WASHINGTON, August 16. /TASS/. The Alaska meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, marks an important step toward normalizing the relations between the two largest nuclear powers, Helga Zepp LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, told TASS in an interview.

"This summit was an extremely important step toward the normalization of the relations among the two largest nuclear powers and pulled the world back from the potential abyss," the expert stressed. According to her, the best indicator for the success of the Alaska summit is what she called "the hyperventilating by the Western mass media and the authors of `Russiagate’, who had to listen to President Putin doubting the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcome."

Meanwhile, "the bellicose statements of members of the `coalition of the willing’" before the summit underlined "the urgency to not only end the Ukraine crisis through a permanent peace agreement, but to remedy the underlying reasons for the various geopolitical crisis around the world by establishing a new global security and development architecture, which must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet," Zepp LaRouche maintained.

"The best plan of action would be if the successful diplomacy of Alaska would be followed up by an invitation of President Trump to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on the 3rd of September to the military parade on Tienanmen Square in Beijing," the expert argued. This, Zepp LaRouche continued, would allow him, "together with President Xi Jinping, President Putin and many other leaders of the Global South," to send a powerful signal to the world "that the leading nations are moving from confrontation to cooperation and in this way inaugurating a new era of mankind," she concluded.

On August 15, Putin and Trump met at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Alaska. Their talks lasted approximately three hours, including a one-on-one conversation in the American leader’s limousine en route to the main negotiation venue, as well as a subsequent small-group discussion involving three participants on either side. The Russian delegation included Kremlin Aide Yury Ushakov and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while the American side was represented by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff.

In a statement to the media following the talks, Putin said they mostly focused on resolving the Ukraine conflict. The Russian leader also called for turning the page in bilateral relations and resuming cooperation as he invited Trump to visit Moscow. For his part, Trump stressed that "great progress" had been made, even as not all positions were agreed upon at the meeting.