Early in the afternoon of Wednesday, August 6th, President Donald Trump made a surprise announcement on a phone conference with the leaders of Britain, Germany, NATO, Finland, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 
Trump said that he would hold an unexpected meeting next week: a summit with Vladimir Putin of Russia. And soon after, he would preside over a peace negotiation with Putin and with Zelenskyy.
But President Trump is in for his own surprise. Putin thinks he can get away with demands that are outrageous. Why? He is an old KGB veteran whose entire role in the Russian spy service was psychological manipulation.
Putin appears to believe that President Trump is one of the most manipulable leaders he has ever dealt with. Says President Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, “Trump thinks Putin is his friend. He trusts Putin.” But Putin “sees Trump as an easy mark.”
Putin has four impossible conditions he will present in this upcoming summit. The Russians say they are non-negotiable.
First, America must immediately lift all sanctions on Russia, sanctions that Russians call “illegal”. Particularly sanctions targeting Russia’s energy sector, financial institutions, and defense exports.
In other words, America must end what the Russian newswire Tass calls “its campaign of economic strangulation.” The United States must open up the flood of money with which Vladimir Putin builds missiles, drones, glide bombs, and fighter jets, the money with which Putin makes war.
Condition number two is the withdrawal of all American troops, missile defense systems, and advanced weapons from nations like Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This leaves the conquest of Eastern Europe free for Vladimir Putin once he digests Ukraine.
Putin’s condition number three is recognition of Russia’s “Sphere of Influence.” In other words Putin wants acknowledgement that Russia has the right to plant puppet governments in nearby nations like Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. That’s a whopping 2.7 million square miles of territory that Putin wants to control.[i]
But there’s more. Just before Putin started the war with Ukraine in February of 2022, he laid out his red lines. Those lines proclaimed that all the European nations that were once part of the Soviet Union are legitimate parts of Russia’s sphere of influence. In other words, countries like Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria are nations in which Russia can install leaders loyal to Moscow.
That’s another 807 million square miles[ii] that Putin wants. In other words, through a combination of the Ukraine war and negotiation with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin wants to build the biggest land empire in the history of the world, a million square miles bigger than the USSR and nearly three times the size of the Russian Empire of Catherine the Great.
Then there are Putin’s terms for a peace deal with Ukraine. Putin wants Ukraine to give him Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. That’s 22.5% of Ukraine. It’s fifty two thousand square miles. Oh, and Putin also wants Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, replaced by a Putin puppet.
In exchange for this, Putin holds out a carrot. A great concession to peace. Putin is willing to negotiate an “air ceasefire.”
In other words, no more drone and missile attacks. No more 400 drones and sixteen missiles attacking Ukraine’s cities every night from Russia. But, more important, no more drone and missile attacks from Ukraine.
You won’t see it in headlines, but Ukraine has been flying its drones deep into Russia, pounding over a dozen gasoline refineries into twisted metal, destroying oil depots, military airfields, radar stations, missile launchers, missile factories, and billion dollar aircraft.
Putting 15% of Russia’s oil refining capability out of business. Seriously damaging Russia’s ability to fuel its military vehicles and potentially crippling the Russian economy. An air ceasefire would stop these highly successful counterattacks from the Ukraine.
Those are Vladimir Putin’s terms for what he calls the “normalization” of relations between Russia and the United States. Those are Vladimir Putin’s terms for peace.
Reuters and the Times of London say they amount to Ukraine’s surrender.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
https://ria.ru/20250302/usa-2002548837.html
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7924308
https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1790809/
https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-trump-to-open-to-meet-putin-zelenskyy/live-73543091
https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-zelenskyy-offers-to-quit-in-return-for-nato-entry/a-71720973
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-peace-deal-talks-v6pwvvnmj
https://apnews.com/article/1626934143a1b25889238a0a62698fe2
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/us/politics/trump-meeting-putin-zelensky.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/12/trump-russia-ukraine-negotiations-fsb-document/
www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-ukraine-talk-about-peace-are-still-far-apart-2025-06-02/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/03/trump-macron-brain-dead-nato-remarks
Putin considers stopping Ukraine air attacks to placate Trump: reports
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[i] 2,663,779.61 per ChatGPT
[ii] 806,589.46 square miles
