President Trump has spent the week setting the bar extremely low for his high-stakes U.S.-Russian summit on Friday in Alaska. Hardly anyone expects him to make much progress in halting the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, given how far apart their views of the conflict are.
But those two warring countries do seem to agree on at least one thing. Merely meeting with Mr. Trump is a big win for President Vladimir V. Putin, bringing the Russian leader out of a diplomatic deep freeze and giving him a chance to cajole the American president face to face.
“Putin’s visit to the U.S.A. means the total collapse of the whole concept of isolating Russia. Total collapse,” Kremlin-controlled television crowed after news of the hastily arranged summit broke last weekend.
For Russia, “this is a breakthrough even if they don’t agree on much,” said Sergei Mikheyev, a pro-war Russian political scientist who is a mainstay of state television.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, iced out of the Alaska talks about his own country’s future, has come to the same conclusion, telling reporters on Tuesday: “Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos. He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”
But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia’s pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Mr. Trump’s threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Mr. Putin did not commit to a cease-fire by last Friday, he would to punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia’s war effort by buying its oil and gas.
The deadline passed with no pause in the war — the fighting has in fact intensified as Russia pushes forward with a summer offensive — and no new economic penalties on Russia.
“Instead of getting hit with sanctions, Putin got a summit,” said Ryhor Nizhnikau, a Russia expert and senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. “This is a tremendous victory for Putin no matter what the result of the summit.”
Before Alaska, only two Western leaders — the prime ministers of tiny Slovakia and Hungary — had met with Mr. Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and was placed under an international arrest warrant for war crimes in March 2023.
Many in Europe have been flabbergasted by Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a summit on Ukraine that excluded Mr. Zelensky, and the continent’s leaders have pressed the president not to strike a deal behind Ukraine’s back.
Mr. Trump tried to allay those fears in a video call with European leaders, including Mr. Zelensky, on Wednesday. The Europeans said they had hammered out a strategy with President Trump for his meeting with Mr. Putin, including an insistence that any peace plan must start with a cease-fire and not be negotiated without Ukraine at the table.
A peace deal on Ukraine is not Mr. Putin’s real goal for the summit, said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “His objective is to secure Trump’s support in pushing through the Russian proposals.”
For Mr. Putin, she said, the meeting is a “tactical maneuver to turn the situation in his favor” and calm what had been increasing White House anger over the Kremlin’s stalling on a cease-fire.
On the eve of the summit on Thursday, the Kremlin signaled that it planned to inject other issues beyond Ukraine into the talks, including a potential restoration of economic ties with the United States and discussions on a new nuclear weapons deal. The arms idea plays into Russia’s longstanding efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as just part of bigger East-West conflict.
Mr. Trump has called his rendezvous with Mr. Putin just a “feel-out meeting” from which he will quickly walk away if a peace deal looks unlikely.
Neither the White House nor the Kremlin has publicly stated what kind of peace deal they are looking for. But Mr. Trump has said it could involve “some land-swapping,” something he feels he is well equipped to negotiate as a onetime New York property developer.
Mr. Zelensky has rejected any land swap, insisting he has no authority under the Ukrainian Constitution to bargain away parts of the country. Agreeing to do so would be likely to trigger a serious political crisis in Kyiv and advance one of Mr. Putin’s longstanding objectives: toppling Mr. Zelensky.
Ukraine’s surrender of its eastern regions would also torpedo Mr. Trump’s hopes that the United States will one day benefit from Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals, most of which are in territory that Russia claims as its own.
“The worst-case scenario for Ukraine and more broadly is that Putin makes some sort of offer that is acceptable to the United States but that Zelensky cannot swallow domestically,” said Samuel Charap, a political scientist and the co-author of a book about Ukraine and post-Soviet Eurasia.
That, he added, could push Mr. Trump back to the openly hostile stance he took on Ukraine in February. He berated Mr. Zelensky at the White House for showing insufficient gratitude for U.S. assistance and for pressing on with a war that he insisted Ukraine could not win.
Russia, too, has in recent days slapped down the idea of a land swap in which its troops would pull out of some of the territory seized during the war.
“Everywhere that a Russian soldier has put his feet will undoubtedly be kept by Russia,” Kostantin Zatulin, an influential lawmaker in Mr. Putin’s political party, told state television this week. This, he added, was Russia’s “red line.”
The Kremlin has not indicated that it would settle for anything less than claiming a large part of Ukraine, without making any concessions.
“We have no doubt that the Russian attitude remains unchanged,” Lithuania’s defense minister, Dovile Sakaliene, said in an interview. She added, “they do not have a concept of cease-fire, and any concession they take as an incentive to escalate.”
Mr. Putin, a veteran master of manipulation, will no doubt work hard in Alaska to cast Mr. Zelensky as an intransigent obstacle to peace.
“Trump thinks he can look into Putin’s eyes and get a deal. He believes in his own talents as a negotiator,” Mr. Nizhnikau, the Finnish expert on Russia, said. “The problem is that Putin has been doing this his whole life and is going into this summit with the idea that he can manipulate Trump.”
Mr. Trump’s last summit meeting with his Russian counterpart, held in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, during his first term, showcased his propensity to accept Mr. Putin’s version of reality. He said then that he saw no reason to doubt the Russian president’s denials of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Trump suggested this year that Ukraine was responsible for the invasion of its own territory and refused to join America’s traditional Western allies in voting for a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s aggression. On Sunday evening, Mr. Zelensky worried aloud that Mr. Trump could be easily “deceived.”
Mr. Trump responded testily on Monday to Mr. Zelensky’s insistence that he could not surrender territory. “He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?” Mr. Trump snapped. “There’ll be some land swapping going on.”
Still, said Mr. Charap, the political scientist, “Putin can’t really count his chickens yet.” Despite his iron grip on Russia’s political system and its major media outlets, he has his own domestic concerns, particularly on the issue of land, if the sort of swap floated by Mr. Trump advances. “Territory is a third rail politically, especially for Ukraine but also for Russia.”
Having stoked nationalist passions inside Russia for years, Mr. Putin has given free rein to a noisy subculture of pro-war bloggers and television pundits. When the host of a flagship weekly news show on state television rejoiced on Sunday that the meeting in Alaska could mean an end to what Moscow calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine, nationalist bloggers responded with fury.
Mr. Putin, fumed one, “has apparently decided to throw in the towel.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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