CNN:

Donald Trump is rewarding rather than punishing Vladimir Putin for failing to meet the US president’s own deadline for agreeing to a ceasefire, according to a leading Russia analyst.

“It’s profoundly disconcerting what’s happened in the past two weeks,” Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNN. Gould-Davies said Trump chose to “reward” Putin with Friday’s summit in Alaska after the Russian president shirked Trump’s latest ceasefire-or-sanctions deadline a week earlier.

Since the summit, he said, Trump has “completely abandoned his demand for a rapid ceasefire, and his threat to impose sanctions, and is increasingly taking Putin’s view that instead the war (in Ukraine) can only be ended by a ‘comprehensive settlement.’”

Such a settlement would address what Putin regards as the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine, which Gould-Davies said is “much more fundamental” than issues of land and aims to deny Ukrainian statehood and identity.

The “root causes” are that Putin wants Ukraine to be just a little piece of Russia while Zelensky and Ukraine do not want that.

It’s quite similar to Trump’s insulting suggestions that it would be cool for Canada to become the 51st state in the US.