The article is titled, WILL TRUMP MEET PUTIN? As of now, the answer is, yes. The meeting is set for next Friday in Alaska. I want to focus on four paragraphs from Sy's piece that illustrate the continued failure of the West to understand what Putin means by "root causes." Here are the choice quotes from Sy's article:

Putin talks to Witkoff because he understands he's got power and speaks for the boss," a knowledgeable US official told me. He said it was Witkoff who understood that the way to get Putin's attention was to cut off his access to the oil markets in India and China by increasing the US secondary tariffs on both buyers. Interest rates in Russia have risen to 18 percent and the economy, hit hard by the cost of the ongoing war, is limping along in part due to Putin's ability to keep on selling government bonds to Russian banks.

The official told me that in essence Witkoff "has said to Putin: You need the oil money and we can control the market. . . .

The official's point was that Trump, along with many elsewhere in the world, views settling the war in Ukraine as an acknowledgement that Russia has seized large chunks of Ukraine and any settlement would involve agreements about new international borders. In other words, it has been just another territorial war. Early in Trump's second presidency, there was a one-sided hope from Washington that Putin would join him in real estate investments and rare earth mineral extraction in the Ukrainian territories seized by Russia. Unless there is a last-minute breakthrough in diplomacy, such US investments are off the table.

I was told by the US official and other experts on the war that Putin and those in his government want more than a big chunk of Ukraine. They want to keep Ukraine demilitarized, out of Western hands, and especially out of NATO. Put another way, they want a guarantee that Ukraine will never be a serious threat to Russia again. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wants to join NATO and to remain in power, but he is playing a losing hand in the war and has been slipping in recent polling

Here is the first flawed assumption: "It has been just another territorial war." Russia does not need the territory because it already is a massive land mass that covers 11 time zones. This war was provoked by NATO expansion to the east. That's the point that Trump and his team still do not grasp. The draft treaty that Putin presented to Biden in December 2021 was all about pushing NATO away from Russia's borders, which explains one of Putin's goals for the Special Military Operation (SMO)… Demilitarization.

Then there is the false belief that the US can cut off Russia's access to the oil markets in China and India:

The official told me that in essence Witkoff "has said to Putin: You need the oil money and we can control the market. . . .

Since Trump announced his tariffs against China and India, both governments have rejected the Trump tariffs as irresponsible interference with their economies, and they are continuing to buy oil from Russia. If Witkoff is so dumb as to believe that was a credible threat for Putin, then Trump is being set up for failure when he meets with Putin.

Sy, who is not an economist, gets it completely wrong when he suggests that Russia's economy is in trouble because Russian interest rates:

have risen to 18 percent and the economy, hit hard by the cost of the ongoing war, is limping along in part due to Putin's ability to keep on selling government bonds to Russian banks.