Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.
The prospect of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Alaska meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin is, unsurprisingly, causing Ukrainian and European anxiety to rise.
It’s a point that was echoed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk earlier this week, who noted he harbored “many fears” about Friday’s summit — although he added he had “a lot of hope” as well, presumably to avoid offending Washington.
This oscillation between hope and fear is utterly understandable considering the last time the two leaders met for a summit in 2018. Back then, a first-term Trump had suggested the meeting was more about breaking the ice than anything else. But the pair didn’t just break the ice — they crashed through it, as Trump eagerly accepted Putin’s denial that Russia had in any way tried to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, putting the American leader at odds with his country’s intelligence agencies.
Seven years on, the worry now is that Putin will nimbly maneuver Trump once more, this time into being at odds with Ukraine and America’s nail-biting European allies. The continent’s leaders have been hoping to persuade Trump not to agree to anything over Ukraine’s head. But is there really a chance that Trump can overcome what his former Russia czar Fiona Hill identifies as a “deferential” attitude toward Putin? Or will the former KGB apparatchik advance his agenda to subjugate Ukraine, return it to being a Russian vassal and, by doing so, crack an already brittle Western alliance?
With all the preconditions for Alaska being set by Russia — and not by Washington — it seems the latter is more likely.
Putin has seen U.S. presidents come and go and, all too often, he’s deftly drained their stamina and exhausted their attention span.
That’s markedly easier for an autocrat than a democratic leader who has to answer to an electorate and can’t play a long game. Putin can wait out his opponents, entangling them in never-ending complications, piling on deflections and digressions. The trick is to obfuscate, delay, muddle, be sorrowfully unctuous, all while dangling a carrot — in this case, an agreement to burnish the U.S. president’s self-cherished reputation as a skillful dealmaker.
Putin has already demonstrated he understands Trump’s psychology: Praise the man while deflecting him — something Ukraine’s passionate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy almost fatally failed to do in his infamous Oval Office meeting early this year. The Russian leader is smart enough to avoid stoking Trump’s anger with a Russian nyet and instead offer respectful applause for Washington’s efforts, while sorrowfully suggesting there’s so much more work to be done.
The truth is, Putin is in no hurry to end the war — in fact, to do so may well imperil his regime, as shifting out of a war economy would raise the prospect of some dangerous sociopolitical infighting. And, of course, prolonging the conflict puts further strain on European nations and the transatlantic alliance — something Beijing no doubt likes.
Furthermore, the Russian leader’s playbook has already handed him a big win simply by securing a meeting with Trump without having to agree to any major public concessions. Perhaps he privately offered one or two to U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff when they met in Moscow last week, but the worry there is that Trump’s golfing buddy and envoy — who shies away from having a note-taker present for his Kremlin meetings — has a nasty habit of being casual about details and has, in the past, been guilty of wishfully misinterpreting what his interlocutors actually said.
Disturbingly, Witkoff has already offered conflicting narratives about Putin’s intentions in several calls with alarmed European leaders, further fueling panic in Ukraine and across the bloc. In fact, it is entirely unclear what Putin told Witkoff regarding what kind of land-for-peace deal he’d be prepared to agree to.
Is he ready to accept a ceasefire along the current front-lines, meaning he wouldn’t get all the territory of the four regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — he claims are Russian? Or is Putin prepared to relinquish Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in exchange for a Ukrainian withdrawal from Donetsk, along with a de facto acceptance from Kyiv that it and Luhansk are part of Russia? Or is he only willing to cede some territory in Sumy and Kharkiv, which his forces are now occupying?
The problem is, any withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donetsk and Luhansk would be a military disaster for Ukraine. It would be a surrender of the country’s so-called eastern “fortress belt,” where it has dug in and held Russian forces back for more than a decade, and would assist Russia to strike further west whenever Moscow wants. It would essentially be a Munich moment, with Trump brandishing a piece of paper and declaring peace in our time.
The truth is, by discussing a “land swap” and emphasizing Ukraine must surrender territory, Trump and Witkoff have been maneuvered by Putin into loading the dice against Kyiv. And a “land swap” is particularly odd phrasing since Russia isn’t being asked to relinquish any land that truly belongs to it.
Rather, this is about Ukraine agreeing to cede land for something that hasn’t at all been made clear. NATO membership? The recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and its right to conduct foreign and defense policy in any way Kyiv sees fit, including receiving arms supplies from the West? Unlikely. “Putin is not fighting merely for land but for what he considers a ‘friendly’ Ukraine, as he defines it,” noted Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya.
Indeed, few seasoned observers of the Kremlin believe Putin is serious about giving up his ultimate goal of subjugating Ukraine — a nation he doesn’t believe should exist. According to longtime Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s New Eurasian Strategies Center, for example, “while the Kremlin is interested in sanctions relief, it sees no need to make substantial concessions.”
“Moscow is seeking to create the impression of progress towards ending the war in Ukraine, as urged by Donald Trump, in order to sustain his interest in the negotiations. The Kremlin believes that Trump is politically vulnerable and that his ability to influence the course of the war is limited. It sees him caught between a faction in Congress that insists on continued support for Ukraine and containment of Russia as a matter of national security, and his own electoral base, which demands a rapid end to ‘unnecessary foreign entanglements,’” the think tank argued.
Plus, giving the impression of being serious about a ceasefire or settlement also makes Kyiv look like the obdurate one, the one saying no — and that’s a risky place to be.
With Zelenskyy resisting a land deal — which he has to do in order to avoid the wrath of his country, where a recent poll suggests only around a third of Ukrainians are prepared to exchange land for peace — this week Trump resorted to some of the harsh language he was using earlier this year, saying he “very severely” disagreed with Zelenskyy’s handling of the war and that “it never should have happened” in the first place.
The U.S. president has, however, balanced that with a warning: On Wednesday, he said Putin will face severe consequences if he fails to agree to a ceasefire during the Alaska summit — a remark that’s somewhat steadied nervous European allies. But will that indeed be the case if the Russian leader fails to do so?
Zelenskyy had painstakingly maneuvered himself out of Trump’s doghouse after his ugly spat in February. The risk now is getting dumped back in it — and Putin will be doing everything he can to try to make that happen, while avoiding Trump’s ire.
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