President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday ended with no progress toward a ceasefire in the Ukraine war nor in persuading the Kremlin leader to ease up on his efforts to force the surrender of a sovereign neighbor.
So, it was a surprising success.
Trump had shown himself to be so desperate for a “win” in his role of wannabe global peacemaker that many foreign policy analysts worried he would fall under Putin’s spell and capitulate to his idol’s conditions for ending the war.
“It’s good that there was no deal,” CNN foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria said with palpable relief. “The fear was that Donald Trump was going to cave and sell out Ukraine.”
Putin gave no ground during the three hours the two presidents, their foreign ministers and closest advisors huddled behind closed doors. The Kremlin leader described the talks as “productive and mutually beneficial” but lamented their failure to address “the root cause” of the Ukraine conflict. That is code for a catalog of Kremlin grievances dating back eight centuries and Ukraine’s more recent audacity in aspiring to join Western democratic alliances rather than be swallowed up by Putin’s empire-building.
Trump tried repeatedly to put a positive spin on a widely criticized meeting with an international pariah on U.S. soil. Putin was treated like visiting royalty, with a red-carpet welcome and applause by Trump. The Russian president was also allowed to make his summation of the summit results first, a deviation from protocol of the host-nation leader opening the commentary.
“Trump did not lose but Putin really won,” observed John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser during his first term in the White House. “He escaped sanctions. He’s not facing a ceasefire. Zelensky was not told anything. Putin achieved most of what he wanted. Trump didn’t achieve anything.”
In his rambling address to hundreds of journalists assembled for what was supposed to be a press conference but took not a single question, Trump touted the many opportunities for U.S.-Russia trade and business ventures—if only the two major powers could put their adversarial history behind them.
“Everybody wants to deal with us,” Trump boasted. “We’ve become the hottest country in the world.”
On the subject of the elusive ceasefire, he said “many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left.” But he conceded “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”
Putin pandered to Trump’s ego in his summation of their meeting, agreeing with Trump’s oft-claimed power to have prevented the Ukraine war from ever happening if only he’d been president in 2022, when Putin launched a massive invasion he expected to topple Kyiv’s leadership in two weeks. Putin also bad-mouthed former President Joe Biden as the leader responsible for pushing Ukraine toward alliance with NATO.
Despite the flattery, Trump appeared fatigued and irritated with his summit guest at times. Trump told the journalists who waited hours for the leaders’ readouts that he would be making calls to allies in NATO, the European Union and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss next steps and a likely second summit in the coming weeks. To that, Putin ad-libbed “next time in Moscow.”
Putin has defied multiple Trump administration offers intended to get his agreement to a ceasefire, which Ukraine has already committed to. Trump and his special envoys to the Russia-Ukraine conflict have come back empty-handed after offering to compel Ukraine to cede 20% of its territory to the invading Russians and accept that Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO. Putin also blew by Trump’s deadline a week ago to agree to a ceasefire or face punishing new sanctions.
Friday’s hastily organized meeting at a U.S. military base outside Anchorage, Alaska, was touted as Trump’s effort to end decades of U.S.-Russia hostility with a big-power collaboration to bring peace to the former Soviet regions and crown their diplomatic success with mutually advantageous business deals.
In the weeks and months before Friday’s meeting, Trump ricocheted from one contradictory policy on Ukraine to another. Since winning his second term in the White House he and Putin have held at least five hours-long phone calls to discuss Ukraine and Trump’s campaign-era pledge to end Russia’s war within 24 hours.
That wildly improbable forecast stirred fears among foreign policy experts and historians that Trump’s impatience to show himself as a peacemaking wizard suggested he would capitulate to Putin’s demands.
Most of what Putin demands in exchange for peace was on offer earlier this year when Trump turned to casting Zelensky as the instigator of Putin’s war and an inflexible obstacle to its settlement.
During the infamous Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Ukraine’s wartime leader for refusing to capitulate to their terms for ending the war without security guarantees that would prevent Russia from rearming and waging a fresh invasion. The Kremlin has done that after earlier attacks on Georgia in 2008 and in Eastern Ukraine when signing a ceasefire after Russian mercenaries first invaded Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Zelensky has refused to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia, citing a constitutional prohibition on any president unilaterally changing the country’s borders. Putin’s forces had already seized, occupied and annexed Ukraine’s most strategic province of Crimea in the winter of 2014, capturing the Black Sea peninsula that is home to the former Soviet Union’s only warm-water port and the Black Sea Fleet naval base at Sevastopol. The base had been under lease to Russia from Ukraine since 1994 and guaranteed Kremlin control until 2042.
One nurtured grievance of Putin’s is the decision by mid-20th Century Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to move Crimea from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic map to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, when the territorial borders meant little in governance or policy under an all-powerful leadership in Moscow.
In addition to Crimea’s security and military significance, the diamond-shaped peninsula jutting into the Black Sea has been the Russian Empire’s vacation playground since czarist times. The dowdy Soviet-era beachfront hotels and services enjoyed a brief renaissance after the Soviet breakup in 1991 and a rush of foreign and domestic investment in the region. But Putin’s annexation and militarization of the peninsula has transformed the tourism venues into targets for sabotage, warship sinkings and seawater pollution defiling the recreational sites.
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