WASHINGTON — President Trump’s Friday meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may be the most-watched Washington-Moscow summit in decades — but don’t expect any major decisions to be made as the US president seeks a “more firm understanding” of how to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine, sources and experts tell The Post.
Trump, 79, plans to treat the meeting as a “listening exercise” rather than a high-stakes negotiation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
While Putin, 72, has set audacious conditions for agreeing to a cease-fire with Ukraine, the US has made no concrete decision to date on whether to support them, sources familiar with the matter tell The Post.
What Russia wants
Among the demands reportedly pushed by Putin — almost entirely unchanged from the start of the war nearly three-and-a-half years ago — is the formal recognition by the US and Ukraine of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as Russian territory, despite Moscow being unable to secure them in 11 years of trying.
This recognition would include the roughly 30% of Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia does not control.
The Kremlin also seeks a freezing of the current front lines.
The desires were communicated to Trump by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who met with Putin at the Kremlin last week, according to European officials.
However, Russia has not made these demands public, which is one reason why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would like a sitdown with Putin — to get the terms direct from the horse’s mouth.
Russia has also pushed for Ukraine to formally agree to never join NATO, a halt to shipments of Western weapons to Ukraine and a prohibition on NATO-aligned soldiers from setting foot on Ukrainian territory.
Despite the White House insisting the war will be the primary topic, Russian officials have indicated they see the Alaska summit as a prime opportunity to discuss potential deals with the US — including opening up Alaskan airspace to Russian flights.
“We hope that the upcoming summit will give impetus to the normalization of bilateral relations,” Russia’s deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told state media site Izvestia, noting that restoration of air traffic could be a possible topic.
The Arctic and economic cooperation are also topics that interest Russia, Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov said, noting that the Kremlin hopes the meeting will lead to Trump going to Russia in the future.
However, Russia observers have expressed concerns over the Alaska location — particularly as Moscow’s hardliners have long “lamented the loss of Russia’s larger territorial extent throughout history,” George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War said Tuesday.
“Russian nationalists have manufactured a pseudo-historical argument for why America’s purchase of Alaska [in 1867] was illegitimate, and that Alaska is therefore actually legally Russian,” he said. “This is all nonsense, of course.”
“The Russian nationalist doesn’t respect the United States, but rather invents territorial disputes with its neighbors and seethes at Russa’s diminished geography.”
What Ukraine wants
Zelensky, 47, has called Moscow’s demands untenable for establishing a cease-fire, but has signaled openness to some concessions — so long as they are made as part of a final peace deal.
Ending the war after more than three grueling years would be a positive for Zelensky, as his country has been ravaged by missile strikes, mines and Russian infantry.
But the Ukrainian leader has been clear he will not accept peace at any price.
Zelensky has been adamant that Ukraine receive security guarantees, like NATO membership or nuclear weapons, to ensure Russia doesn’t invade again in the future.
“It is impossible to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine, and no one will recognize that. That’s why this conversation may be important for their bilateral track, but they cannot decide anything on Ukraine without us,” Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv Tuesday. “I hope the US president understands that and takes into account.”
What Trump wants
Friday will give the president a chance to observe Putin with his own eyes to better assess whether the Russian dictator is “tapping [him] along” with empty promises of peace, as Trump himself has occasionally suggested might be the case.
”Only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go in and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end,” Leavitt said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio similarly described the summit as a “feel-out meeting, to be honest.”
”The president talked to Putin on the phone three or four times, OK? And nothing has come of it — or at least we haven’t gotten to where we want to be,” he said. “And so the president feels like, ‘Look, I’ve got to look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face-to-face. I need to hear him one-on-one. I need to make an assessment by looking at him.’”
Trump made ending the war in Ukraine one of his major 2024 campaign promises, and securing a peace deal would provide a major bulwark for his foreign policy legacy.
To that end, Trump is expected to raise the issue of land swaps between Russia and Ukraine to gauge Putin’s reaction. The US president will also speak to European leaders ahead of Friday’s meeting in addition to after the sitdown, sources familiar with the preparations say.
“The next meeting will be with Zelensky and Putin, or Zelensky and Putin and me. I’ll be there if they need, but I want a meeting set up between the two leaders,” Trump said Monday. “There’ll be some land swapping.”
