United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday in a bid to try and end Russia’s three-year assault on Ukraine.

In the run-up to the meeting, Trump said that he believes Putin is ready to agree to a ceasefire. But his suggestion that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could “divvy things up” has alarmed observers in Kyiv.

For their part, remarks from top Russian officials suggest that Moscow has tried to water down discussions about the war by linking them with other bilateral issues, particularly restoring economic ties with the US.

On Thursday, Putin sat down with top officials at the Kremlin to discuss the Alaska meeting. He said that he believed the US was making “sincere efforts to stop the fighting, end the crisis and reach agreements of interest to all parties involved in this conflict”.

Earlier on Thursday, Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s top foreign policy aides, told reporters about Russia’s preparations for the talks. He said it was “obvious to everyone that the central topic will be the settlement of the Ukraine crisis”.

“An exchange of views is expected on the further development of bilateral cooperation, including in the trade and economic sphere,” he said, pointing out that: “I would like to note that this cooperation has a huge and, unfortunately, untapped potential.”

Ushakov also announced that in addition to Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s delegation in Alaska would also include the country’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation.

The inclusion of Siluanov and Dmitriev is another sign that the Kremlin hoped to discuss economic matters at the summit.

What does Russia-US trade look like?

In 2021, before Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, total trade between Russia and the US amounted to $36.1bn. This included $6.4bn in US exports to Russia, and $29.7bn in US imports from Russia – amounting to a US trade deficit of $23.3bn.

For context, Russia was America’s 30th largest trade partner in 2021. Since then, after numerous rounds of American sanctions, trade between Russia and the US has fallen roughly 90 percent.

Incidentally, Russia’s overall trade balance – leaving the US – declined significantly following its decision to invade Ukraine. From 2022 to 2023, its international balance of payments fell by a whopping 70 percent, to just $86.3bn.

But back in 2021, Russia’s trade surplus with the US was concentrated almost exclusively in commodities. Oil, minerals and base metals like iron and steel made up roughly 75 percent of Russia’s exports. Meanwhile, US exports to Russia were concentrated in manufactured goods.

Were Russian exports to the US vital?

The short answer is no.

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the US – whose energy sector was transformed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling in the early 2000s – was already the world’s largest oil producer, at 11.9 million barrels of oil per day.

One area where Russia did hold limited significance was in certain types of energy products. Russia supplied certain grades of crude oil – notably Urals – as well as refined products like vacuum gas oil (VGO), residual fuel oil and naphtha.

Russian VGO was especially important for making gasoline and diesel products in US refineries, which lacked enough domestic feedstock with the optimal chemical and physical properties.

Elsewhere, the US continues to import limited quantities of uranium hexafluoride, a chemical important in uranium processing, from Russia. Some US utility companies still have supply contracts with Russia, which accounted for about one-third of America’s enriched uranium needs when war broke out.

As with energy products, however, American firms exposed to Russian uranium supplies have readjusted their supply chains in response to sanctions. What’s more, US companies like X-energy and Orano have invested heavily in domestic production in recent years.

Does Russia have any other leverage?

In the wake of sanctions after February 2022, most Russian commodity shipments were rerouted from Western countries to China at discounted prices, including for energy products and uranium.

Indeed, trade between China and Russia has grown in parallel with sanctions on Russia. A common border, shared geopolitical perspectives and joint opposition to the US have deepened bilateral relations.

Russia-China trade saw annual growth of nearly 30 percent in both 2022 and 2023, when it hit $240.1bn, according to the Centre for European Policy Analysis. In 2024, Russia climbed to 7th place among China’s trading partners, up from 13th place in 2020.

During that time, China has supplied Russia with more high-end products – like advanced electronics and industrial machinery – while Moscow has solidified its position as a top supplier of oil and gas to Beijing.

What’s more, the two countries conduct regular naval exercises and strategic bomber patrols together. The US has consistently expressed concerns over joint military drills and views the China-Russia alignment as a threat to its global leadership role.

Putin will be aware of these dynamics heading into Friday’s meeting.

What else could Putin offer Trump?

In March, Putin’s investment envoy – Kirill Dmitriev – claimed that Russia and the US had started talks on rare earth metals projects in Russia, and that some American companies had already expressed an interest in them.

“Rare earth metals are an important area for cooperation, and, of course, we have begun discussions on various rare earth metals and (other) projects in Russia,” Dmitriev told the Izvestia newspaper.

China’s almost total global control over the production of critical minerals – used in everything from defence equipment to consumer electronics – has focused Washington’s attention on developing its own supplies.

The US Geological Survey estimates Russia’s reserves of rare earth metals at 3.8 million tonnes, but Moscow has far higher estimates.

According to the Natural Resources Ministry, Russia has reserves of 15 rare earth metals totalling 28.7 million tonnes, as of January 2023.

But even accounting for the margin of error hanging over Russia’s potential rare earth supplies, it would still only account for a tiny fraction of global stockpiles.

As such, the US has been pursuing minerals-for-security deals with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine in recent months, in an effort to wrestle control of the global supply chain away from China.

It may try and do the same with Russia.

What does Russia want from these meetings?

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western countries have imposed 21,692 sanctions on Russia, mostly against individuals.

Key sanctions on Moscow include import bans on Russian oil, a price cap on Russian fuel, and the freezing of Russian central bank assets held in European financial institutions.

But on July 14, Trump threatened to impose so-called secondary sanctions, that if carried out, would mark a notable shift.

Since then, he has targeted India – the second biggest buyer of Russian oil – by doubling a 25 percent tariff on its goods to 50 percent, as a penalty for that trade with Moscow. So far, Trump has not imposed similar secondary tariffs on China, the largest consumer of Russian oil.

But he has suggested that Beijing could face such tariffs in the future, as the US tries to pressure countries to stop buying Russian crude, and thereby corner Putin into accepting a ceasefire.

Members of Trump’s administration have also indicated that if the Trump-Putin talks in Alaska don’t go well, the tariffs on India could be increased further.

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both US political parties are pushing for a bill – the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 – that would also target countries buying Russian oil and gas.

The bill would give Trump the authority to impose 500 percent tariffs on any country that helps Russia. US senators are reportedly waiting on Trump’s OK to move the bill forward.

In Alaska, Putin is expected to demand that Western sanctions on Russia be eased in exchange for Moscow agreeing to any peace deal.

An Afghan man, whose details were accidentally leaked by the UK in a major data breach, has been detained in Pakistan for imminent deportation alongside several family members, his son told the BBC.

The BBC has seen documents which appear to confirm the man was part of Afghan special forces units who worked alongside British forces in Afghanistan, known as the Triples.

The threat of deportation comes as Pakistan continues its drive to remove what they say are “illegal foreign nationals” to their countries.

But the Afghan man’s son said their case is particularly urgent, as if they are deported to Afghanistan, he fears they will be killed because of his father’s Triples association.

The Taliban government claims that all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. But a UN report titled “No safe haven” that was released last month cast doubt on their assurances about a general amnesty.

The man and his family initially applied to the UK’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) – which was set up to relocate and protect Afghans who worked with British forces or the UK government in Afghanistan – shortly after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.

The family were in Pakistan waiting for a final decision on the application – which was endorsed by the Ministry of Defence last year – when Pakistani authorities came to take them away.

The man’s son, Rayan, whose name we are changing for his safety, told the BBC he avoided being rounded up after hiding in a hotel bathroom in the capital Islamabad with his wife and baby son as several of his family members were taken to a holding camp.

“Some of my family are just children, the youngest is only eight months old, we kept begging the police to leave them.”

His brother later called from the camp to say officials informed them they would be deported, Rayan added.

“My brother told me they were kept in a room with about 90 other people, and were then singled out by name and separated,” Rayan said. “I’m so scared they will suddenly be deported.”

Rayan explained the family had been in limbo in Pakistan since October 2024, when the family had their biometrics recorded.

But they are still waiting.

“We have just been waiting with no explanation. They kept telling us to wait, and now it is too late,” Rayan said.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said it does not comment on individual cases. “We remain fully committed to honouring our commitments to all eligible people who pass their relevant checks for relocation,” the statement added.

The situation is made more worrying by the fact the family’s details were among those of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to resettle in the UK which were inadvertently leaked in February 2022. Families involved in the leak fear it has made them vulnerable.

Rayan is now terrified police will come back to detain him, his wife and their child next, and said he has been pleading with the British High Commission in Islamabad to be relocated to another hotel for protection.

Calvin Bailey, a Labour MP who worked alongside the Afghan Triples as an RAF commander, told the BBC that the situation is “incredibly upsetting”. He said Rayan’s father and the Triples were “people that we need to help and we owe a duty to and we must ensure that they receive more than the minimum protection”.

Bailey went on to add that he hopes the government and the British High Commission is engaged behind the scenes, even though that work is not always public.

Pakistan has a long record of taking in Afghan refugees. But the government has previously said it has been frustrated by the length of time it has taken for Afghans to be relocated to other countries.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Talal Chaudry, told the BBC it “should ask the UK authorities why they are delaying these resettlements”.

“It’s already been years,” he said. “Do you really think they will give any leniency to Pakistani nationals who are overstaying in the UK?”

Since September 2023, the year Pakistan launched its “Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan”, 1,159,812 individuals have returned to Afghanistan, according to the United Nations migration agency.

The government has maintained its policy is aimed at all illegal foreign nationals.

About three million Afghans are living in Pakistan, according to the UN’s refugee agency – including around 600,000 people who came after the Taliban takeover in 2021. The UN estimates that half are undocumented.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has called on Pakistan to “ensure that any return of Afghans to Afghanistan is voluntary, safe and dignified”.

Amid police raids and deportations this summer, UNHCR has urged the government “to apply measures to exempt Afghans with continued international protection needs from involuntary return”.

Additional reporting by Usman Zahid

For all the West’s lofty claims about spreading freedom, prosperity and progress, the world remains scarred by chronic instability and mass hunger. Last month, as part of its wind-down of international food and medical aid, the United States destroyed 500 metric tonnes of emergency food aid in the United Arab Emirates. Over 60,000 tonnes of emergency food aid have remained stockpiled in warehouses around the world due to the shutdown of USAID. Meanwhile, Israel – with US and European Union support – has been systematically starving the nearly two million remaining Palestinians in besieged Gaza, part of the almost 320 million people globally who are malnourished or at risk of starving to death in 2025.

It’s part of a much larger pattern of hoarding and starvation that has its roots in Western norms around capitalism and settler-colonialism, a crime against humanity that rarely faces meaningful international repercussions. This is not an isolated atrocity: The rise of the West and the US was built on the massive hoarding of food resources for profit and the deliberate use of starvation to cow those already living under oppression.

It is difficult to miss, in both the international news reports and the desperate social media posts of starved Palestinians begging for money, food and clean water, with many showing themselves and their children reduced to emaciated bodies. It should shame us all, yet Westerners and their allies have all committed themselves to genocide, with ample food mere kilometres away. A recent poll by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israeli Democracy Institute shows that 79 percent of Israeli Jews are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Gaza, though, is hardly alone in facing mass starvation as part of a genocidal campaign, whether in 2025 or in recent world history. What has been all too easy for the West to miss are famine-level crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Sudan. As of March, “a record 27.7 million people are in the grip of acute hunger … amid ongoing conflict linked to massive displacement and rising food prices” in the DRC, according to the United Nations. The two-year-long conflict in Sudan, which has killed an estimated 150,000 people, many of whose deaths were linked to famine, disease and starvation, has also left nearly 25 million in need of food assistance, including nearly 740,000 in North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, where the population faces starvation while under siege.

To be sure, nearly every major power in human history has attacked or withheld food and water supplies in the process of conquering other nation-states and plundering their resources at one time or another. But the West, as the world knows it today, began its quest for global dominance with the First Crusade in the 1090s, and with it, perfected its tactics for siege warfare and the deliberate starvation of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Holy Land (present-day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), all in the name of Catholicism. Those first Crusaders, short on food supplies themselves, also died in their thousands from hunger or committed acts of mass cannibalism to survive.

Denying food and water in this Western-dominated world has always been a political and capitalistic weapon of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism. Western Europe’s plundering of the Western Hemisphere not only formed the foundation of capitalism and the never-ending pursuit of profit worldwide, it also entrenched the use of famine, malnutrition and deprivation as tools to control and exploit subject peoples. From the 16th through the 19th century, the transatlantic slave trade, African chattel enslavement and forced labour of Indigenous peoples helped fill royal coffers in Europe and build great wealth for landowners across the Western Hemisphere. Enslaved and coerced labourers, denied adequate food and water, toiled in the fields to grow cash crops such as sugar, coffee and tobacco, or mined gold and silver, and frequently died from starvation, disease and abuse. One recent study estimated that as many as 56 million Indigenous people died between 1492 and 1600 alone. Outside the eventual United States, seven years was the average lifespan for most of the 12 million Africans who survived the horrors of the Atlantic crossing and arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

Beyond the Americas, around 10 million people starved to death during the Great Bengal Famine of the 1770s because the East India Company prioritised collecting food for Europe’s ports and imposing punitive taxes on South Asian peasants over saving lives. This famine, like so many others under colonial rule, was not an accident of nature but the outcome of deliberate economic policies that treated human life as expendable. Between 1904 and 1908, in what is now Namibia and Tanzania, the ruling Germans “directly killed or starved to death” approximately “60,000 Herero” and “10,000 Nama” in Namibia, as well as “up to 250,000 Ngoni, Ngindo, Matumbi and members of other ethnic groups” in crushing colonial uprisings.

Perhaps the political and psychological impact of famine and bubonic plague in 14th and 15th-century Europe helps to explain both the West’s penchant for colonisation and its weaponisation of food, and the denial of access to it, as punishment. As noted in the results of the 1944–45 Minnesota Starvation Experiment with 36 white men, the participants “would dream and fantasise about food” and “reported fatigue, irritability … and apathy,” including “significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis”. Imagine the psychological impact of generations of food insecurity and starvation across an entire civilisation, especially one that believed itself to be religiously and morally superior because of its Christianity. The West has been consistent in denying populations everywhere the fundamental human right to eat.

As for the United States, the nation that began as the Jamestown colony in 1607 has operated under John Smith’s words for the past 400 years: “The greater part must be more industrious or starve. He that will not work, shall not eat.” America’s own colonial history and post-independence expansion also involved stealing land from Indigenous groups, burning crops and ensuring famine and massive Indigenous population decline. Growing heaps of cash crops such as tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar and cotton left little land for enslaved Black folk to cultivate food for themselves. Enslavers often provided the enslaved with meagre rations such as corn mush and salted pork fatback, hardly enough to sustain life.

Even when the United States became an agricultural juggernaut, the “work or starve” song remained the same, its classist and racist message only evolving with the times. For the past 40 years, US presidents and Congress have enacted multiple bills requiring the nation’s poor to work for minimal food benefits or go without, including new work requirements for SNAP (food stamps) benefits enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year. In 2015, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up the thinking of US business leaders and the Western world towards those living with food precarity: “They’re doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest.”

I can attest to the impact of malnourishment and working just to eat. From the end of 1981 until I went off to college in 1987, one-third of every month at home in Mount Vernon, New York, was spent with little or no food in my belly, often with massive intestinal gas pains bloating my abdomen. It did not matter whether my mother worked full-time for Mount Vernon Hospital or relied on the US welfare system for food aid. Once, I dropped from 83 to 76 kilogrammes on my 188-centimetre frame in the 18 days after finishing my undergraduate degree, while working for Pitt’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in 1991. I walked the five kilometres each way to and from work for those three weeks because I only had $30 to get me through. Fantasies of hoarding food and controlling access to resources were definitely part of my experiences with moderate hunger and malnutrition.

Today, the United States produces enough food to feed more than two billion people, and the world produces enough to feed more than 10 billion every year. Yet the quest for profit and markets for agribusinesses, and the continued deliberate denial of access to food for vulnerable and marginalised populations, all to subjugate them for their land, their resources and even the very food they grow, continues largely unabated. Hunger remains one of the West’s most enduring weapons of control and domination. Geopolitically, there can be no peace in a world full of people whom the West has deliberately helped starve.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.