ANCHORAGE, Aug. 15 — The speculators have spoken, and they speak with the finality of a slammed door: prediction markets place the probability of a second Trump-Putin meeting before December 31st at precisely zero percent — not a whisker of doubt left in either direction. The Alaska handshake, it appears, was not an opening act but a closing curtain. Some $6.7 million in wagers have settled upon this grim verdict, lending the figure a weight that mere punditry cannot match.

The August 15th summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson represented a rare convergence — two leaders willing to sit across a table over Ukraine's fate. Yet market consensus suggests that whatever fragile diplomatic architecture was sketched in Alaska has since collapsed, or simply never progressed past a single encounter. With fewer than five months remaining in the calendar year, traders evidently see no credible mechanism — no ceasefire breakthrough, no back-channel miracle, no mutual political incentive — sufficient to engineer another meeting. The clock runs short, and faith runs shorter.