In ordinary times, the failure of the leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear powers to reach agreement on ending a brutal, three-year conflict at the heart of Europe might be cause for despair.
But to the Ukrainians and their European neighbors, the breakup of talks between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin after less than three and a half hours contained an element of relief.
Desperate as they are to end the death and destruction, their deepest fear was that Mr. Trump would give in to the Russian president’s territorial demands, and force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into a painful choice between giving up more than 20 percent of his country or rejecting a peace accord that he fears is a poison chalice.
Mr. Zelensky may yet have to make that choice. But Mr. Trump lifted off from Alaska, ahead of schedule, without having achieved the most basic first step: a temporary cease-fire that would allow further negotiations to take place. It was exactly the outcome, he told reporters earlier on Friday, with which he would not “be happy.”
As Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump boarded their planes and flew off in different directions, it was unclear whether they were putting the best face on failure, or just being coy about some kind of agreement on a way forward. Mr. Putin insisted that “moving along this path we can reach — and the sooner the better — an end to the conflict in Ukraine.” But he did not detail the path.
Mr. Trump was no more specific. He said in an interview afterward with Sean Hannity of Fox News that the onus was now on Mr. Zelensky to get a cease-fire deal. If there was a framework for achieving that goal, no one was discussing it.
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