Presidents Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet Friday at Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, in northern Anchorage, American officials said Tuesday. The trip will be Putin’s first to the United States in a decade, and the first-ever for a Russian president visiting Alaska, which Russia sold to the U.S. 158 years ago.
White House officials are already playing down expectations for the summit, which is ostensibly about the future of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the Financial Times and CNBC reported Tuesday. The Friday meeting is planned one week after a deadline Trump gave Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face further sanctions on August 8. Four days later, neither has occurred.
Trump himself called the Friday meeting a “feel-out session.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as a “listening session” about Russia’s ongoing invasion, which Putin has used to occupy and conquer about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.
Worth noting: Putin has an arrest warrant out from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It was issued in 2023 for the war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children, which is still taking place inside occupied Ukraine, as the New York Post reported last week. Because of the warrant, Putin doesn’t travel abroad that much, especially to Europe where most countries are wary of Putin’s motives. The Middle East was one option; but Trump suggested Alaska and Putin accepted. CNN has a bit more on the difficulties accommodating Putin in Alaska on such short notice.
The view from Kyiv: “This war must be ended. Pressure must be exerted on Russia for the sake of a just peace. Ukraine’s and our partners’ experience must be used to prevent deception by Russia,” President Volodymir Zelenskyy said on social media Wednesday.
“At present, there is no sign that the Russians are preparing to end the war,” Zelenskyy said. “Our coordinated efforts and joint actions—of Ukraine, the United States, Europe, and all countries that seek peace—can definitely compel Russia to make peace. I thank everyone who is helping,” he added.
Worth noting: A top Putin aide is already talking about a follow-up summit that will be held somewhere inside Russia, Yuri Ushakov told reporters Wednesday.
Trump spoke to European leaders in a joint call Wednesday. The discussion reportedly featured talk of “red lines,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “These include: a cease-fire as a prerequisite for further talks; any territorial discussions to start from the current front lines; and binding Western security guarantees that Russia must accept.”
The view from Berlin: “We want negotiations to take place in the right order; a ceasefire must come first. Essential elements should then be agreed in a framework agreement,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday after the phone call with Trump. He added, “Ukraine is prepared to negotiate on territorial issues, but…legal recognition of Russian occupation is not up for debate.”
But Russian officials muddied the waters a bit, insisting Ukraine must give up four regions Russia has invaded—Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. “The territorial integrity of the Russian Federation is enshrined in our constitution, and that says it all,” Russian deputy foreign ministry spokesman Alexei Fadeev said Wednesday.
Zelenskyy told Trump he thinks Fadeev and Putin are “bluffing.” Zelenskyy said he believes “Putin is trying to apply pressure before the meeting in Alaska along all part of the Ukrainian front. Russia is trying to show that it can occupy all of Ukraine,” according to Reuters in Berlin.
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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1961, East Germany began building the Berlin Wall.
Around the Defense Department
Will tearing up nearly-complete IT overhauls save money? “Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.” reports Reuters’ Alexandra Alper, who has a deep dive, here.
Some lawmakers worry that DOD leaders won’t follow congressional intent as they spend $150 billion from the reconciliation act, Breaking Defense reports. The deadline for the Pentagon’s plan is Aug. 22.
ICYMI: “‘Fund first, ask questions later’ is a bad way to go,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, wrote in Defenese One.
Vulcan’s first natsec launch lofts the Pentagon’s first experimental navigation satellite in half a century. United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket launched the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Tuesday. The satellite will test new anti-spoofing signals, a steerable phased-array antenna to send signals to ground forces in high-jamming areas, and receivers to help the satellite operate without instructions from ground controllers, Joanna Hicks, a senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory, told reporters Monday ahead of the launch.
The mission was supposed to have launched in 2022, but delays with ULA’s heavy-lift Vulcan pushed it to this year. Defense One’s Audrey Decker has a bit more, here.
What are the prospects for military action against foreign drug cartels? “The president has ordered the Pentagon to use the armed forces to carry out what in the past was considered law enforcement,” the New York Times reported on Friday. Your D-Brief-er talked with journalist and writer Kevin Maurer, whose work focuses on U.S. special operations forces around the world, and who dug into the subject for Rolling Stone.
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Listen: Defense One Radio, Ep. 189: “The U.S. military vs. drug cartels.”
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See also Politico’s take: “Why Trump’s War on the Drug Cartels Is Bound to Backfire // The president’s punishment-heavy plan doesn’t just ignore other factors—it actively undermines itself.”
Meet the archconservative church network that Pete Hegseth belongs to. A week after SecDef reposted a video showing pastors arguing that women should not be able to vote, the Associated Press has an explainer.
Trump 2.0
Analysis: “Sending the National Guard into D.C. Is the Wrong Solution to a Crime Problem,” writes former Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian and researcher Chris Park of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Their argument features three components:
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“Military forces are less familiar than police with the nuances of citizens’ rights and the conditions under which force is permissible (see Figure 1, which compares military training with that of the police). National Guard training focuses on combat—how to use weapons and fight—while police training focuses on handling crime and the law.”
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“Military forces have the wrong attitude about civilians. Law enforcement is trained to see civilians as citizens who deserve protection, except in the most extreme circumstances. Military personnel are taught to treat civilians as potential threats and to always be ready to respond. Crowd control—in other words, dealing with unruly citizens—is the primary law enforcement training the National Guard receives.”
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“Military personnel are untrained in the complexities of gathering evidence and building a case that will stand up in court. Indeed, nearly half the Police Academy’s 27-week curriculum is dedicated to criminal procedure.”
Their recommendation: “The first action should be bringing the police up to full strength, despite the president’s statements that D.C. has enough police,” Cancian and Park write. What’s more, “If the concern is the protection of federal property, physical security could be enhanced” as happened in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. “Similar measures could be adopted again. Physical security has the advantage that it is on duty 24/7 and does not require expensive personnel.” Continue reading, here.
Commentary: “There’s a real risk that the feds could posture for 30 days,” writes Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, writing Tuesday for The Atlantic, “and then declare victory as violence continues its downward trajectory. That would, of course, do little to fix the real problems.”
Instead, Lehman argues, “the administration should focus its resources on the people and places that make the District unusually unsafe. The city has already identified the ‘power few’ who drive the large majority of violent offending. The administration’s priority should be to target these people for apprehension, prosecution, and incapacitation—as soon as possible.”
But there is a bit more that can be done, too, says Lehman. “Research shows that deploying more senior officers reduces both crime and use of force—the opposite of what D.C. does. The administration could switch things up in a way that the city perhaps could not.”
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And lastly today: A Trump DOD official cited literal fake news in his previous job. The president’s top civilian defense official for Latin America, Joseph Humire, ran an alleged think tank which, in the course of its “Tren de Aragua” coverage, cited at least five newspaper articles that didn’t exist, InsightCrime reported Monday.
“One of the false events is dated March 10, 2025—one day before Humire testified in the US Congress regarding immigration and security issues, including Tren de Aragua,” InsightCrime reports. Another “entry dated March 18—one week after Humire’s congressional testimony—contained similarly unsubstantiated information.”
Humire’s former employer at the Center for a Secure Free Society “told InSight Crime that the organization would work to fix the issue,” taking down one of the instances pointed out; but the executive director dodged further inquiry.
For what it’s worth, “Humire and the Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment,” InsightCrime adds.
Read the full article here