March 18th, 2025: Trump’s High Stakes Meeting With Putin & A Shocking Lab Leak Admission
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What is the main focus of Trump's meeting with Putin?
It's Tuesday, the 18th of March. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. President Trump is set to speak directly with Russian President Putin today, pushing for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine. But Russia isn't budging, demanding ironclad guarantees that Ukraine will never join NATO as part of any deal. Later in the show, the U.S. ramps up airstrikes on Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, keeping the pressure on the group as its sponsors in Tehran vow retaliation. Plus, Venezuela is blasting the White House for the deportation of hundreds of Trenderagua gang members, also known as TDA, to El Salvador, calling the move illegal. That's coming, of course, from Nicolas Maduro.
We'll examine if the White House actually cares what the despotic Maduro regime says about anything. Okay, look, you and I know that the White House, in fact, doesn't care what Maduro says. In reality, the Venezuelan strongman has stolen more elections than even Putin. And in today's back of the brief, after years of dismissing it as a conspiracy theory, the New York Times is finally acknowledging what many sane people have suspected all along, that a lab accident in China may have been the real origin of COVID-19. And U.S. government officials, well, worked to suppress the notion of a lab leak during the pandemic. I, for one, am shocked that there's gambling at Rick's. But first, today's PDB Spotlight. President Trump is set to speak one-on-one with Russian President Putin today, marking the most direct effort yet to get Putin on board with a ceasefire in Ukraine.
It's a high-stakes move because while Ukraine and the US signed off on a 30-day ceasefire during talks in Saudi Arabia last week, Russia hasn't budged from its maximalist position. And last time we checked, a ceasefire only works if both sides stop shooting. Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he and Putin would discuss, quote, dividing up certain assets. Now would include land and curiously, power plans. Now, one assumes that the Ukrainians would also want to say in divvying up Ukrainian assets. When referencing power plants, Trump didn't elaborate on what exactly that means, but most likely he was referring to the massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Yeah, it's the largest power plant in Europe and is currently sitting, well, smack in the middle of Russian-occupied Ukraine. Trump appeared to be somewhat optimistic ahead of the phone call, telling reporters, quote, We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but I think we have a very good chance, end quote. But here's the problem.
Putin has shown no interest, that would be zero interest, in a ceasefire unless it locks in Russia's gains from the war. He's been clear about his priorities. He'll keep the land that he's taken, and he'll shut the door on Ukraine ever joining NATO. Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko reinforced that message, telling Russian media that the Kremlin will demand, quote, ironclad security guarantees, meaning that Kyiv would be permanently excluded from NATO and Ukraine would have to agree to total neutrality. And it's not just about land or alliances. Grushko also made it clear that Russia wants no foreign troops, not even peacekeepers, on Ukrainian soil as part of any post-war deal. That could be a sticking point because both Britain and France have floated the idea of sending forces to monitor any ceasefire. So, you ask yourself, what does all this mean for Ukraine? Well, it's not great. And by that I mean, it's the opposite of great.
And as we've been reporting here on the PDB, Ukraine's position is frankly weakening by the day. They've now been all but completely pushed out of the small foothold they had in Russia's Kursk region. That's a position that, at its peak last August, covered some 500 square miles of Russian territory. It was a massive propaganda win at the time and a potential point of leverage to at least have a card to bring to the negotiating table. Now, that's been whittled down to a tiny sliver on the border. The fighting there is less about holding land at this point and more about survival, preventing Russia breaking through and pushing deeper into Ukraine's Sumy region.
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