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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip

No Ceasefire Or Deal After Trump-Putin Summit; Trump Backs Off Severe Consequences Threat To Putin; Trump Says He And Putin Largely Agreed On Land Swaps; CNN's Post Analysis On The Trump-Putin Summit. Aired 10-11p ET

Aired August 15, 2025 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[22:00:00]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST: Good evening. I'm Abby Phillip in Washington for a special edition of News Night with continuing coverage of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. Now, tonight, there is no deal, no ceasefire, and Donald Trump is now putting the ball in Ukraine's court.

The president rolling out a literal red carpet for Vladimir Putin at their first face-to-face meeting in six years. It was supposed to be one-on-one, but at the last second, it was changed to three-on-three with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff joining Trump for the talks.

Now, that group spoke for nearly three hours and afterwards the president suggested a lot of daylight between them.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: There's no deal until there's a deal.

We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to. There are just the very few that are left, 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.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: But Trump didn't expand on that significant point of contention, but just hours earlier, he had told reporters on Air Force One that he wanted a ceasefire today and wasn't going to be happy if it wasn't agreed to. But despite the fact that there was no deal, according to Trump, the meeting couldn't have gone better in terms of his relationship with Putin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST: If you had to grade it on a scale of one to ten?

TRUMP: So, I think the meeting was a ten in the sense that we got along great. And it's good when, you know, two big powers get along, especially when they're nuclear powers. You know, we are number one, they're number two in the world, and it's a big deal. That's a big deal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Our panel is here in Washington.

Josh Rogin, we are, now, I'm looking at the clock. It's about three hours. Since that meeting came to a conclusion, maybe a little bit more, we still know nothing about what transpired. What does that say to you?

JOSH ROGIN, LEAD GLOBAL SECURITY ANALYST, WASHINGTON POST INTELLIGENCE: Well, it seems to me that if President Trump had some deliverable or something positive to brag about, he would've bragged about it by now. He would've at least hinted at it. And, you know, the fact is that although the White House set the expectation is very, very low, they seem not to have even reached that bar and that everybody knows what that one thing is that they didn't agree on. That's Ukraine, which is actually the only important thing that we're here to discuss. And if they had some good discussions about nuclear disarmament or, you know, energy deals, none of that really matters if they can't resolve anything related to Ukraine. And, again, we probably would've heard it by now.

And what Vladimir Putin said was very clear, he said. We have to solve the root causes of the Ukraine war, which everybody knows means that he doesn't want Zelenskyy to rule Ukraine. He wants to be in charge of who rules Ukraine. And President Trump seems to be finally realizing that, that there's no overlap between their visions for it. And I think that's why you get what we had here, which is a failure to communicate.

PHILLIP: Let me actually play Putin talking about this root causes thing. Just listen to what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT: Our country is sincerely interested in putting an end to this, but at the same time, we are convinced that in order for the Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, all the root causes of this crisis, which have been repeatedly discussed, must be eliminated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Evelyn Farkas, what does that mean to you?

EVELYN FARKAS, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT DEFENSE SECRETARY: To me, it means the root causes are imperialism. It's what Josh said. Vladimir Putin wants to control Ukraine. And that is not something that's on the table. President Zelenskyy can't agree to it. We can't agree to it. And Putin came here today or to Alaska, to the United States, to buy time.

[22:05:02] He wanted to delay so that his war could continue. Because even though the Russians are incrementally inching forward, and it's not serious right now, he thinks time's on his side, and he wanted to also get on the good side of President Trump.

So, I actually think it's a good outcome in the sense that they didn't agree to a ceasefire because Vladimir Putin, without continued pressure on the battlefield, would break a ceasefire the next day. So, it's good that he didn't trick our president with that, and maybe it's good that President Trump learned something in that meeting. But I think, overall, it's clear that Putin appears to have gotten what he wanted, which is more time.

PHILLIP: Well, I'm curious what you think.

FMR. STATE SEN. PHIL WILLIAMS (R-AL): I think I'll go on record right away and say I may be the only one at the table that thinks today was not a waste of time.

PHILLIP: Okay. Tell us why.

WILLIAMS: And I'll also -- I'll clear -- well, for several reasons. I think, number one, Putin had to come to the United States. We didn't go to him. I think at the end of the day, one of the things that has been so, you know, unabashedly said about Trump is that everything he's doing right now is carving Zelenskyy out of the discussion. He's not going to be at -- the very last thing he said was, Zelenskyy has a say in this, and we'll take this back to Zelenskyy and see what's what.

There were a couple of read between the lines moments that I thought were very telling. One of those was that Putin himself said, I don't want the other NATO or western nations to, I'm going to paraphrase here, but Jimmy up what we've been working on today. But then Trump also followed up too and said, I'm going to immediately call NATO and western leaders and I'm going to call Zelenskyy and we'll see where it goes. And he won't disclose what they're going to talk about, which I think is part of, I mean, I hate to say it, but they art of the deal. I can't tell you how many mediations I've been in as an attorney. You go back and forth between the parties that shuttle diplomacy, you can't just break loose and tell everybody what you talked about with one party because it burns the disclosure process, and you've got to go ahead and let the process play out behind closed doors first.

PHILLIP: Yes, I take that point about the -- I actually think it's a very uncharacteristic of Trump, frankly, to not be saying a whole lot about this, so there's that. But on the -- he got him to Alaska, to American soil, but did so by creating this incredibly flattering spectacle for Vladimir Putin, which was -- essentially, I mean, Putin could have landed, gotten back on the plane and gone back home, and he would've been like, it's a win-win situation. In retrospect, given that there was no ceasefire, which Trump said he wanted, given that there was no breakthrough, which Trump said he wanted, was that a mistake?

WILLIAMS: No, I don't think it was. I think, in fact, I think today was a huge flex, having a B-2 fly over Putin's head, that was one of my favorite moments of the year. I think --

PHILLIP: For what? I mean, I guess I'm just saying, for what? Like what does it all signify if at the end of the day Trump got nothing?

NAYYERA HAQ, FORMER WHITE HOUSE SENIOR DIRECTOR, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: What did what Putin got --

WILLIAMS: Well, the assumption is he got nothing. Go ahead.

HAQ: Yes. What Putin ended up getting from this was entering U.S. soil without having to submit to any concept of international law as somebody who has an international arrest warrant against him, having to not essentially flout American U.S. sanctions against him and his oligarchs. He got multiple photos of handshakes and, you know, grin and grabs with the president of the United States.

Also, this is -- his first incursion into Ukraine cost him the seat at the G8. It is now the G7, right? The global economic leaders, Russia and Putin specifically were kicked out of that club. And now we are seeing the United States being the entity that is bringing Russia out of that rogue state status and bring it back into, and Trump said it himself superpower status, great power dynamic.

So, this all plays right to Putin's imperialist message and all of this, and to Evelyn's point, this was all known and nothing today is news. The only person, the Russian dynamic and how things are really working in Ukraine that this seems news to is the president of the United States.

PHILLIP: Jonah?

JONAH GOLDBERG, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. I mean, what's below underwhelming? Subwhelming? Look, I agree. This is probably the best -- this is the second best outcome that we could have had. The best outcome was them calling off the summit in the first place. I do think it wasn't a waste of time. It was worse than a waste of time for many of the reasons that Nayyera and others have said, this creates this new dynamic, this new bromance thing is rekindled, you have Trump talking about how it's a ten because they get along great. What the hell is that?

Like to have a good relationship between two leaders is in service to an end. It is not to make a buddy movie. And no one -- he's got this sort of 1980s thing still in his head that he thinks it takes some great courage and it's really exciting that he got along with a foreign leader, and it's gaslighting.

And so the idea that now we are setting up a situation where the Russians are getting -- they're towed back into the international community.

[22:10:06]

You have now this bilateral relationship where these many important things that we're supposed to be talking to this war criminal about. Putin won just -- if you watch the whole day with the volume off, it was a total win for Putin and a total loss for Trump.

WILLIAMS: Let me ask, has anybody at this table ever watch Trump do the deal? Because that's what he does. The first thing he always does is begin to try and establish that we can have rapport until we can't. I mean, you all are acting as if today is final, like this is the end of the show.

PHILLIP: Watch Trump do what deal?

HAQ: Where did that go with --

PHILLIP: Hold on a second, Nayyera. Watch Trump do what deal? What are you talking about?

WILLIAMS: First of all, the deal that nobody was willing to work on the last four years. The last four years, foreign policy was, let's write another check. That was it.

PHILLIP: Are you talking about doing a deal with Putin on Ukraine or something else?

WILLIAMS: No, I'm talking about the deal that brings an end to the carnage. You've got 1.2 million casualties on the Russian side alone. You've got literally somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000.

PHILLIP: I guess the reason I'm confused is because there is no deal. That's why my confusion is because --

WILLIAMS: No deal today. You act as though there's never going to go --

PHILLIP: My confusion is because there's no -- it's been six months since he's been president. He thought he could end it with a phone call With Putin. We've now had this massive summit where he created this big scene. And what has come out of the summit is a lot of nice words about Trump, but no substance on Ukraine. In fact, it sounds like Putin wants to move past Ukraine. He wants to talk about the relationship between the United States and Russia, about what they can do in terms of business, what they can do in terms of the Arctic, what they can do in terms of nuclear. He's not even really talking about Ukraine.

ROGIN: Not to mention the fact that all President Trump has done for the last seven months is undermine Ukraine's position, made the deal much harder by stopping the weapons shipments that we promised to Ukraine, by not enforcing the sanctions, by staving off the Congressional law that would increase the pressure on Putin. And by doing things like this, which are giving Putin a lot of leverage in the negotiations and then yelling at Zelenskyy all the time that he's the problem.

So, what it's actually happened here is that President Trump has undermined his own goal of getting a deal. I believe he wants a deal, but he's doing it so incompetently and so skill-lessly that he's actually making peace much harder. And if he would just pursue the negotiations with more strategy and a little bit more intentionality, and a little bit more leverage, and a little bit more pressure. He might actually get closer to the goal that he professes he has.

WILLIAMS: So, what you're losing sight of in all of that are the pieces that had to be established before we ever got to today. I've heard this was a hasty summit. This was a hurry-up get-together. It was not. Take a look back, we had the NATO summit. NATO was now providing additional defense spending GDP levels they've never seen before. NATO is now going to be buying weapons from the United States with the opportunity then to parse them back through to Ukraine. We're not having to write the blank check for it every single day, but there's been an entire new establishment of how the order works and the deal is now being made after the pieces parts have been laid in place.

HAQ: To your point about the new order and how it works, all credit to NATO for really stepping up when the United States pulled back entirely, and decided --

FARKAS: that's why they're doing it.

HAQ: And that the United States was not interested in maintaining, you know, any democratic world order anymore. That's essentially the message that happened when, let's not forget the last G7 meeting, you had Trump sitting there being yelled at by multiple leaders, again, not a good position, and the NATO leaders and European leaders realized they had to take a different tack. Trump, as of last week, was talking about giving territorial concessions to Putin at this same summit. They had to get on the phone with him and essentially give him a lesson in how not only does diplomacy, but how working with Putin works.

And every day, you saw a downgrading adjustment by the White House by the day of the summit, they were calling it a listening session. All of that could have been avoided. Ultimately, this was a meeting that could have been an email.

PHILLIP: Well, we will have much more. I want to get to what the United States' actual commitment to Ukraine is in this moment. We'll get to that in a few minutes.

But next for us, from the red carpet to the applause, we're going to talk about the optics of this whole thing and whether that backfired on the United States.

Plus, Trump says the Putin told him that the 2020 election was rigged, which is, of course, music to Trump's ears.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:15:00]

PHILLIP: If optics is everything, that's what Vladimir Putin got tonight in Alaska. He received a literal red carpet treatment on US soil, which was the first of many mixed messages. The president warmly clapped and shook his hand as they met on the tarmac, and then a more aggressive demonstration, a flyover of American warplanes prompting a surprised reaction from Putin. On the podium, a photo op, but no questions. And in a highly unusual move, Putin joined Trump in The Beast despite having his own vehicle on the tarmac. And in the joint statement, the Russian president actually spoke first at the press conference. That is something I don't think I've seen in a domestic summit of any kind in covering White Houses.

Evelyn, several things about this, but I want to ask you. I mean, earlier today, John Bolton was saying, and, by the way, former national security adviser for Trump was saying that the idea that Trump placed all of those fighter jets lined up on the tarmac and then had Putin walking through them essentially just created an opportunity for intelligence gathering on the part of the Russians.

[22:20:09]

What did you see there?

FARKAS: Well, yes, and also letting him into The Beast, because, who knows, maybe Putin thought there might be a chance, or maybe it was already arranged ahead of time. And, I mean, the Russian president could put a bug in The Beast. I mean, hopefully, we swept for it, and I know it sounds a little outrageous, but, you know, he is an intelligence officer and the Russians are always collecting intelligence, Abby, so, yes, intelligence. But I think it was probably more to show off to President Putin that that's why they were there.

PHILLIP: And I asked the question earlier, Phil, because you talked about the flyover. And I think you know, the flyover of American might is great and impressive to us. My question is, is it actually impactful to Vladimir Putin? I think Putin seemed to take all of this pomp in circumstance and say, I came here for one reason, and that is to buy some time to create some distance between the United States and Ukraine and to make Trump think I like him. And it seems like he achieved all those things.

WILLIAMS: Well, listen, there were a number of visuals, a number of optics that I think were extremely important and they were staged. There was a lot of stagecraft in this. Meeting on a U.S. military base, meeting in the -- with walking through all of the fighter jets sitting there on the tarmac. And that's not intel gathering. I mean, Putin already has those. He has a specs already, I guarantee you. But then the reality is that flyover, what you call a flyover, I call a flex. What that really was the actual plane that dropped bombs on the Iranian nuclear facilities most recently to show the world that Trump is not afraid to do what is necessary. Oh, by the way, that's flying over your head right now.

So, I don't think that was not like an honorarium. That was not a moment to honor the visiting president. That was a moment to say, and oh, by the way, this is what we got. What have you got?

FARKAS: And your strategic error has suffered an attack by the Ukrainians that took out 40 of your long range bombers.

ROGIN: We might be reading too much into it. I've been to that face. Have you guys been to Elmendorf? I've been there. I walked down that, you know, runway. I saw a lot of planes. I didn't really learn anything about the planes by looking at them.

PHILLIP: You didn't.

ROGIN: It's not really bad.

PHILLIP: You did?

ROGIN: Yes. But --

PHILLIP: That's not the same.

ROGIN: I'm just saying you can look at the planes, what are you going to really learn? Everyone knows what the planes look like. And all of that pomp in circumstance is like, you know, Trump loves that kind of stuff where you get all the jets in the planes and the tanks, you put them out on the street, because that's what strong man tough guys do. That's what he's doing, you know? Xi Jinping has all of those parades. Kim Jong-un has all those parades and Trump loves the parades. But that doesn't mean anything. That's just nonsense.

What's really going on there is that he's giving Putin the biggest stage in the world, and Putin is loving that because, in essence, Trump sees his relationship with Putin as much more important than Ukraine. He's always been like that. Since the 90s, he believes that the United States and Russia are natural friends and allies and that they should work together on all of these things, and Ukraine's just an irritant in what he views as a U.S.-Russia relationship that's just destined to be awesome if he could just get past this annoying little Ukraine thing. That's how he thinks. He's said it a million times since the 1990s now.

PHILLIP: And he wants to impress Putin.

ROGIN: Yes.

PHILLIP: In a very simple -- it's a pretty straightforward, simple thing. He's putting all the toys out there on the tarmac so he can impress this guy, who frankly he's been trying to impress for a very long time. Who knows why, but that seems to be the dynamic.

HAQ: And here's the piece that actually where Putin came back and showed that he's the real expert at the flex, which is at the press conference on U.S. soil deciding to speak 20 minutes exclusively in Russian when he speaks absolutely perfect English, right, and then waiting for everybody in that room to figure out and understand what he was saying. And Donald Trump comes in essentially to play cleanup and give two or three anodyne words about, well, there's no deal until there's a deal, and I'll call NATO. Those are standard holding statements and Putin commanded that room with largely American press.

ROGIN: And everyone's like, oh, commanded every, he figured out how to flatter Trump.

HAQ: Yes. ROGIN: Everybody figured out how to flatter Trump. Every leader knows, everybody knows, every Congressman knows, every Fox journalist knows, you tell him exactly what he wants to hear, you tell him that he is awesome, and then everything's hunky dory. It's not a mystery what Putin did. He doesn't -- you don't have to be a KGB officer to tell Trump that he's awesome, you agree with everything that he --

GOLDBERG: So, look, I actually agree with Phil. I thought the B-2 thing was pretty cool and I think it, it was better to do it than not to do it.

I also think part of the problem here, as we are really trying to play out the string on a day where very little happening is that even if something big happened, a week from now, it couldn't matter because this administration constantly changes its positions and then people come in afterwards and say, oh, it's the art of the deal, when, in fact, it's just a mercurial, glandular president who chases things like an escaped monkey from a cocaine study.

[22:25:04]

And so, look, we thought the relationship with Ukraine was over for good after that disastrous Oval Office meeting. It's got a lot better after that.

ROGIN: Has it?

GOLDBERG: It's gotten better than it was, and it's certainly got better than we thought it was.

ROGIN: A lot better?

GOLDBERG: Better.

PHILLIP: I mean, one question I have --

GOLDBERG: We restored more -- we restored some of the aid that we had cut off.

ROGIN: Yes, some of it.

GOLDBERG: Yes. Look --

ROGIN: A little bit of it.

GOLDBERG: Look, I think the way we've treated Ukraine is a moral outrage and dishonor.

ROGIN: Okay. That's not much better.

GOLDBERG: I agree with that.

ROGIN: That's bad. That's a bad thing.

GOLDBERG: But my point is, of course, it's a bad thing.

ROGIN: Okay.

GOLDBERG: But it was a low point. And things changed afterwards, they'll change again.

ROGIN: They got slightly less off of it.

PHILLIP: All right. We are going to talk -- we want to -- I want to talk a little bit more about that very soon, but on the, just the wisdom, Evelyn, of having this meeting without Ukraine, right, I mean, this is a genuine question. Is there a strategy in isolating Russia and saying, we're just going to sit down with Russia and see if we can come up with something, or was this always sort of doomed to have a limited impact on the situation?

FARKAS: Well, if you remember, Abby, in the beginning, President Trump said he wanted Zelenskyy there. Vladimir Putin will never sit at a table with Zelenskyy. The only circumstances under which he will sit as an equal, because he does not see Zelenskyy or Ukraine as an equal, they're subservient, they're part of the Russian Federation, the only circumstance that he would do that is if he's been militarily defeated and then he'll send someone else.

So, you know, that was never going to happen, this trilateral thing that Trump -- the problem is President Trump doesn't understand the historical, the ethnic, the, you know, emotional reality that, that these people live in. And he thinks he can dismiss and just deal, you know, the way he likes to deal --

PHILLIP: With his friend, Vladimir.

FARKAS: With money and deal. But if he doesn't under -- sorry.

PHILLIP: He gave a history lesson at the top of his remarks. When he opened his mouth first, I was like, oh boy, we're going to be here for a while, because that's exactly the type of thing that he does. This is a man who is deep in his vision of what Russian history ought to be. Meanwhile, Trump is just operating on a different level that is much more surface and they're just not on the same plain, and that was very much on --

HAQ: Let's also not forget about --

WILLIAMS: I don't think there was anything to Putin's remarks that anybody out there went, wow, that was incredible. Nobody bought that. That was called sucking up. That's all that was. That was literally trying to set the stage that the giant suck up at the beginning of the stage.

PHILLIP: It's typical of Putin to spill to unspool this narrative about Russia's place in the world, and that's what he did at the start of his remarks. And the idea is to set --

WILLIAMS: He didn't look at it and go, we are one.

PHILLIP: He was able to do that. Again, I don't understand why the White House allowed that to happen. but he was able to do that unchecked for however long that lasted and set the table.

WILLIAMS: I will say that no one at the White House is going to proofread the president of Russia's speech before he gives it. At the same time, once he starts speaking, the last thing you're going to see happen is the president goes, stop speaking now, I don't want to hear anymore.

HAQ: But this is what diplomacy -- this is what at the State Department at the Pentagon, for those of us who work events and public affairs and diplomacy, this is literally what you spend your entire job doing on that day, is making sure the choreography goes right. And the choreography from the beginning has always been to Putin's advantage to the point when he decided to jump in and give his lecture and give a theology of how he operates in the world, which is not what Trump did. Trump did not give a theory of the case of what the United States means on the world stage, and probably doesn't really have one when it comes to democracy and defense of Ukraine or any other country.

What Putin also tapped into by arriving in Alaska is this deep Russian history in which they still believe Alaska belongs to them. Like that is for an audience in Russia. It's a good thing that we didn't give back the Bering Strait at this point, but Putin won on that level as well as saying, hey, look, I am here, I have stepped foot once again on another territory that used to be ours.

PHILLIP: He also --

WILLIAMS: No. What you're missing there is that one more flex was the fact that we had him come to Alaska. So, we have him come to Alaska, our military base --

HAQ: That does not translate to a flex to anybody in Europe and anybody in Russia, maybe in MAGA circles, that's a flex. But we gave him access to a place --

(CROSSTALKS)

ROGIN: Putin is a war criminal. That's not a flex. That's a weakness.

PHILLIP: I just have to note that senator from -- the senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, she made sure that she was there. She told us earlier today so as to ensure that President Trump did not even attempt to sell to bring up the fate of Alaska in these conversations.

ROGIN: He did try to make an energy deal with the Russians to give away Russians access to -

[22:29:56]

PHILLIP: Listen, she was like, I was here to make sure that that did not come up.

So, coming up next for us, hear how the Ukrainians were reacting to this summit and what this means for the MAGA crowd back here at home, which does not want to send more aid to Ukraine. That's next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

Back now to our breaking news. Tonight, President Trump is headed back to Washington, D.C. as we speak, essentially empty-handed.

[22:35:04]

After his high-stakes summit with Vladimir Putin fell flat, the ceasefire agreement in Russia's war on Ukraine that Trump had sought to broker did not happen. But in an interview with Fox News, Trump said the fate of the deal is now up to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is joining us now live from Kyiv. Nick, it's important to remember that all of this is happening while there is a very active war going on. Talk to us about how this is being viewed over in Ukraine and have you gotten any inkling that that phone call that Trump promised he would make to Zelenskyy has yet happened?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: No, we have not had any indication that it's happened yet. And you see at dawn here, Ukrainians perhaps working up to not the worst news they could have imagined and that there hasn't been a sort of de facto peace deal presented to them where it hadn't been in the room.

Instead, there is this confusing situation now of clearly Vladimir Putin believing there was an agreement, Donald Trump seeming particularly displeased or reluctant to yield the details of anything that may have been agreed, but now saying he had to put it to NATO and to Zelenskyy himself.

I suspect that call will probably happen in the hours ahead, perhaps when Trump gets back to Washington. Who knows, frankly, and who knows indeed what's in it. I think it's fair to say that if Trump has pleased that he got a concession from Vladimir Putin, we would know about it.

And certainly Putin's rhetoric sounds like a man unchanged, unreformed, very much focused on the notion of imposing a peace. That's essentially defeating Ukraine militarily and the root causes of the war. No change really there.

And so Trump suggesting that it's really up to Zelenskyy to accept the deal or not, suggesting he would recommend Zelenskyy took the deal, yet being reluctant to lay out exactly what that might look like, I thought was particularly telling, as indeed was the idea that there might be a subsequent meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy that Trump could indeed attend as well.

Now, I should point out that Zelenskyy has for some time agreed with the idea of meeting one-on-one with Vladimir Putin, pretty much American urging to try and get diplomacy moving here. It's been Putin that's been reluctant to do that, and indeed Putin that was reluctant to attend a trilateral offered by Zelenskyy, supported by Trump back in May in Istanbul. So quite whether or not what we've seen in this meeting is Putin offering to meet Zelenskyy or whether that's something his staff will now prevaricate over, suggest technical preconditions or logistical hurdles for, we don't know. But interestingly, there clearly is some sort of idea of a proposal that Trump has to put to Zelenskyy, and he is now framing it as basically, well, if this doesn't work, it's kind of Ukraine's fault.

So again, the pressure on Kyiv, very much the wronged party here, the victim of Russian aggression to potentially accede to a deal. And we've been in this place before.

Now the European allies likely will speak to Trump, will learn about this deal. They're also friendly with Trump, they have been able to exact significant influence on him in the past. So he may find himself dragged back more into that particular orbit.

It's a very repetitive cycle we're seeing here but ultimately, it gives Putin one thing, and that is time to continue his military offensive in the east, which is incremental at times, but increasingly closer to a strategic breakthrough of some description. And that's, I think, what many Ukrainians fear Trump has found time for.

PHILLIP: All right. Nick Paton Walsh, thank you for all of that great reporting.

Jonah, you know, the anti-Ukraine crowd at home is pretty strong in terms of their influence in Trump's orbit. And I wonder, you know, where do you think that they stand right now?

Because you seem to think that the relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy is better now than it was before. Maybe it is but Trump could change his mind tomorrow.

GOLDBERG: Yes, absolutely he could change his mind. And when I say it's better, I'm saying, you know, it's like the best gas station sushi in Alabama. It's saying something, it's just not saying a lot, right?

And part of it is that, as you were saying earlier, everyone's figured out how to play Trump, including now Zelenskyy. And so Zelenskyy sucks up to Trump in a way that has smoothed over a lot of this stuff. Also, Vance has come on a little bit towards Western Europe.

You can just keep asking the rhetorical questions all night.

PHILLIP: I'm sorry, Jonah, but I have the same rhetorical question. I think he has been more quiet, but I don't, I mean, what do you think Vance --

ROGIN: He hasn't changed his views.

GOLDBERG: I don't think he's changed his views either. Look, my whole point is that this stuff keeps changing. And look, the MAGA base, which hates Ukraine, also didn't want us to attack Iran, and Trump did it anyway. [22:40:09]

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon are very loud. That doesn't necessarily mean they dictate what Trump will do one way or the other. I do think -- we were just talking about flexes and being anti- Ukraine.

The thing that I think we haven't talked about is Sergey Lavrov wearing the USSR shirt. You've got to remember, this whole thing about root causes, the root cause of the war with Ukraine, according to Putin, is Ukraine's existence. Ukraine was the victim of a fairly close-to-Holocaust-scale genocide in the 1930s that no one was allowed to even talk about until the 1980s, that is a rich memory there.

And so when you tell Ukrainians, or you pretend that the Ukrainians are the ones at fault, the way Marjorie Taylor Greene and these other gargoyles do, it is so profoundly offensive, because it is complete erasure of the actual history here. Putin is a war criminal who wants to destroy another country, and this idea of cutting a deal with someone who has that baseline objective is a first-order offense and a case of national dishonor.

PHILLIP: Can I just play one thing? Because you brought up the USSR sweatshirt. Let me play what conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro said. He's actually saying that there's a bit of a double standard playing out here among conservatives about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BEN SHAPIRO, HOST, "THE BEN SHAPIRO SHOW": They decided to lead off with a pretty audacious statement because Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, arrived at this event wearing a USSR T-shirt. It's a CCCP shirt, which is USSR in Russian. That is a hell of a take here by Sergei Lavrov.

Now remember, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy showed up to the White House wearing military fatigues, this was the end of the world. I mean, we should have something to say about Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, showing up in a CCCP shirt.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Will they have something to say about it?

ROGIN: No, I agree with everything Jenna said, except for the one thing, which is that somehow Zelenskyy is doing better. Because look what happened today. He just had a summit with Putin, and Zelenskyy wasn't there.

It was the worst day for Zelenskyy that there has been.

GOLDBERG: And it could have been worse.

ROGIN: Yes, but that's not a good thing. And when J.D. Vance makes some sort of half-overture to convince a bunch of Europeans to stop criticizing him for 10 minutes, that's not honest. He's been working against Ukraine for years as a senator, he hasn't changed that view, he's very clearly against a U.S. funding for Ukraine.

And there's no change in that. And we extrapolate--

WILLIAMS: He was also against the Houthi thing. You know, Vance loses a lot of internal argument on this. The idea that Zelenskyy wasn't there today is somehow a failure, negates the idea that, in diplomat speak, there's a thing called shuttle diplomacy where you go back and forth between the parties.

GOLDBERG: There's no back, there's just forth.

WILLIAMS: You've got that coming.

HAQ: As a former diplomat at the table, and I think Evelyn's had this experience as well, shuttle diplomacy really requires that you are an honest broker between both parties. You're respected and you give both parties equal due. And so after the disastrous White House meeting in which the vice president and president and head of the State Department decided to berate a foreign leader who was under attack, that eliminated any sense that the United States is playing equal sides on this.

In addition to the fact that this is not the first time that a government under attack has been undermined by Trump by negotiating with the invading party. He did that in Afghanistan.

PHILLIP: Well, putting aside words for just a second, there's a reality of what is happening on the ground for Ukraine. And the flow of U.S. aid to Ukraine is about to, if it has not already, it's about to creep to a stop. He's saying, oh, I'll sell it to the Europeans, maybe for a profit, and then it'll go to Ukraine that way.

But Evelyn, I mean, what is the impact of that on whether Ukraine actually believes, whether the world actually believes that the United States even cares about the outcome of this war?

FARKAS: That is the most important thing that we should be talking about tonight. Because the only way to get Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin to compromise, to capitulate, to do real diplomacy is for them to meet defeat on the battlefield, meet real defeats.

And for that to happen, we have to provide Ukraine with more assistance and fast. And yes, the Europeans are stepping up, and they're doing so in a really open way because they're afraid that we're not reliable, and what if Ukraine falls, then they'll have to defend themselves. There's that specter now.

But also, you know, the reality is that they can't do as much as we can. And there's frozen money, about $300 billion, that the Europeans could unfreeze if we help encourage them to do it.

And then they can use that money to buy U.S. weapons. We could speed up weaponry. They need weaponry to hit the Russians and protect the Ukrainian people.

[22:45:02] PHILLIP: All right, we have to leave the conversation there.

Next for us, President Trump may be happy without a deal since Vladimir Putin apparently told him the 2020 election was rigged. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: Welcome back to our special coverage. If intimidation is the best form of flattery, Vladimir Putin knows that Donald Trump appreciates a throwback. Listen.

[22:50:08]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things. He said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.

He said mail-in voting every election, he said no country has mail-in voting. It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections. And he said that to me, it was very interesting because we talked about 2020, he said you won that election by so much.

And that's how he got it. He said, and if you would have won, we wouldn't have had a war, you'd have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead.

And he said, and you lost it because of mail-in voting, it was a rigged election, but mail-in voting, Sean.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: Oh, yes, Phil, taking advice on free and fair elections from Chuck Snow's Vladimir Putin, of all people.

WILLIAMS: Okay, prepare yourselves.

Everybody get ready. Dive on, Phil. Here we go.

PHILLIP: Phil, you don't have to defend it. It's okay.

WILLIAMS: The reality is, I mean, I don't know how we got into the 2020 election out of the summit today in Alaska. But the truth is, you know, everybody still questions on the right side of the aisle the 2020 election.

The processes were weird, the whole thing made no sense. Everything went awry. COVID was used as the excuse for everything.

PHILLIP: Everything did not go awry. Actually, very little went awry.

WILLIAMS: If you were not a Biden supporter, everything went very much awry.

HAQ: If you were an independent observer of election--

PHILLIP: Actually, very little went awry. I mean, I'm sorry, Phil, I said, I told you, you don't have to defend it, but you chose to defend it. So now I'm going to have to correct the falsehoods that are being said.

Listen, nothing, very little went awry, to the point. Hey, don't take it from me. When Donald Trump and his campaign took all of their so- called evidence to courts, guess what?

They were all thrown -- they lost every single one of those cases.

WILLIAMS: We can look at every Secretary of State who made decisions.

FARKAS: There's also a book that Major Garrett and his co-author wrote, who's an expert on democracy. And they said the 2020 election was actually the best election in U.S. history in terms of how many eyes were on it, how many checks were on it, how many people voted.

PHILLIP: I don't want to get us too off course here, because I think it is, the fact that we're having this conversation in the context of Vladimir Putin, of all people, the person who the intelligence community agreed interfered with the election, who wouldn't know a free and fair election if it stared him in the face, is telling Donald Trump, as a form of flattery, that he was cheated out of an election is wild.

HAQ: This is how Russia has operated, though, in terms of propaganda and surveillance in other countries, is understanding what the divisions are that exist in a country. In the 1960s and 70s, racial divisions were exploited. Right?

Understanding during the 2016 election what the divisions were with Black Lives and White Lives Matter, all of this is part of Putin's very deep understanding of how to get into the American psyche and, again, create conversations that really are coming out of nowhere at this point. And that was the substance of his conversation.

That is what the President of the United States took away from this meeting, not caring about Ukraine, not potentially saying that maybe I shouldn't deport 200,000 Ukrainian refugees in my countries. All the President of the United States got about this conversation was a classic KGB narrative of let's give you the propaganda you need to hear.

ROGIN: The fact that, let's remember, Vladimir Putin engaged heavily in interfering in the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton with a massive interference campaign and hacking and everything.

PHILLIP: Hey, they hacked federal courts literally within the last seven days.

ROGIN: So his profession that he sort of cares about the integrity of U.S. presidential elections is laughable on its face. And the fact that the President of the United States was like, oh, he's making some pretty good points, just shows how much of a gullible mark that he actually is.

GOLDBERG: I don't have anything more to say about the election stuff. It wasn't stolen, it wasn't rigged. But it is, and maybe the impressive thing about Vladimir Putin's stolen elections is that he does it without mail-in voting, and that's impressive.

But I will say the other part of it, which is very frustrating to me, is it's in service of this line that Trump has used for years now, which is that if I had been President, Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. That might be true in some sense that Trump might have figured out a way to sell out Ukraine in some weird way or something like that.

But at the end of the day, if Putin's position is that the root causes, as he says, are the reason why he had to do this, and the root causes are Ukraine's existence, then Trump is lying, or Putin is lying, and Putin knows that to give Trump those talking points, which they also raised in the press conference, is a really gross distortion of the situation, and it's incredibly belittling to the part of the Ukrainians.

[22:55:07]

PHILLIP: Listen, I mean, Putin talks about the invasion of Ukraine as if he was not the one who did it, which is so bizarre, and to have Trump, again, repeat that essentially, I think really gives Putin a lot of credence on the world stage. It wasn't really his fault, he didn't really have that much to do with it.

HAQ: It was self-defense.

PHILLIP: There were some root causes that Ukraine caused themselves to be invaded.

FARKAS: So, President Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. I was in the Pentagon then, right? I worked on that portfolio.

And because it didn't work, meaning he didn't get political control over Ukraine, in 2022, he did the full frontal, breaking all human rights laws, invasion. So, he's doing it for his own reasons, not because of who's in the White House.

PHILLIP: I'll leave it there, unfortunately, Phil. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone. "Laura Coates Live" starts right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)