Trump and Putin have other issues to discuss than Ukraine
Ukraine will obviously be on the Anchorage summit's agenda, but it may not even be the top item. Instead the two leaders could choose to find common ground over arms control and nuclear security. Getting Russia to rejoin the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty which Moscow abandoned soon after its invasion of Ukraine would be one positive trust-building breakthrough. Another is dividing up the mineral wealth of the Arctic.
Mr Trump has taken pains to lower expectations of a Ukraine ceasefire, instead describing the Anchorage summit as 'a feel-out meeting' to see what Putin 'has in mind'. If the US president feels that Putin is offering a 'fair deal' he promised to 'reveal it to the European Union leaders and to Nato leaders and also to President Zelensky'.
It's significant that Mr Zelensky is last on Trump's list of the stakeholders in the conflict. Understandably, both the Ukrainian president and European leaders are angry and insulted in equal measure by Trump's high-handedness. A statement published on Tuesday and signed by all European leaders (except, predictably, Hungary's Viktor Orban) insisted that 'the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine'. Mr Zelensky also refused to trade land for peace.
That's unfortunate for the prospects of the Anchorage talks, because making peace over Ukraine's head and trading land is precisely what Mr Trump has in mind. Twice now he has mentioned that territory will be swapped as part of a future peace deal. 'There will be some changes in land,' he told reporters on Monday.
'Russia has taken some very prime territory. They've taken largely ocean – in real estate we call it ocean front property. That's always the most valuable property.'
What Trump means by this is a mystery to anyone who has access to a map of the front lines in Ukraine.
Russia has occupied all of southern Ukraine's sea coast up to the left bank of the great Dnipro River at Kherson. That includes most of the Kherson region, half of Zaporizhzhia, about three quarters of Donetsk and pretty much all of Luhansk. Back in September 2022 Putin solemnly had these four regions written into his country's constitution as the newest members of the Russian Federation.
The Kremlin's official demand is that Kyiv surrender the as-yet unconquered parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk as the price of peace.
That's obviously ridiculous, and even the hardest-line Russian nationalists know that such a voluntary surrender of land, cities and populations will never happen. The only realistic scenario for a ceasefire and an eventual peace deal is the partition of Ukraine along whatever the line of control is at the moment the guns fall silent. But we can be sure that the Kremlin will be at pains to describe that as a major concession.
Then there's the question of informal de facto recognition versus legally binding de jure recognition of Ukraine's new borders. The Kremlin demands that Kyiv formally acknowledge its lost regions as part of Russia. Zelensky has adamantly refused to do so. But many long-frozen international conflicts – such as the division of Korea in 1952 or Cyprus in 1974 – depend on a diplomatic fiction where the two sides do not recognise each others' existence. The legal status of a partitioned Ukraine is likely to be a major sticking point in future negotiations.
What is Trump talking about when he speaks of land swaps? It's possible he's referring to tiny pieces of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions that Russia has taken, which could conceivably be swapped for equally tiny pieces of Donetsk or the final unoccupied sliver of Luhansk. But these are minuscule corrections - and have little obvious connection to Trump's cryptic ramblings about seaside real estate.
It's also worth unpacking what Mr Zelensky means when he refuses to 'trade land for peace'. In the West, those words are often mistakenly taken to mean that the president demands all his lost Ukrainian lands back, and intends eventually to roll back the Russians to their pre-war borders.
But that's not what he is speaking of. Rather, Zelensky is rejecting the Kremlin's demand to surrender yet more land as the price of peace. And he is also refusing to give legal recognition to the occupation. But everyone in Kyiv's presidential administration realises that the lands already under Russian control are, for the time being at least, irrecoverable.
On Tuesday the Ukrainian president announced that Kyiv's intelligence services have reported that Russian troops are actively preparing for a major new assault in Donbas. Putin 'is definitely not preparing for a ceasefire or an end to the war,' tweeted Mr Zelensky. Indeed in recent days Russian forces around the strategic town of Pokrovsk have been taking as much as nine square kilometres a day.
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