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The fallout from Donald Trump’s summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week continues to grow. On Friday, Trump flew to an apparently impromptu meeting with Putin, shaming America by greeting like an honored guest the man who’d ignited the largest war in Europe since Hitler. The whole misbegotten summit was likely driven more by Trump’s desire to change the news cycle (especially after weeks of anger from his own base about the Jeffrey Epstein files) than by any real chance of securing an agreement.
What happened after the handshakes, as the two men went behind closed doors in Anchorage, remains a secret, but it couldn’t have been pleasant for the American president. When the two leaders emerged, Putin spoke first and said very little of substance except to reiterate his insistence on solving the “root” causes of the conflict. Trump mumbled his way through a few minutes and took no questions. Then both presidents got on their planes and went home. Later, a haggard Trump tried to put a happy face on the failure in Alaska; on Friday night, he quietly told Sean Hannity that Volodymyr Zelensky has “got to take” Putin’s deal, implying that the United States was endorsing Putin’s demand to freeze the front lines and partition Ukraine. Such an arrangement would give Russia some breathing space while leaving it free to attack again in the future.
Trump’s attempt to spin the Anchorage meeting, however, did not sway Zelensky or several European leaders, who in an extraordinary show of diplomatic concern all rushed to Washington two days after Trump’s return. In contrast to Zelensky’s previous visit to the White House, when he arrived alone to be ambushed and insulted to his face by Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, this time the Ukrainian president came to town accompanied by the leaders of five NATO nations, along with the NATO secretary general and the president of the European Commission. The Alaska summit was never a good idea, especially without some signal from Putin that he was actually ready to stop the killing, but the response from European leaders is the clearest evidence yet that Trump was on a path to selling out Ukraine to the Kremlin.
Fortunately, someone at today’s meeting appears to have talked Trump out of the idea of trading land for a temporary peace, an especially encouraging change because the White House already had a map of Ukraine in the room that seemed to be color coded almost perfectly in line with Putin’s wishes. When the group discussion concluded, Trump called Putin and then issued a somewhat scrambled statement on Truth Social, in which he said that he had gained the Russian dictator’s assent for a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky.
The plan—such as it is at the moment—to put Zelensky and his team in a room with Putin makes little sense. Trump believes that he can arrange a one-on-one meeting, with no mediators, between Putin and the man Putin is trying to kill every day, to be followed by a trilateral meeting among Putin, Zelensky, and Trump. The American president has backed away from his calls for a cease-fire, saying instead that he’s solved several wars without a cease-fire.
Meetings require some level of basic agreement among the principals in order to produce results. Both sides have to have at least some shared goals; otherwise, such meetings are not negotiations but two sides reading each other their demands across a table. Without the pressure of further U.S. sanctions or more arms to Ukraine, Putin is likely to meet Zelensky only to renew his demands that Kyiv surrender and certify Putin’s gains, an ultimatum to which Zelensky cannot agree.
The Russians, for their part, are being a bit more cautious about Trump’s offer of further negotiations. Their readout of the call tonight said that the Kremlin supports “continuing direct talks” and that Trump and Putin have “discussed raising the level of the contacts.” None of this verbiage means anything: Putin can easily afford to say that he’s thinking it over, and he loses nothing by humoring Trump while Russian forces continue to pulverize Ukrainian cities.
Still, it could have been worse. The Europeans, for now, seem to have moved Trump away from a land-for-peace deal, in which a grim handover of Ukrainian territories and the people who live in them would have been followed by haggling with Putin over what a “security guarantee” means. At the least, the mini NATO delegation achieved the minimum goal of stopping Trump from announcing some screwball plan to give Putin chunks of someone else’s country, and if kicking the can down the road while promising more talks averts an American-imposed partition of Ukraine, that’s good news for Kyiv.
Trump did, however, buy time for Putin, who has never been in as much of a hurry for a peace deal as Trump. Setting up a bilateral meeting with Zelensky and Putin while the fighting goes on will take a lot of planning—especially because the only thing Putin appears to want is to destroy the Ukrainian government and take over the country. Such a meeting could happen, but without a cease-fire or a basic agreement on Ukraine’s existence, it would yield little more than Putin reiterating his demands, declaring Zelensky the obstacle to peace, and then continuing the war.
Perhaps the Europeans did the best they could, stiffening Trump’s spine a bit after whatever browbeating he took in Alaska. But in the end, all of Trump’s showmanship has resulted in no substantive progress. Putin’s war continues. That said, Alaska is still part of the United States, America is still in NATO, and Kyiv remains free—and in this second Trump presidency, perhaps that counts as a good-enough day.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
