No Ukraine ceasefire but a PR victory for Putin: key takeaways from Trump's Alaska summit with Russian president

The Guardian

a day ago

Donald Trump's much-hyped summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin ended on Friday after just a few hours with few details given about what they discussed and no agreement to end the war in Ukraine, despite warm words between the two leaders.
Six key takeaways from the meeting:
As Donald Trump conceded during his brief press conference with Vladimir Putin, 'understanding' and 'progress' are oceans apart from an agreement. At the end of a summit more notable for its choreography than its substance – frustrated reporters were not permitted to ask questions – the leaders failed to negotiate even a pause in fighting, let alone a ceasefire.
'There's no deal until there's a deal,' Trump conceded, while Putin described their talks only as a 'reference point' for ending the conflict and, significantly, a potential launchpad for better diplomatic and economic ties between Washington and Moscow.
Putin may have been the guest at a meeting held on US territory, but the Russian leader gained far more cachet than his host. Putin spoke to reporters first – a break with convention that gave him the opportunity to set the tone of a brief and, at times, quixotic press conference in Anchorage.
Clearly mindful of his surroundings, Putin, who had hitched a ride from to the venue in 'the beast' – the secure US presidential limousine – reminded the world that the US and Russia were, in fact, geographical neighbours, although he stopped short of mentioning that Alaska had once been a Russian colony.
Trump was effusive in his praise for the Russian leader, repeatedly thanking him for his time and later, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, awarding a '10' for the Anchorage summit because 'it's good when two big powers get along'.
As if to underline his dominant role in proceedings, Putin ended the briefing by suggesting that their next meeting be held in Moscow – an invitation that slightly wrongfooted Trump, who had to admit that it would generate 'a little heat' at home. But he did not rule it out.
That is code for his non-negotiable demand that Russia retain the eastern Ukrainian regions it has captured during the three-and-a-half-year war, as well as other Kremlin 'red lines': no Ukrainian membership of Nato and the European Union, and an end to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presidency.
In a message to Keir Starmer and other regional leaders who made a public show of support for Zelenskyy on the eve of the summit, Putin warned 'European capitals' against 'creating obstacles' to peace in Ukraine. 'I have said more than once that for Russia, the events in Ukraine are associated with fundamental threats to our national security,' he said.
The summit was notable for the absence of the man who leads the country whose fate now lies in the hands of Trump and an alleged war criminal. The contrast between the public ambushing of Zelenskyy by Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office in February and the personal connection – some might even call it warmth – on show in Anchorage was hard to ignore.
Kyiv could perhaps take solace in the fact that Trump did not appear to have accepted all of Putin's demands, but the summit did little to reassure Ukraine that it can, in Zelenskyy's words, continue to 'count on America'.
As he ended his comments to the media, Trump, almost as an afterthought, said he would call the Ukrainian leader 'very soon', along with Nato leaders.
Trump is not a man to let go of the long list of resentments he harbours towards his political opponents at home; not surprisingly, he used a summit called in an attempt end the bloodiest war in Europe for eight decades as a platform to revisit some of those grievances.
Perhaps encouraged by Putin – who revealed he had told Trump he agreed with the US president's contention that the Ukraine war would not have started had he, and not Joe Biden, been in the White House when Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022 – Trump repeatedly referenced 'hoax' claims, backed by US intelligence, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.
In his interview with Hannity, he also claimed that Putin had told him that the 2020 US presidential election 'was rigged' through the widespread use of postal voting.
The Ukraine war raged on even as Trump and Putin sat in a room in front of a screen proclaiming that they were 'Pursuing Peace'. As preparations were made for their first face-to-face meeting since 2019, there were no signs that Russian forces were preparing for a possible ceasefire, with reports that small sabotage groups had pierced Ukrainian defences in the eastern Donbas.
Zelenskyy also warned that Russia was planning new offensives on three parts of the frontline. On the day of the summit Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that Russia was preparing to conduct tests of a new nuclear-capable, nuclear-powered cruise missile that, if successful, would be used to bolster its negotiating position with the US and European countries.
As the two leaders met, most eastern Ukrainian regions were under air raid alerts, while the governors of Russia's Rostov and Bryansk regions reported that some of their territories were under attack from Ukrainian drones.
The continued fighting was proof that Putin had never been interested in negotiating a ceasefire, the Ukrainian opposition lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko said on Telegram: 'It seems Putin has bought himself more time. No ceasefire or de-escalation has been agreed upon.'