Bryan Adams’ "Summer of ‘69” is an ode to nostalgia: a lost world of teenage romance, boundless possibilities, and a conviction that the good times might never end. Vladimir Putin was 16 that summer, though it’s safe to say his experiences of heady adolescence were a little different. By ninth grade, he’d already gone to inquire about joining the KGB, in between school classes, fights, and supper at his family’s rat-infested communal apartment.
Yet one can safely assume he too looks back on that time with great fondness. The Russian president has floated the idea of getting together with fellow global titans, China’s President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, on the sidelines of a summit in Shenzhen next month to discuss how the war he unleashed on Ukraine might be brought to an end. His proposal, which spares no seat for Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky or any European official, offers a telling glimpse into the mind of a man whose entire worldview was forged at the height of Soviet power.
The danger for Trump lies in agreeing to Putin’s framing. The man who sent his tanks, missiles and drones into another sovereign state as part of a "special military operation" has made it clear that said state’s leader will have no say in how his operation will come to a close. To outsiders, this may seem perverse.
After all, how can a country that is both the battlefield and one side of a conflict be excused from the negotiation table at which it could be settled? But if, like Putin, you regard the world as a chessboard owned by great powers, it makes perfect sense. Smaller countries may select their flags, parliaments and perhaps even presidents, provided they don't confuse those privileges with the right to choose their own geopolitical destiny.
That was the logic of the Soviet sphere. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush a Hungarian uprising demanding greater freedom from Moscow's control. Twelve years later—the year Putin first walked into the KGB reception in Leningrad—Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubček lifted censorship and allowed open political debate.
Moscow responded by sending tanks into Prague, arresting Dubček and hauling him off to the Soviet capital. By the following spring, he had been replaced, and his reforms dismantled. Two months before Russian forces marauded across the Ukrainian border in 2022, the Kremlin offered a contemporary interpretation.
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