The Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin’s summit has strengthened the Russian dictator. The meeting between the US and Russian presidents in Alaska only bolstered the Kremlin’s position and prolonged the war in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs reports. 

Initially, Trump claimed he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. But eight months later, and after at least six calls with Putin, Trump’s peace initiatives resulted only in Russia intensifying strikes on civilians and the number of dead civilians. Today, Russian forces killed 24 elderly people in Donetsk Oblast who were standing in line for their pensions. How the US plans to end the war and hold Russia accountable for this atrocity remains unclear.

Since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which altered the world order by forcibly changing the borders of a sovereign country, Putin has played the long game. The Alaska summit gave him even more time and strengthened his position to achieve a military victory in a war of attrition against Ukraine.

The summit was never about peace in Ukraine

Its real purpose was to bend the international system to Moscow’s will and maintain a monopoly on power domestically.

Putin emerged victorious in Alaska

Putin has faced little opposition to the Alaska visit. A Russian Levada Center survey showed that 79% of Russians considered the summit a success for Putin, and 51% were more optimistic about improved relations with the US.

“After the summit, Russian media did not have to put out false pronouncements to highlight Putin’s diplomatic triumph,” the report says. 

Legitimizing aggression against Ukraine

The summit allowed Putin to legitimize Moscow’s claims. Russians who doubted the war’s purpose now had grounds to consider the invasion “just.”

During the Anchorage meeting, the dictator emphasized Russia’s “legitimate concerns,” its pursuit of a “fair security balance in Europe and the world,” and the need to “remove all root causes” of the war in Ukraine.

Trump did not refute any claims, effectively agreeing with Putin’s position on Moscow’s right to influence Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Western security guarantees.

“Putin flew home having demonstrated to his subjects that he was right all along, that they must not waver, and that he will win for them,” the report concludes. 

Russian imports from China plummeted 17.8% in August compared to last year, Chinese customs data shows, marking the steepest monthly decline since Moscow began relying on Beijing as its economic lifeline after invading Ukraine.

The collapse in trade that once sustained Putin’s war economy has prompted frustrated Russian officials to tell Reuters that China “does not behave like an ally” and sometimes engages in “outright robbery.”

Trade decline accelerates despite Putin’s efforts

Chinese imports from Russia dropped 17.8% year-over-year in August, while Chinese exports to Russia fell 16.4% — double July’s decline rate of 8.6%, according to Chinese customs data reported by The Moscow Times.

This decline came despite Putin’s September visit to China, where he signed what he claimed was a breakthrough memorandum on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline — only to see Gazprom shares tumble 3.1% as investors recognized it as another non-binding agreement.

Sanctions pressure and market saturation take a toll

The trade decline reflects multiple pressures on the relationship. Russian Industry Minister Anton Alikhanov blamed sanctions and volatility in commodity markets for falling bilateral trade at a business forum in Kazan.

He also noted that Russia is seeing a gradual saturation of Chinese products in certain market segments.

The pressure intensified after then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned China during the Biden administration about sanctions evasion, which led to Chinese exports to Russia declining 16% in March 2024.

Key sectors show a dramatic decline

The August data reveal the breadth of the trade collapse. Russia’s fuel exports to China fell almost 20% from January to July, while vehicle imports from China — including passenger cars, tractors, and trucks — plummeted 46% to $5.8 billion.

The vehicle sector illustrates the problem of Chinese market dominance. Chinese carmakers surged from less than 10% of Russia’s auto market before the war to commanding more than half by mid-2023, creating dependency that Russian officials now regret.

Strategic implications for Moscow’s war effort

The revenue shortfall comes as Russia faces mounting costs from its prolonged war in Ukraine. The partnership had been crucial for Putin’s narrative that Russia could successfully replace Western markets with alternative relationships.

Chinese companies continue supplying components for Russian weapons production, but Beijing maintains a careful distance from direct military support while extracting maximum economic benefit from Russia’s isolation.

The deteriorating relationship also exposes the fundamental weakness in Putin’s strategy of building alternative alliances, revealing instead a relationship in which Russia has become a junior partner dependent on Beijing’s goodwill.

Earlier this week, as the Iranian defense minister headed to Qingdao for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Donald Trump was basking in the spotlight at a NATO gathering in the Netherlands, claiming credit for brokering a Middle East truce. But beneath the headlines, one untold story was about who gets to shape the new world order, and how Russia, once a regional kingmaker, is now struggling to define its place.

As old alliances crack, Russia is scrambling to shape a new global order. Its answer: an unexpected bold imperial narrative that promises stability but reveals deep anxieties about Moscow’s place in a world where legitimacy, history, and power are all being contested.

The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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