. Putin will continue to bomb Ukraine while Trump continues to attempt to wave shiny objects to distract his base.
I see I was right about the F-22 fly-over.
ABC News said that Putin seemed to enjoy the ride in the presidential limousine. They should check for bugs he may have left behind.
Well that was a waste of fucking time.
Reporting is that they talked for 3 hours. What the fuck were they talking about for 3 hours? The “press conference” lasted for like 5 minutes and contained absolutely zero information.
My Russian wife says Putin’s closing remark about their next meeting, which Putin said in English, “Next time in Moscow” was a joke. I don’t get it.
Lavrov wins the joke-fest of this summit. His CCCP t-shirt was either a funny joke or a threat/intent to put the Soviet Union back together. I’m sure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were ROTFLOL.
Agent Orange bloviating/shooting the shit and showing off. Creating a distraction from Epstein. That’s it. Big fat nothingburger.
Unless, of course, in the process of showing off, he told Putin things he shouldn’t have.
The Beast. And what does ABC know? It was a choreographed moment that avoided photos of the two of them admiring the F-22, currently the best fighter jet in the world. Not good optics for Russia.
You were expecting…something more?
Stranger
It is as easy as Trump making a stupid move to trade land, Putin saying no while recording Trump making the offer, then blackmailing him to shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of the way. Putin is that smart, and Trump is that stupid.
No, not really I suppose.
We’ll never know everything that was said. Rubio and Witkoff were there. There’s no way Trump and the second coming of Stalin didn’t have “alone time.”
ETA: Trump looked terrible I thought. I can’t put my finger on it? Stressed out maybe?
ETA 2: I didn’t realize Trump was so much taller than Putin. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the two of them standing directly next to each other like that.
I get what you mean about “second coming” yet Stalin was even more of a paranoid moron than trump. He “purged” (a nice way of saying put ‘em up against the wall) so much of his top military leadership. And he had no military knowledge. That he did not have Zhukov killed too saved Russia at (ironically) Stalingrad and was a, if not THE, turning point of WWII.
And then, seeing how Zhukov was a hero and had political aspirations, quashed them.
Putin is dangerous as he is diabolically intelligent. Does it matter to Russia they’ve lost 1 million soldiers to something like 175,000 Ukrainians? Nope. He has liberated millions (EtA: Can’t back that number with a cite or even claim by Putin; yet that was his stated casus belli and may well be so in the Eastern Baltics - so how ever many people live in occupied Ukraine and ain’t no stopping him now) of ethnic Russians and i cannot think of a craftier President/leader than he is.
Putin has lost as many soldiers as he has claimed he has lost. It’s not like the grieving families can compare notes.