In Ukraine, the battle lines long ago calcified into a stalemate, with Russian invaders moving forward incrementally and occasionally getting pushed back. In the diplomatic sphere, however, the territory is shifting fast.
When Donald Trump meets Russia’s Vladimir Putin today in Anchorage, Alaska, the summit will be the latest in a series of concessions by the American president. Trump’s affection for Putin has waned—“I got along well with Putin,” he said this week, conspicuously adopting the past tense—as his frustration with the ongoing war waxes. Yet by inviting Putin to meet, he’s allowing Russia to further protract the conflict.
During the 2024 presidential election, Trump vowed that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours—or even before taking office. After those targets were far in the rearview, with no resolution in sight, he more than promised vague important developments in his trademark two-week increments. More recently, on July 28, he issued Putin a deadline of “10 or 12 days” to cease hostilities, and the following day, he narrowed that down: 10 days, or by August 8. On the day that the ultimatum ran out, Trump announced he’d meet Putin in person, despite no end to the violence.
For the Russian autocrat, this is a win in itself. Putin is a global pariah facing an international warrant for his arrest, but the U.S. is welcoming him to American soil for the first time since 2015. (The U.S. has never had much respect for international justice structures, but the Trump administration is particularly dismissive of them.) Without stopping his aggression against Ukraine, and despite blowing through a series of deadlines, he gets a photo op with Trump. Putin today praised what he called “quite energetic and sincere efforts” toward peace by his American counterpart, which is more than anyone can say for Putin himself.
What’s in it for the president? As my colleagues Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Jonathan Lemire reported last weekend, Trump has grand dreams of a legacy as a peacemaker—perhaps even one with a Nobel Prize. This gives Trump some reason for patience with Putin. But the expectations for this summit keep getting lowered. Initially, the White House allowed suggestions of a tentative peace deal—or at least a genuine cease-fire—to spread in the media.
Now the White House says that Trump will be in Alaska for a “listening exercise, with Trump saying, “All I want to do is set the table for the next meeting.” He acknowledged this week that the U.S. doesn’t have many levers to pull to stop the killings of Ukrainian civilians. “I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” Trump said, referring to Putin. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street.” It was a notable acknowledgement of limitations from a leader who prefers bluster, but Trump does often respond to images he sees on the news.
Earlier this week, Trump suggested that he might push a deal that ends the conflict by swapping territory between the countries. This would be a sweetheart deal for Putin, who would acquire legal control of large swaths of rich Ukrainian land he has already seized illegally by force. The idea received an angry response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is not invited to the Alaska meeting—itself another win for Putin (though Trump has floated the possibility of Zelensky joining him and Putin in Alaska later). European leaders, who have sought to ease Trump toward their position of support for Kyiv, spoke with him earlier this week, and they said afterward that Trump would not offer any such deal.
But Trump still has little love lost with Zelensky. The men have improved their relationship since Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance berated Zelensky in the Oval Office early this year, but Trump’s interest in Ukraine is purely instrumental—a way to earn plaudits for peace—just as it was when he tried to get Zelensky to assist his 2020 reelection campaign by opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden.
Trump, meanwhile, has been embarrassingly acquiescent to Putin in past conversations. During a March 2018 phone call, he congratulated Putin on his victory in an election almost universally viewed as illegitimate, despite an all-caps reminder atop his briefing sheet that warned, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” This was just a teaser for a meeting four months later in Helsinki, during which Trump accepted Putin’s claim that Russia hadn’t interfered in the 2016 election, and indicated that he trusted Putin over the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus view. Today, Trump is meeting with Putin one-on-one, without aides who might help keep him on track.
Trump’s posture in Anchorage will go some way toward revealing how serious and durable his disaffection with Putin is. But it won’t end the war, and it may not even offer much progress toward a resolution. On Wednesday, Trump warned that there would be “very severe consequences” if Russia didn’t stop the war, but he declined to outline them: “I don’t have to say.” That’s unlikely to rattle Putin, who knows how to call a bluff. But at least it doesn’t give him another specific deadline to mock.
The post The U.S.-Russia Summit Is Already a Win for Putin appeared first on The Atlantic.
