Will Trump get Putin to agree to a Ukraine ceasefire on Friday?

Yahoo

13 hours ago

As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin prepare to meet in Alaska to discuss an end to the Ukraine war, experts have expressed doubts over long-lasting peace.
Donald Trump is set to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday (15 August) to attempt to negotiate an end to the three-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine.
The White House has said it is "open" to a three-way meeting including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, but that - for now - a bilateral meeting would be held between the US and Russia.
It will mark the first time a US president has met Putin since Joe Biden held talks with him at a summit in Geneva in 2021.
Now, European ministers are preparing for their own discussions amid fears that Washington may dictate terms that are unfavourable to Ukraine, which has already said it won't cede territory to its neighbour.
UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has said "any peace must be built with Ukraine, not imposed upon it", adding that Britain and other European leaders "will not reward aggression or compromise sovereignty".
Meanwhile, experts have told Yahoo News that Putin will not give up his territorial ambitions in Ukraine easily and that he is willing to wage a "protracted war" to get what he wants.
Here's what has been said so far about the upcoming talks and the likelihood of a ceasefire being reached.
What has Russia said?
Senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov has said Trump and the Russian president would be focusing on "discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis".
"This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically," the Kremlin foreign policy adviser said.
In a post on Telegram on Saturday, Russia's investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev forewarned that other nations would attempt to use "provocations and disinformation" to undermine the talks.
"Undoubtedly, a number of countries interested in continuing the conflict will make titanic efforts to disrupt the planned meeting between President Putin and President Trump," he said.
What has Trump said?
Asked if he thought these talks would be the final opportunity to achieve peace in Ukraine, Trump told journalists on Friday that he didn't like using the term "last chance".
"I think my gut instinct really tells me that we have a shot at it," he said. "The European leaders want to see peace. President Putin, I believe, wants to see peace. And Zelenskyy wants to see peace."
However, asked if this would mean Ukraine giving up territory lost to Russia following Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the president suggested this would be a requirement.
"We're looking at that but we're actually looking to get some back and some swapping. It's complicated," he said.
"It's actually nothing easy, it's very complicated. But we're going to get some back, and we're going to get some switched. There will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."
What has Ukraine said?
Zelensky has said that Ukraine is "ready" to work for "worthy" and "lasting" peace, and, crucially, a peace that "will not collapse because of Moscow's wishes".
In a video address on Saturday (9 August), the president said "Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier," adding that Ukraine's borders were fixed in the country's constitution.
Zelensky has made a flurry of calls with Ukraine's allies since US special envoy Steve Witkoff's visit to Moscow on Wednesday (6 August), as European leaders push back against ceding too much to Putin.
Despite these concerns, the Ukrainian leader said he has not heard any "doubts" from allies about "America's ability to ensure that the war ends".
"The President of the United States has the levers and the determination," he wrote in an X post on Saturday. "What is needed now is not a pause in the killings, but a real, lasting peace. Not a ceasefire sometime in the future, in months, but immediately. President Trump told me so, and I fully support it."
'An inevitable fact': Putin likely to insist on seizing four regions
Christina Harward, Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, has told Yahoo News that Putin is unlikely to budge over his key territorial demands.
"In the past 12 plus months, Putin has stuck by his demand that Ukraine must cede all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts before Russia could agree to a ceasefire," she said.
"Putin is likely trying to present Russia's seizure of these four oblasts as an inevitable fact - which it is not given the many obstacles that stand in Russia's way before it could seize all of this territory."
Kristin Bakke, professor of political science and international relations at University College London, adds that Russia may use the Alaska summit to "press for recognition of its control over occupied territories and a halt to Ukraine's NATO ambitions" – both "red lines for Kyiv".
A potential surrender of Donetsk for with "no commitment to a final peace settlement" would "position Russian forces extremely well to renew their attacks on much more favourable terms, having avoided a long and bloody struggle for the ground," the Institute for the Study of War said on its website.
It says this would mean Ukraine abandoning a key defensive line known as the "fortress belt" – a "major obstacle to the Kremlin's territorial ambitions in Ukraine over the last 11 years".
'Putin is not scared of sanctions'
Trump has warned of more secondary sanctions against countries doing business with Russia in a bid to pile pressure on the Kremlin, having already slapped an additional 25% tariff on India for this reason.
However, warning that this might not be as effective as hoped, Harward said: "Putin is not scared of sanctions right now."
"Russia's battlefield losses are a major driver of Russia's economic issues, so Western economic pressure must be coupled with military aid to Ukraine to enable Ukrainian troops to inflict even worse battlefield losses on Russia.
"Only then can we make Putin rethink how he is approaching this war and bring him to the table to make compromises to end his war."
Eugene Rumer, a former US intelligence analyst for Russia who directs the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Program, said there is "close to zero chance" of Putin agreeing to a ceasefire due to tariffs and sanctions.
"Theoretically if you cut off Indian and Chinese purchases of oil that would be a very heavy blow to the Russian economy and to the war effort. But that isn't going to happen," he said.
Rumer added that China has already signalled that it will keep buying Russian oil.
'Frozen conflict' more likely than ceasefire
A full ceasefire "appears unlikely at this time", said Harward, pointing to the Russia's stubbornness over its territorial aims in Ukraine.
Far from stopping at Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, she says Putin wants "all of Ukraine" and is "ready for a protracted war" if it means achieving this goal.
"He is even heavily preparing his society to swallow the pill of a long war. Putin thinks time is on his side and he just has to hold out longer than Ukraine and the West," Harward added.
"A genuine, full ceasefire likely won't happen until the West can change Putin's calculus."
Bakke added that meetings like Friday "rarely settle the hard stuff", although a framework for peace talks and what's up for discussion may emerge by the end of the week.
She says that a "full, enforceable ceasefire" will be a "stretch" unless Russia's "cost-benefit calculation changes", adding that a "frozen conflict" is more likely in the short term.
Read more
Mapped: What parts of Ukraine does Russia control as Trump suggests land swap for peace? (The Independent)
EU leaders push to consult with Trump ahead of Putin meeting on Ukraine (The Guardian)
Vance says US is 'done with funding Ukraine war' ahead of Trump-Putin talks (The Independent)