In a Trump-Putin summit, Ukraine fears losing say over its future
While Putin has made clear that he regards Ukraine as rightful Russian territory dating back to the days of Peter the Great, the Russian leader has not called for the reversal of the US$7.2 million sale of Alaska to the US in 1867, during a period of financial distress for the empire.
'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,' Zelenskyy said, noting that the Ukrainian constitution prohibits such a deal.
Then, in what sounded like a direct warning to Trump, he added: 'Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are simultaneously solutions against peace. They will not bring anything. These are dead solutions.'
Zelenskyy is the one with the most on the line in the summit.
After his bitter Oval Office encounter with Trump in February, which ended in Trump's declaration that 'you don't have the cards right now', he has every reason to fear that Trump is at best an unreliable partner.
At worst, Trump is susceptible to being flattered and played by Putin, for whom he has often expressed admiration.
However, there are also considerable political risks for Trump.
Those would be especially acute if he is viewed as forcing millions of Ukrainians into territorial concessions, with few compensating guarantees that Putin would not, after taking a breather of a few years, seize the rest of the country.
'President Trump still seems to be going into this conversation as if Putin is negotiating as a partner or friend,' said Tressa Guenov, the director for programmes and operations at the Scowcroft Centre for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
'That will continue to make these discussions difficult if Ukraine isn't involved.'
Trump's personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, raised the possibility of a meeting of Trump, Zelenskyy, and Putin, and in the past week, it looked like that might be a precondition for the session in Alaska.
But Trump waved away the notion when asked about it by reporters.
A senior Administration official said yesterday that the President remained open to a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy, but that the meeting between Trump and Putin was set to go ahead as scheduled.
Yet the gap in how Trump approaches these negotiations and how the America's allies in Europe approach them became all the more vivid at the weekend.
After a meeting of European national security advisers and Ukrainian officials with Vice- President JD Vance, who is on a visit to Britain, leaders of the European Union's executive branch and nations including France, Britain, Italy and Germany called in a statement for 'active diplomacy, support to Ukraine, and pressure on the Russian Federation to end their illegal war'.
They added that any agreement needed to include 'robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity', phrases Trump has avoided.
'The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,' the leaders said.
Trump has long sought a direct meeting with Putin, declaring publicly that a problem like Ukraine could only be resolved with a meeting between the two top leaders.
He also said last week that he expects to see President Xi Jinping of China before the end of the year.
And he seems reluctant to impose more tariffs or sanctions ahead of those meetings.
In fact, his deadline for Putin to declare a ceasefire or face crushing 'secondary sanctions' melted away on Friday without a mention from Trump, other than that people should wait for his meeting with Putin.
The fact that Trump is even meeting with Putin represents a small victory for the Russian President, Guenov said.
'Trump still has given Putin the benefit of the doubt, and that dynamic is one Putin will attempt to exploit even beyond this meeting,' she added.
While Trump has insisted that an understanding between himself and the Russian President is crucial to a broader peace, Putin, Guenov said, would certainly welcome any land concessions Trump is willing to grant.
Already the President has signalled that is where these talks are headed. Trump suggested that a peace deal between the two countries could include 'some swapping of territories', signalling that the US may join Russia in trying to compel Ukraine to permanently cede some of its land — the suggestion flatly rejected by Zelenskyy.
'We're going to get some back, and we're going to get some switched,' said Trump, leaving unclear who the 'we' in that statement was.
'There'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both, but we'll be talking about that either later, or tomorrow.'
Russian officials have demanded that Ukraine cede the four regions that Moscow claimed to have 'annexed' from Ukraine in late 2022, even as some of that land remains under Ukrainian control.
And Russia is seeking a formal declaration that the Crimean Peninsula is once again its territory. Yalta, where the meeting of three great powers was held 80 years ago, is a resort city on the southern coast of Crimea.
Until late last week, it appeared likely that the meeting between Trump and Putin would be held on the traditional neutral grounds of the old Cold War, perhaps in Geneva or Vienna.
Putin's willingness to venture into American territory was striking, not least because his arrival in the US will signal the end of his political and legal isolation from the country.
In the past few months, Trump has terminated efforts at the Justice Department and the State Department to collect evidence of war crimes committed by Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. Inviting Putin to meet in the United States seemed to extinguish any threat that the US would provide evidence to the prosecution.
'It's bewildering how we could bring in somebody the International Criminal Court has classified as a war criminal,' said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, who has tracked many of the Russian violations.
But he emphasised that Putin is entering the meeting with Trump in an extraordinarily weak position economically, and that it would benefit US negotiators to realise how few cards Russia holds.
'The mystical illusion of power that Putin creates is as real as the Wizard of Oz,' Sonnenfeld said. 'The Russian economy has been imploding. Trump doesn't seem to realise that.'
Sonnenfeld cautioned Trump against any deal in which Ukraine would give up rights to the Donbas region, particularly given the agreement that the Trump Administration negotiated for the US to share in future revenues from Ukraine's mineral reserves through a joint investment fund.
'Giving up the Donbas would be disastrous,' he said. 'That is where a lot of these valuable minerals are.'
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David E. Sanger and Luke Broadwater
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Photo / Tyler Hicks, The New York Times 'Without rules' Kiriyenko casts himself as a student of the cold calculus of power. He is a sixth-rank black belt in aikido, a Japanese martial art focused on harnessing an opponent's energy and turning it against them. He professes an interest in Methodology, a Soviet-era school of philosophy in which society can be engineered, managed, and transformed from above. In the tumult of modern Russian politics, that focus on power has translated for Kiriyenko into shifting alliances and repeated reinvention. 'In a game without rules,' he once told an interviewer, 'the one who makes the rules wins.' Kiriyenko was just 35 in 1998 when he briefly became Russia's prime minister. His youthful image and meteoric rise — he'd been a regional oil refinery manager a few years before — earned him the nickname Kinder Surprise, a play on the name of a European children's candy. After losing his post when Russia defaulted on its debt, Kiriyenko co-founded a party pushing Western-style economic overhauls. He took a crash course in literature to appeal to the urban middle class, reading five books a week in the midst of his 1999 election campaigns for Moscow mayor and for the Russian parliament, according to Marat Guelman, then his campaign manager. 'He was quick to perceive, quick to change,' said Guelman, who later turned against Putin and now lives in Berlin. After Putin won the presidency in 2000, Kiriyenko pivoted again and quit parliament to work for the Kremlin. A few years on, Guelman asked for help for an associate who had run afoul of authorities, describing him to Kiriyenko as 'a person of our convictions'. Kiriyenko, Guelman recalled, shot back: 'I don't have convictions now — I'm a soldier of Putin'. Alfred Kokh, a 1990s-era deputy prime minister of Russia who also left the country, described a similar exchange. He complained to Kiriyenko in 2003 about improprieties in that year's parliamentary election campaign. 'Are we going to la-la,' Kiriyenko replied, 'or are we going to talk business?' Students in a new school subject called 'Fundamentals of Security and Protection of the Motherland' learn first aid skills at a school in Kursk, Russia, a city not far from Ukraine's border. Photo / Nanna Heitmann, The New York Times Powerful friends Already ensconced in the Kremlin machinery, Kiriyenko ran one of the government's biggest businesses from 2005 to 2016: Rosatom, the state nuclear energy conglomerate. During those years, Kiriyenko deepened a bond with a banking and media magnate, Yuri Kovalchuk, according to Western officials and several of the Kiriyenko associates who spoke to the New York Times. A physicist by training, Kovalchuk is widely seen as one of Putin's closest friends. He persuaded Putin to bring Kiriyenko back to the Kremlin, some of those people said. Kiriyenko had proven himself at Rosatom, modernising the company with Japanese management principles and extending Russian influence by striking deals around the globe. In his new Kremlin job, Kiriyenko was entrusted with orchestrating Putin's version of democracy, an exercise in cementing the president's legitimacy and keeping control of a far-flung nation. As the first deputy chief of staff overseeing domestic politics, Kiriyenko planned the selection of the Kremlin's preferred candidate for governor in each of Russia's more than 80 regions, the elections to fill the more than 600 seats in parliament, and the stage management of Putin's own re-election in 2018 and in 2024. 'He's the technical implementer,' said Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal politician in Moscow who ran for president, with the Kremlin's approval, in 2018. 'It's a huge amount of work.' Kiriyenko also held contests to identify the next generations of technocrats, featuring online aptitude tests and role-playing leadership games. Just this year, finalists of his 'Leaders of Russia' competition have been named to government roles such as auditing construction projects in occupied Ukraine, managing bus transit in suburban Moscow and running the health ministry in Khabarovsk in Russia's Far East. He has broadened his portfolio further by taking on Russia's last bastion of free speech: the internet. In 2021, Kiriyenko wrested control of the country's most popular social network, VK, from an oligarch. Kovalchuk put up much of the money. Kiriyenko's son became chief executive. Kovalchuk's grandnephew took another senior role. The power of that alliance was on display in a blitz that many analysts saw as a prelude to a potential ban on WhatsApp. In March, VK unveiled its own messaging app. In June, Russia's communications minister praised the company for releasing a 'fully Russian messenger' in a televised meeting with Putin. Days later, Russian lawmakers passed a bill mandating that a Russian-made messaging app should come preinstalled on all smartphones. In July, the Government announced that this app would be the one developed by VK. 'For us, the government is always a partner and a senior comrade,' Kiriyenko's son and the head of VK, Vladimir Kiriyenko, said in April. Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin, who said that the Kremlin gave 'a blank cheque' after the invasion of Ukraine to musicians who were 'more focused on national interests', at a hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo / Katarina Premfors, The New York Times Backing the invasion As Putin massed troops and plotted his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the President's political aides were largely in the dark, Kiriyenko's associates said. The three people close to the Kremlin said they were convinced that Kiriyenko didn't share the fixation on Ukraine's pro-Western turn that drove Putin to attack the country. After the war started, Kiriyenko soon refashioned himself once again. Trading his suit for olive-green shirts, he started travelling to occupied Ukraine amid the fighting, touring hospitals and schools. He worked on planning a public 'war crimes' trial of Ukrainians to show Putin fulfilling his promise to 'denazify' the country, one of his associates told the New York Times in June 2022. The trial never materialised as Russian forces struggled on the battlefield, but Kiriyenko said at a conference in 2023 that the war 'must end with trials of Ukrainian criminals'. He did succeed in putting on a different show — the sham referendums in which Moscow claimed Ukrainians under Russian occupation had voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia. Inside Russia, Kiriyenko used the levers of his office to try to engineer popular support for Putin's invasion. The Public Projects Directorate, a unit focused on patriotic initiatives that Kiriyenko oversees, developed propaganda lessons for Russian schoolchildren. His staff also pressured midlevel officials to serve stints as administrators in occupied Ukraine, said Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin analyst in Moscow who has worked with the Kremlin. 'Sure, those who don't want to can refuse,' Markov said. 'But in that case they understand that they'll face serious limits on their careers.' Kiriyenko's portfolio also includes the arts. He has ramped up government support for pro-war entertainers who backed the war while blackballing those critical of it, according to Russian media reports. Iosif Prigozhin, a major music producer, said in an interview with the New York Times that the Kremlin gave 'a blank cheque' after the invasion to musicians who were 'more focused on national interests'. Prigozhin's wife, the pop star Valeria, has performed at patriotic concerts in Red Square. He called Kiriyenko 'positive, decent, sensitive and precise.'. When Kiriyenko's office seeks performers for events, 'the approach is not demanding, but suggestive', Prigozhin said. Kiriyenko's policies are also backed up by the full force of the Russian state. Thousands of anti-war Russians have been prosecuted or forced into exile in an effort that many analysts, opposition figures, and the former colleagues of Kiriyenko say they believe was largely co-ordinated by him as the Kremlin official who oversees domestic politics. Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition leader, had just been arrested and interrogated in July 2022 when he said he chatted with a security service agent in the grim corridor of a law enforcement agency in Moscow while waiting for his prisoner transport to arrive. The agent told him that his arrest was a 'political decision', dropping hints about a 'Sergei' in the Kremlin who was a 'buddy' of Boris Nemtsov, the politician who brought Kiriyenko into government in the 1990s. The suggestion was that Kiriyenko was responsible for his fate, Yashin recalled in an interview after his release in a prisoner exchange last year, though he noted he couldn't be certain of Kiriyenko's role, if any. To Yashin, the irony was remarkable. Both he and Kiriyenko were allies, at different times, of Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader assassinated in 2015. 'Now Nemtsov is dead, and one of his friends put another one in prison,' Yashin wrote from jail in 2022. An anti-war protester is detained by police in central Moscow on February 25, 2022. Photo / Sergey Ponomarev, The New York Times 'Absolutely opportunistic' In February of this year, Russian state news outlets reported that Kiriyenko was managing public unrest in Abkhazia, a Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia. To help show the benefits of being on the Kremlin's side, Kiriyenko offered a gift of 20 Russian school buses and organised a version of his trademark leadership competitions. Kiriyenko's remit has been increasingly expanding outside Russia's borders. A different Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Dmitry Kozak, oversaw relations with Abkhazia as recently as last year. But Kozak has lost influence in Moscow amid his criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, according to the three people close to the Kremlin, a US official and a Western contact. In the past few months, they said, Kozak presented Putin with a proposal to immediately stop the fighting in Ukraine, start peace negotiations and reduce the power of Russia's security services. The Russian President has kept Kozak, who has been at Putin's side since the 1990s, in his senior post. But he has shifted much of Kozak's portfolio to Kiriyenko, including managing Kremlin relations with Moldova and with the two breakaway regions of Georgia, the people said. The expansion of Kiriyenko's influence shows how his star continues to rise at the Kremlin as he embraces and executes Putin's wartime policies. Kiriyenko is 'effective' and 'absolutely opportunistic', Yashin said. If Putin or a future Russian leader pivots back toward the West someday, Yashin said, 'Kiriyenko will find the words for it'. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Anton Troianovski Photographs by: Getty Images, Tyler Hicks, Nanna Heitmann, Katarina Premfors, Sergey Ponomarev ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
