According to the oracles of Polymarket, the world may safely assume that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shall not again clasp hands before the clock strikes midnight on December 31st. The exchange has priced a second summit at precisely zero percent — not merely improbable, but, by the market's cold arithmetic, impossible. The telegraph wires carry no hedging whatsoever.

The context, however, is rich. The two leaders did meet on August 15th at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, a historic rendezvous centered upon Ukraine's grinding war. Yet prediction markets, surveying the remaining months of 1925 — pardon, 2025 — find the calendar too slim, the logistics too cumbersome, and the diplomatic temperature too uncertain for a second encounter to materialize separately from that Alaska affair. With under five months remaining and $6.7 million wagered in a single day, the market consensus speaks with unusual conviction.