Russia Has High Hopes for Trump-Putin Summit. Peace Isn't One of Them.

Hindustan Times

11 hours ago

Moscow sees an opening to reset relations with Washington, with Kremlin officials hinting at the potential for deals with the U.S. on infrastructure and energy in the Arctic and beyond, as Russia's state media plays up what it bills as a looming entente between two equal great powers.
'Neocons and other warmongers won't be smiling' when the two leaders meet, said senior Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev. 'The Putin-Trump dialogue will bring hope, peace and global security.'
Though the 'Ukrainian question' has been declared to be the main item of the agenda, 'much more important global issues' would be raised in Alaska, including ambitious plans for economic and infrastructure cooperation in the Arctic, senior Russian lawmaker Sergey Gavrilov said.
Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia's foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that 'settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.'
Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.
But when it comes to Ukraine, where Europe's bloodiest war in generations has raged for more than three years, there has been little indication that Putin intends to make a meaningful compromise. The Russian president's offer, as relayed by Witkoff, is a cease-fire if Kyiv agrees to give up territory—including major urban areas that Russian forces have been unable to capture.
Western diplomats and Russian analysts say that Putin thinks he is winning on the battlefield and that his original goal of replacing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet regime in Kyiv might finally be within reach now that Washington has stopped paying for Ukrainian weapons.
'To avoid having a clash with Trump, he may agree to secondary concessions—but he won't end the war,' predicts Russian political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who now lives abroad and is a critic of the Kremlin.
'The ideal scenario for Putin would be to divorce the issue of relations with America from the issue of Ukraine, hoping that other political and economic matters would make Ukraine of little relevance to Trump,' Gallyamov said.
The very fact of the summit with Trump—and in the U.S., no less—is already a win for Putin, helping restore the international standing of a man treated as a pariah in much of the West and facing an arrest warrant on war-crimes charges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
'He can say: 'Look, you have tried to isolate me, but I am meeting with the American president while you Europeans have to crawl on your knees and call him 'Daddy,'' said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University.
Residents carry their belongings out a damaged building following a Russian drone strike Sunday in Bilozerske, in Ukraine's Donetsk region.
'The image of standing tall and proud on equal terms with the United States,' Radchenko said, 'that's what Russia has always wanted, and that's what is really important to Putin.'
Trump has let his self-imposed deadline on sanctions against Russia lapse ahead of the summit, a move European diplomats fear signals to Russia that no serious additional U.S. pressure will be placed on the Kremlin whatever happens with Ukraine.
'Putin is absolutely convinced, as the General Staff continues to tell him, that with a little more pushing, the Ukrainian front will collapse,' said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a former adviser to Russia's central bank.
That doesn't mean that Russia will oppose a pause on its own terms, such as a stop to weapons supplies for Ukraine, that would make its next round of offensives easier, she said.
One possible concession in Alaska, some Moscow-based analysts indicated, would be for Putin to offer a limited cease-fire in the air, ending missile attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in Ukrainian cities in recent months. Such a move would be in Russia's interest because Ukraine's long-range drone attacks have caused significant damage to Russian oil refineries and military industries, while also disrupting Russian civil aviation.
Air attacks could resume once Russia stockpiled enough missiles and drones and repaired the damage.
Russian troops this summer have stepped up a ground offensive in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region, aiming to encircle the towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. Meanwhile, protests against attempts to curb Ukrainian anticorruption authorities have also shown widespread discontent with Zelensky.
Still, total Russian advances over the past two years account for less than 1% of Ukrainian territory. No strategic breakthroughs have been achieved, and the much-heralded Russian offensive earlier this year on the northern region of Sumy has collapsed with high losses.
The Russian proposal ahead of the Alaska summit, as relayed by Witkoff to European leaders and Ukraine, calls for Kyiv to surrender to Russia the heavily fortified northern part of the Donetsk region in exchange for a cease-fire. That is an area larger than the entire West Bank, with big industrial cities.
Zelensky has rejected the demand, saying he won't give away Ukrainian land and pointing to Russia's long history of violating cease-fires and diplomatic agreements. European leaders backed Kyiv, saying any territorial concessions must be reciprocal and accompanied by security guarantees.
Trump said Monday that his meeting with Putin is meant to 'feel out' whether a peace deal was possible. Trump threatened to abandon the negotiations if he sensed no agreement could be made. 'I'm going to go and see the parameters now,' he said. 'I may leave and say, 'Good luck,' and that'll be the end. I may say this is not going to be settled.'
He added that he will seek a Russian withdrawal from some occupied parts of Ukraine. They have occupied some 'very prime territory,' he said. 'We're going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.'
What the Russian public has been told to expect is a Ukrainian surrender rather than a cease-fire, let alone a Russian withdrawal.
Alexander Sladkov, a top war propagandist on Russian state TV, wrote on Telegram that any cease-fire with Kyiv would last six months at most. 'After that, there will be more war, with a stronger and rearmed enemy,' he said. 'A victory of Russia in the special military operation is inevitable.'
Such declarations seem to reflect the dominant message on Russian TV screens. 'We need to win. To win. A horrible war is under way, and it won't end with the meeting in Alaska,' Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia's top TV personalities, said in a recent broadcast.
Kirill Fedorov, a Russian military analyst, agreed. 'The special military operation is a zero-sum game, and it can only be concluded with total victory,' he wrote on Telegram. 'Both the Zelensky folks and the Kremlin understand that—while Trump is a 1990s businessman in a president's chair, so he just keeps imagining deals.'
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [e-mail]