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.
Big Boys, Little Countries
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. In an ill-fated draft security arrangement, Moscow said the United States and NATO must halt the alliance's expansion, rule out Ukrainian membership and tamp down their military presence in eastern Europe.
Whether you see Putin’s argument against NATO expansion as valid or not is irrelevant. In either case, Ukraine is reduced in the Russian discourse to a plaything whose future would be determined by an agreement to which it was not a party.
Russian political analyst Alexander Baunov describes Putin’s desire to settle the war in Ukraine via talks with the U.S. as a quest for a "new Yalta"—a reference to the 1945 conference in which Franklin D. Roosevelt met British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin to discuss the fate of the world after Nazi Germany.
In Putin’s mind, a grand bargain between great powers is the right and proper way to decide the course of history, not involving minnows like Ukraine.
Halcyon Days
There are, of course, a few problems with this line of thinking, one of which is the assumption that modern Russia remains a great power.
In 2005, Putin famously called the Soviet Union's collapse the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," but the statement is frequently misrepresented. He wasn’t yearning for Communist Party congresses or collective farms; rather, he was lamenting the passage of a time in which Russia, as the center of the Soviet Union, presided over its sphere of influence and could stand toe-to-toe with America as a bona fide superpower.
Today, Russia retains several tools of power and influence, chief among which is the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, along with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and significant expertise in nuclear energy and hydrocarbon production.
But by any other metric, it is at best a middling power. The World Bank valued America's economy at $30.8 trillion in 2025 and China's at $19.5 trillion—Russia's was $2.6 trillion. If Trump takes Putin up on the offer of a trilateral meeting with Xi next month, we can assume the Kremlin will not be picking up the restaurant tab.
Russia’s own foreign policy establishment acknowledges this established hierarchy, which will only become more entrenched in the coming years. Ivan Timofeev, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, wrote in June that the Russia-China-America triangle is "clearly asymmetric."
"China is critically important to Russia as a source of industrial imports and a market for Russian raw materials and technology exports amid Western sanctions," he said. Moscow’s main use for Beijing, according to his analysis, is simply to act "as a rear guard against a possible future confrontation with Washington."
During the summer of ‘69, Soviet and Chinese soldiers were shooting at one another along the Ussuri River. Today, the country Moscow once regarded as a dangerous Communist rival is an indispensable benefactor.
Brotherly Love
Perhaps the squarest of ideological pegs Putin has nevertheless managed to force into a decidedly round hole was revealed in July 2021, when the Kremlin’s website published an essay directly attributed to the Russian president.
...
In the lengthy text entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin professed his respect for Ukrainian identity and sovereignty while simultaneously, consistently denying it. This fundamental contradiction is summed up in the space of the following four lines: "We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians' desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous. I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia."
In the "Russkiy mir" (Russian world), Ukraine merely occupies a room. Russia holds the keys, owns the house, and the land on which it is built. Now, after four years of war on Kyiv, the language of respect and acknowledgments of Ukrainian sovereignty have disappeared from Putin’s dictionary.
"I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people one people," he told the audience at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last year. "In that sense, all of Ukraine is ours. Where a Russian soldier sets foot, that is ours."
Thus far, Trump has said he remains open to meeting Xi and Putin whether Zelensky "is there or not," though he did say any discussion would be focused on nuclear weapons and denuclearization, not the fate of Ukraine. But enticing the American president across the world for a three-way chat in the heart of the Eastern Hemisphere is exactly what Putin wants.
If Trump acquiesces, Putin would have secured recognition of his summer of ‘69 principles before anybody signs away a square mile of Ukrainian territory to the Kremlin: the big powers decide, Russia remains one of those big powers, and everybody else has to just live with it.