What We’re Watching: Trump to meet Putin, Indigenous voters in Bolivia shift right, Lula’s anti-Trump strategy goes global

Trump to meet with Putin, proposes trilateral summit with Putin and Zelensky

The Kremlin confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with US President Donald Trump “in the coming days” to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war. The location of the meeting isn’t yet clear. Trump also reportedly told a group of European leaders yesterday he will hold a (so-far unconfirmed) trilateral summit with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has been trying without success to get Putin to end the war – threatening further sanctions and secondary tariffs on Russian trade partners. Will his personal powers of persuasion do the trick?

Amid economic turmoil, Indigenous voters in Bolivia shift right

With the Bolivian election just 10 days away, economic grievances are causing Indigenous voters – who represent 62% of the population – to abandon the ruling Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, which has long acted as their standard-bearer and has held power for most of the last 20 years. Natural gas exports have plummeted and inflation has risen to a 40-year high. MAS now trails conservative rivals in polling. Bolivia’s election could be a bellwether for socialist difficulties elsewhere in the region: ruling left-wing movements in Chile and Colombia also face a challenging path to reelection in the next 12 months.

Brazil’s Lula goes global with anti-Trump stance

But if some LatAm leftists are looking cooked, at least one other is cooking. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is giving no ground in his clash with Trump, telling Reuters he won’t “humiliate” himself by calling the White House. The US president has threatened Latin America’s largest economy with steep tariffs over the prosecution of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump pal, on charges he plotted a coup after losing the 2022 election. The aging Lula, now in his third term and debating a fourth, has gotten a bounce at home from telling the gringo president to stuff it. But his recent spate of high-profile international media interviews suggests he’s leaning into the “anti-Trump” role at the global level, too. Narendra Modi, take note?