When Trump meets Putin, anything could happen

Boston Globe

3 days ago

Top Republicans were horrified. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called it a 'disgraceful performance.' Trump's own national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, would later write that 'Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with in Helsinki.'
Trump plans to see Putin on Friday in Alaska for the first time since his return to the White House to discuss the U.S. president's goal of ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. With Putin pressing peace proposals that heavily favor Russia, many analysts and former Trump officials worry that he will once again turn a meeting with Trump to his advantage.
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During Trump's first term, he and Putin met six times in person and had several more phone conversations. (His successor, Joe Biden, met Putin only once, in June 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)
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Those interactions alarmed many of Trump's senior aides, who watched as the U.S. president disregarded their advice, excluded them from meetings with the Russian leader and proposed impractical ideas that appeared to have been planted by Putin, like creating a U.S.-Russia 'impenetrable Cyber Security unit.' The idea was dropped as soon as Trump got back to Washington.
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The relationship has grown more complicated in Trump's second term. In recent months Trump, eager to fulfill his promises of settling the war between Russia and Ukraine, has grown irritated by Putin's unwillingness to de-escalate the conflict.
Putin will land in Alaska determined to rewind Trump's view of the war to February, when he berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a contentious White House meeting for not showing more gratitude for U.S. support, while speaking warmly about Putin.
'Since the blowup between Trump and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, Europeans, Ukrainians and Ukraine's supporters inside the administration have cobbled together a policy of helping Ukraine stay in the fight and preventing the lurch by Trump to embrace Russia's view of the conflict,' said Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
'The real test on Friday will be how much of that policy survives the first in-person contact between Trump and Putin in his second term,' Weiss added.
The White House portrays the meeting as an example of Trump's dedication to stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine and defends his unconventional style as a needed break from slow-moving diplomatic customs.
But critics worry that the hastily planned conversation will play into the hands of Putin, a former KGB agent known as a master manipulator.
'I think he believes he should reel Trump back in, and believes his KGB skills will do that,' Bolton said in an interview with NewsNation last week.
The Russian leader may also benefit from the fact that Trump, in contrast to his first term, has few advisers pushing back against Putin's worldview. For his trip to Helsinki, for instance, Trump was surrounded by such Russia hawks as Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
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Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the lone member of Trump's inner circle with a clear record of criticizing Putin. But even Rubio, who also serves as Trump's national security adviser, has softened his tone since joining Trump's Cabinet.
The Alaska meeting was set after Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Putin in Moscow last week. Witkoff, a friend of Trump and a fellow real estate mogul, had no diplomatic experience before joining government. He has been criticized for meeting with Putin without other U.S. officials and for echoing his talking points afterward.
To be sure, the Russia hawks around Trump in his first term often had little success. When Trump called Putin after the Russian president was reelected in a March 2018 vote widely seen as illegitimate, Trump's aides placed a clear instruction in his briefing papers: 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE.' Trump did so anyway.
Not even a federal investigation into 2016 Russian election interference was enough to restrain Trump. When the two leaders last met in person, on the sidelines of a 2019 Group of 20 gathering in Osaka, Japan, Trump joked with Putin about the subject. 'Don't meddle in the election!' Trump said, with a smirk and a finger wag. Putin grinned in delight.
The investigation, and the presence of Putin critics at high levels of his administration, may have led Trump to conduct his conversations with unusual secrecy, however.
When the men first sat down together, at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Trump was joined only by his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and an interpreter. After the meeting, Trump took the interpreter's notes and ordered him not to disclose what he heard.
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That evening, Trump and Putin had an impromptu conversation, initiated by Trump, at a group dinner. No other Americans were present, and the White House confirmed the meeting only after surprised witnesses spoke to reporters.
Asked by reporters what he had told Trump in Hamburg about the 2016 election, Putin replied, 'I got the impression that my answers satisfied him.'
For his part, Trump called a New York Times reporter in Hamburg just as he was departing from the summit and said Putin had told him that Russia could not have been involved in the 2016 election because its operations were so sophisticated they never would have been detected. Trump said he was 'very impressed' by that argument, a case he went on to make in public.
Analysts said they have low expectations for the sort of breakthrough on Ukraine that Trump is hoping to achieve in Alaska. Putin has shown every sign that he believes he can gain more on the battlefield than in negotiations -- at least on the terms Trump has so far required.
Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that in his first term Trump tried to strike major deals with the authoritarian leaders of such nations as China and North Korea, with limited results.
'In general, Trump's history of meetings with strong men from Xi Jinping to Kim Jong Un does not lead to a successful deal that follows,' she said.
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Fiona Hill, who was senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council in the first Trump White House, agreed that any breakthrough appeared unlikely.
Putin and his aides have been frustrated at a lack of diplomatic progress with the Trump administration, and Hill said she sees little fresh ground for a deal, even one favorable to Putin.
The Russians 'always want something they can take to the bank, an agreement they can hold the U.S. to,' she said. 'They were excited by Witkoff at first, since he's a direct channel to Trump, but they're frustrated there's no structure around it.'
While Putin might welcome a leader-to-leader meeting, she said, 'he wants the details to be worked out later. And Trump isn't a details guy.'
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