ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—The verdict on the high-stakes meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was swift and brutal. It wasn’t delivered in a joint statement or a press conference, but in the tired, cynical chatter of the people who had stood behind the scenes, watching the two leaders fail to find common ground.
“We didn’t get there.” The words, uttered by Trump after a nearly three-hour meeting in an anonymous conference hall, echoed hollowly in the vast Alaskan landscape. The air, crisp and cold, held none of the warmth of a diplomatic breakthrough. Putin, for his part, had offered no concessions, not even a momentary pause in the assault on Ukraine. As the world watched and waited, reports filtered in that Russian forces had attacked Ukrainian targets even as their leader sat at the table.
The failure of the summit was felt nowhere more acutely than among the locals who had played a part in it. For a group of local business people, gathered in a back room after the delegations had departed, the summit’s legacy was less about geopolitics and more about a simple dish of wild Alaskan salmon.
“I wonder if the top leaders of the US and Russia liked the salmon dish?” a member of the local fishing cooperative, exhausted from a long day of logistics, muttered from a luggage box.
“I don’t know,” replied a restaurant representative who had personally overseen the food delivery. He laughed, a short, bitter sound. “At least there wasn’t any joint declaration about how Alaskan wild salmon is the best.”
It was a sentiment that captured the summit’s ultimate hollowness. The event had been billed as a momentous step toward peace, a chance for a new kind of diplomacy, but it had yielded nothing.
“It was a summit-like conference that lacked any kind of promotional value for local businesses,” a venue staff member said flatly. The words hung in the air, a final, definitive epitaph for the meeting.
A tired-looking female conference hall manager took a swig from a small bottle of whiskey, added a cigarette, and lit it. Her expression, grim and knowing, was the professional’s assessment of the situation. “Putin won this show,” she declared.
“Why?” someone asked.
“Putin attended this conference while at war,” she explained, exhaling a plume of smoke. “The Russian secretary was receiving reports from the Ukrainian front every five minutes, while the US delegation was trying to stifle a yawn.”
Her words cut through the room’s disappointment, getting to the heart of the matter. It wasn’t about a lack of will or diplomacy, but a fundamental asymmetry in motivation. One side was actively engaged in a conflict; the other was merely observing it from afar.
“Are you saying the US should get involved?” the first speaker asked.
“Yeah,” she replied, her voice filled with world-weary resignation. “You can’t really say anything unless you’re actually fighting, right?” The question hung unanswered in the Alaskan air, a somber reflection on a meeting that had promised much and delivered nothing. The only thing left was the aftertaste of wild salmon and the bitter knowledge that, for all the talk of peace, nothing had been resolved.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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