Grading Trump’s Ukraine Diplomacy

Foreign Policy Live

Foreign Policy

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.1 • 622 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

The Trump-Putin summit on Friday, followed by Monday’s unprecedented White House meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky and seven other European leaders, has left analysts wondering whether recent diplomacy will result in an end to hostilities—or if it’s all just pageantry. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Sergey Radchenko sit down with Ravi Agrawal to debrief these two high-level meetings. Kendall-Taylor is a former CIA analyst and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Radchenko is a Johns Hopkins University professor and the author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. Ravi Agrawal: Grading Trump’s Ukraine Diplomacy Ivo H. Daalder: Russia and Ukraine Are as Far Apart as Ever Stephen M. Walt: Trump Has No Idea How to Do Diplomacy Rishi Iyengar: Key Takeaways From Trump’s Meeting with Zelensky Keith Johnson: 7 Lingering Questions After the Trump Ukraine Summit Michael Hirsh: Trump’s Putin Gambit Failed—but Maybe It Was Still Worth Trying Sergey Radchenko: Not Unprecedented but Unprincipled Christina Lu: ‘There’s No Deal Until There’s a Deal’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	America is changing. And so is the world.
0:04.5	But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval.
0:08.7	It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
0:12.5	I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.
0:14.7	I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global story.
0:18.8	Every weekday will bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.
0:24.4	Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:29.6	What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi.
0:34.1	Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?
0:40.7	Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.
0:44.6	From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.
0:50.5	What difference at this point does it make?
0:53.9	Yeah, that's right. Lock her up.
0:56.1	Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:01.5	Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's editor-in-chief. This is FP Live.
1:10.4	So it's the middle of August.
1:12.7	Things are meant to be slow.
1:14.4	And I would never have imagined that in the space of just three days, which included a weekend,
1:19.9	we would have a meeting between the presidents of Russia and the United States, followed
1:24.3	by a White House summit with the leaders of Britain, Finland, France, Italy, Germany, Ukraine,
1:30.1	and the heads of the European Commission and NATO.
1:33.5	All of this playing out live on international TV.
	...

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