“There’s no deal until there’s a deal.” President Donald Trump indicated during a press conference after his highly anticipated meeting with Russian head of state Vladimir Putin that he didn’t get what he wanted.

“We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left,” Trump said. “Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

It’s not clear what the Russians agreed to — if anything — during Friday’s hours-long meeting in the capital of Alaska, which was once Russian territory. Earlier in the week, Trump said he wanted to eke out a ceasefire agreement and schedule a follow-up meeting between Trump, Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Neither head of state said anything indicating what came of that.

Trump made other statements suggesting the Russians weren’t as cooperative as he would’ve liked: “I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on, most of them I would say, — a couple of big ones that we haven’t quite got there — but we’ve made some headway.”

The two agreed to meet again. Putin suggested, in English, “Next time in Moscow.” Trump didn’t commit, instead saying he would “get a little heat” if he went there.

Putin spoke, in Russian, before Trump. He began by talking about America’s and Russia’s shared past. Most of what he mentioned was related to the two nations’ cooperation during World War II against Nazi Germany. He also repeated the point that Russia needed to do what was best for its security. “The situation in Ukraine has to do with fundamental threats to our security.” This is likely a reference to Ukraine seeking to join NATO, which the Russians consider the primary trigger for their invasion. More on that later.

Putin also framed the potential of the two power nations forging good relations and doing business, saying:

Russia and the U.S. can offer each other so much in trade, digital high tech, and in space exploration. We see that Arctic exploration is also very possible…. It’s very important for our countries to turn the page, to go back to cooperation.

Business was undoubtedly on the minds of both sides, as each delegation included high-ranking economic officers. Here’s a complete list of who attended the meeting:

From the U.S. — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine.

The Russians who came with Putin included Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, Foreign Policy aide Yuri V. Ushakov, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Putin’s Special Envoy on Foreign Investment Kirill Dmitriev. Notice the number of economic Cabinet members.

Trump said he will call European leaders as well as Zelensky to let them know what came of the meeting.

With the war in Ukraine heading toward year four, we think this an appropriate time to look at what Putin said the day before he launched the invasion of his neighbor, on February 24, 2022. Western news outlets have a bad habit of publishing reports on wars and other matters of great weight with nary a mention of what’s going on in the designated villain’s head. The war between Russia and Ukraine is a perfect example. The West has been presented with a version of this war that is limited to Ukraine’s position, which is easy to sympathize with.

As a sovereign nation, Ukrainians have a right to make whatever choices they see best regarding domestic and foreign policy. (Although this hasn’t been true since the invasion thanks to a series of clampdowns on speech, media, opposition political parties, and elections). What Ukraine does is none of Russia’s business. They are totally different countries. It is easy for Americans to understand this view, since no group of people detests being told what to do more than Americans.

American and European news outlets have consistently called the invasion “unprovoked.” That’s illogical. No war is unprovoked. Something always provokes the instigating nation. Whether that provocation is just, moral, or legal is a separate matter. So what provoked Russia to invade?

Here’s what Putin said on the eve of the invasion.

“Our biggest concerns and worries,” he said, are “the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year.” What are those threats? “I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.” For 30 years, he said, Russia has been trying to work out an agreement with the West regarding NATO.

However, “We invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.” Putin then accused Western leaders of lying:

They have deceived us, or, to put it simply, they have played us. Sure, one often hears that politics is a dirty business. It could be, but it shouldn’t be as dirty as it is now, not to such an extent. This type of con-artist behaviour is contrary not only to the principles of international relations but also and above all to the generally accepted norms of morality and ethics. Where is justice and truth here? Just lies and hypocrisy all around.

Since the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Ukraine has ramped up overtures to join NATO, and the West has indicated they are open to its membership. We have documented the veracity of Putin’s claim that they were assured NATO would not expand past Germany in past reports. To put it succinctly, Russia’s NATO claim is legitimate. It is corroborated by a number of U.S. foreign policy experts as well as documents that have been declassified within the last few years. You can read those documents here and here. You can also read warnings from none other than Russia containment authority George Kennan. As far back as 1997 he said the West’s reckless policy of expanding NATO would trigger “anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”

Regarding Western officials’ claim that NATO is not aimed at Russia and that it’s a voluntary defensive alliance that any country can join, an article written by Sean McMeekin and published in Chronicles magazine shortly after the invasion made the following point:

Then it is worth asking why Russia was never invited to join it. It is not without interest that Putin mentioned, in his otherwise bellicose speech on Feb. 21, that he asked President Clinton in 2000 whether the United States might see Russia joining NATO one day. Although Clinton seemed amenable at the time, the U.S. delegation reportedly became “very nervous.” Needless to say, no invitation ever followed for Russia to join NATO. Perhaps this was an impossible fantasy, but if so, does it not rather prove Putin’s point that NATO is fundamentally an anti-Russian alliance?

Putin also cited examples of unprovoked Western aggression, including America’s 1999 78-day bombing of Serbia, as well as Western military excursions into Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Then he lobbed criticism at a foreign excursion even many Americans have come to regret with great zeal:

They used the pretext of allegedly reliable information available in the United States about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To prove that allegation, the US Secretary of State held up a vial with white power, publicly, for the whole world to see, assuring the international community that it was a chemical warfare agent created in Iraq. It later turned out that all of that was a fake and a sham, and that Iraq did not have any chemical weapons. Incredible and shocking but true. We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum.

Putin then claimed that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West “immediately tried to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and utterly destroy us.” This too has a hint of legitimacy. In 1992, shortly after the official collapse of the Soviet empire, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said he wanted the rest of Russia dismembered. Then in 1997, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in the Council on Foreign Relations mouthpiece Foreign Affairs that Russia should be broken up into three confederations. 

Putin also accused the West of trying “to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration.” This is an obvious reference to the degenerate social values that have poisoned the culture in America other countries where they’ve been exported. This is undeniably true, but we would add the caveat that those deviant values are rejected by the American people as well.

The Russian leader also accused the West of aspiring to global dominance, which is also true. However, what he doesn’t mention is that he himself has expressed support for a global order. He has supported a Eurasian Union, and used an analogy during his interview with Tucker Carlson of one brain with two hemispheres to portray how he sees the world order.

As we mentioned earlier, the Russians wanted to be in NATO, as evidenced by Putin asking if Russia could join.

Later in his 2022 speech, he circled back to the NATO issue, defining the “red line”:

Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us. … The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons. For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.

In the rest of the speech, Putin addressed Ukraine’s “Nazi” problem, and what he frames as the Russian people of eastern Ukraine’s pleas to Mother Russia to be liberated from persecution. You can read the entire speech here.

It is likely that Trump and his officers have heard this story. The question is: Does he buy it, and what will he do next?