(16 Aug 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
London – 16 August 2025
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1. SOUNDBITE (English) Nigel Gould-Davies, Senior Fellow, International Institute for Strategic Studies:
"As expected, no agreement. A deal was never on the cards because you can’t agree to end a war if the victim isn’t present. There are things to say about the details, and there are things about the issues. On the human details, the feel, the textures, I mean, clearly Trump was very effusive, extraordinarily so in his greeting of Putin. I was very struck by the contrast with his performance in the press conference afterwards when he was notably deflated. He spoke for barely three minutes unlike Putin who pretty much dominated that event. It’s also interesting that the format was not a not a one-on-one and that it was much shorter than expected around half the time than the White House had indicated and no lunch. And that’s symbolically important, because I mean, in diplomacy, breaking breads together is a particular form of hospitality that’s always sort of signified a sort of degree of sort of success and warmth. And you’ll recall that it was the lunch with President Zelensky that was canceled immediately after that disastrous Oval Office meeting. So there’s something there that suggests that it was, from Trump’s point of view, far from ideal, that it’s not only that he didn’t get the result that he wanted, but there was something that caused the whole thing to be difficult to present, even as a kind of an interim step in a successful direction."
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2. SOUNDBITE (English) Nigel Gould-Davies, Senior Fellow, International Institute for Strategic Studies:
"On the substance of the issues, the fact of the meeting alone and that there was no open sort of bust up, it’s clearly a victory for Putin. The optics of being greeted in that way by Trump and that’s an important win for Putin but as before and I think more explicitly than and directly than we’ve seen, there is this clear underlying incompatibility in the way that the two leaders are framing the problem of the war. Trump’s urgent intention is to achieve a cease-fire. That’s the term he’s constantly used, to stop the fighting as quickly as possible. Putin frames it in very different terms as a solution that requires what he calls an addressing of the root causes of the war. And that’s code for a much larger geopolitical agenda that would not only in effect pave the way for Ukraine’s subordination to Russia, but bring about some longer term, larger restructuring of European security on Russia’s terms. That’s really the extent of his ambitions and that’s not something that he is rushing to achieve. It’s a firm and fundamental goal and so in respect both of sort of time scales and also underlying ways of understanding the war and what’s needed to solve it, that incompatibility clearly came out. I think perhaps the most significant, specific, and if you’re European, worrying phrase to be uttered at that press conference was, I think it was Putin, warned Europeans not to torpedo the process, the diplomatic process that has begun and both sides agreed would continue. So Putin’s clear intention now is to keep the diplomatic process on track and confined to a strictly bilateral basis. So no interference by the Europeans or the Ukrainians, that’s very unwelcome to Russia. For this to be a process that continues and gradually in Putin’s ambitions wins a round to his Putin’s concept of an end to the war which would satisfy his larger and profoundly revisionist agenda for the continent."
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