( Note from Editor : The article published on 28 Aug 2025 in a newspaper ! Today it has been shared to other media outlets for publishing ! We do not know What is the reason to republish after 10 Days ? Anyhow we are publishing it on the request of the Embassy )
Albert P. Khorev
The writer is the Russian Ambassador to Pakistan
The recent Russia-U.S. summit in Alaska sparked a flurry of articles in Pakistani and global media outlets speculating about its implications for global security. The purpose of this article is to clarify the key outcomes of the summit and provide a clear picture of where we are in terms of settling the Ukrainian conflict.
First, it’s important to understand that simplistically presenting one party of the meeting as “winners” and the other as “losers” is inherently flawed. Politics is not a game of cricket, in which competing teams do their best to defeat each other, and emerging victorious is the sole purpose of the contest. The art of politics is finding a compromise that leads to a “win-win” situation for everyone involved rather than inflicting defeat on the other party.
The Alaska summit marked the first in-person meeting between the Presidents of Russia and the United States since 2021. Over the past four years, Russian-American relations have reached their lowest point in post-Cold War history due to the Biden administration’s failed policy of seeking a strategic defeat of Russia through NATO and Ukraine as a proxy. The summit helped achieve substantial progress in identifying the contours and modalities of the conflict settlement.
This meeting was the result of painstaking work aimed at restoring trust between the two powers that bear special responsibility for global stability.
The current American administration, led by President Trump, understands that the myths of “Russian unprovoked aggression” and “an imminent Russian threat to Europe” can exist only in the minds of so-called experts who learned about the Ukrainian crisis in 2022 and know nothing about the underlying factors that led to it.
President Trump has made commendable efforts to facilitate a settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Despite criticism suggesting that Trump is seeking a quick and easy solution, his eagerness to grasp the underlying causes that prompted the special military operation in February 2022 is conducive to achieving a mutually agreeable resolution.
This meeting once again highlighted that, despite having a decisive advantage on the battlefield, Russia favours a diplomatic path. The key point to understand is that the Ukrainian conflict is not about territory, but rather the Russian-speaking people of Donbass who lived under Ukrainian army shelling for eight years, from 2014 to 2022. They were punished for rejecting the unconstitutional 2014 coup d’état in Kiev, which brought a nationalistic and neo-Nazi regime to power.
By branding the people of Donbass as “terrorists,” the Kiev regime attempted to justify its onslaught of violence against its own people, leaving thousands of civilians, including women and children, dead. If the people of Crimea had not sought protection from their historic motherland in 2014, they would have suffered the same fate. The Minsk Agreements, endorsed by the UN Security Council and guaranteed by Germany and France, temporarily halted the massacre of the Donbass people by the Ukrainian army.
The Minsk Agreements were intended to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, but turned out to be another political ruse orchestrated by the Europeans and their Ukrainian allies. The agreements’ real goal was to buy Kiev time to rearm and launch another punitive operation against its own people. Ultimately, the goal was to turn Ukraine into a NATO springboard for containing Russia.
This history lesson is exactly why Russia does not favour an immediate ceasefire now. The Western obsession with pausing the fighting has nothing to do with the lofty words of caring for human lives. Ukraine’s patrons need a pause to give Kiev a reprieve, regroup its forces, and supply more weapons to prepare for another round of hostilities.
Instead, Russia supports eradicating the root causes of the conflict, which include Kiev’s neo-Nazi policies, the oppression of the Russian-speaking population andthe Russian language in Ukraine, Zelensky’s crusade against the Orthodox Church, and NATO’s desire to expand further eastward. In May 2025, President Vladimir Putin initiated the resumption of direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations, which were interrupted in April 2022 by the Ukrainian side.
Three rounds of negotiations yielded some positive developments in terms of POW exchanges, but demonstrated Kiev’s unwillingness to discuss the technical modalities and verification mechanisms of a potential ceasefire. This “all or nothing” approach, as well as the insistence on a summit between Presidents Putin and Zelensky above all else, has stalled the progress of negotiations.
The recent Russia-Ukraine talks, however, debunked the myth of “Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children.” Despite Kiev’s false narrative that Russia stole thousands of Ukrainian children, Ukrainian negotiators provided a list of only 339 suspected evacuees from the war zone.
After confirming the children’s Ukrainian parentage, Russia has repatriated some of them with Qatar’s mediation. Meanwhile, 228 children have died from Ukrainian shelling since 2022. So much for Ukraine’s agenda of protecting children’s rights.
The Alaska summit showed the United States’ willingness to facilitate a compromise to resolve the conflict, just as the Trump-EU meeting showed the “coalition of the willing’s” absolute commitment to prolonging the conflict.
EU states must understand that Western troops on Ukrainian soil, whether under the NATO flag or in their national capacities, are unacceptable and will not lead to a settlement. Perhaps this is precisely why Europe insists on sending its military as peacekeepers. Historically, Europe cannot tolerate a strong Russia, using every opportunity to weaken our country.
As the Russian leadership has repeatedly stressed, Russia is not interested in an eternal conflict with its immediate neighbour. We view the Ukrainian people as a brotherly nation and are committed to restoring bilateral ties, which were damaged by the failed policies of the Ukrainian authorities following 2014.
Our country does not harbor any plans to attack neither Europe nor NATO. EU countries invented this narrative to garner support for the Kiev regime, and they seem to have fallen for it themselves. Such claims are pure folly and nonsense.
As part of the Alaska arrangements, Russia expressed its willingness to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, the EU, and NATO states as part of a broader deal to restore the significantly degraded European security architecture.
In the coming weeks, it will become clear whether the West is genuinely committed to peace and an early resolution of the conflict or merely to sloganeering and warmongering. Russia is ready to reach a compromise that takes its national security concerns into account. The ball is now in the Western court.
