Russia and Ukraine agree: A Trump summit is a big win for Putin

Boston Globe

a day ago

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For Russia, 'this is a breakthrough even if they don't agree on much,' said Sergei Mikheyev, a pro-war Russian political scientist who is a mainstay of state television.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, iced out of the Alaska talks about his own country's future, has come to the same conclusion, telling reporters Tuesday: 'Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos. He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.'
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But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia's pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Trump's threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Putin did not commit to a ceasefire by last Friday, he would to punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia's war effort by buying its oil and gas.
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The deadline passed with no pause in the war — the fighting has in fact intensified as Russia pushes forward with a summer offensive — and no new economic penalties on Russia.
Ukrainian firefighters and rescue personnel at the site of a Russian bombing in the area in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on July 24. Friday's summit in Alaska pull the Russian leader out of diplomatic isolation from the West, and Ukrainian and European leaders fear it gives him an opening to sway the American president.
DAVID GUTTENFELDER/NYT
'Instead of getting hit with sanctions, Putin got a summit,' said Ryhor Nizhnikau, a Russia expert and senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. 'This is a tremendous victory for Putin no matter what the result of the summit.'
Before Alaska, only two Western leaders — the prime ministers of tiny Slovakia and Hungary — had met with Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and was placed under an international arrest warrant for war crimes in March 2023.
Many in Europe have been flabbergasted by Trump's decision to hold a summit on Ukraine that excluded Zelenskyy, and the continent's leaders have pressed the president not to strike a deal behind Ukraine's back.
Trump tried to allay those fears in a video call with European leaders, including Zelenskyy, on Wednesday. The Europeans said they had hammered out a strategy with Trump for his meeting with Putin, including an insistence that any peace plan must start with a ceasefire and not be negotiated without Ukraine at the table.
A peace deal on Ukraine is not Putin's real goal for the summit, said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. 'His objective is to secure Trump's support in pushing through the Russian proposals.'
For Putin, she said, the meeting is a 'tactical maneuver to turn the situation in his favor' and calm what had been increasing White House anger over the Kremlin's stalling on a ceasefire.
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On the eve of the summit Thursday, the Kremlin signaled that it planned to inject other issues beyond Ukraine into the talks, including a potential restoration of economic ties with the United States and discussions on a new nuclear weapons deal. The arms idea plays into Russia's long-standing efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as just part of a bigger East-West conflict.
Trump has called his rendezvous with Putin just a 'feel-out meeting' from which he will quickly walk away if a peace deal looks unlikely.
President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during a heated exchange in the Oval Office on Feb. 28. On Trump and Putin's meeting, Zelensky said, "Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos."
DOUG MILLS/NYT
Neither the White House nor the Kremlin has publicly stated what kind of peace deal they are looking for. But Trump has said it could involve 'some land-swapping,' something he feels he is well equipped to negotiate as a onetime New York property developer.
Zelenskyy has rejected any land swap, insisting he has no authority under the Ukrainian Constitution to bargain away parts of the country. Agreeing to do so would be likely to trigger a serious political crisis in Kyiv and advance one of Putin's long-standing objectives: toppling Zelenskyy.
Ukraine's surrender of its eastern regions would also torpedo Trump's hopes that the United States will one day benefit from Ukraine's reserves of rare earth minerals, most of which are in territory that Russia claims as its own.
'The worst-case scenario for Ukraine and more broadly is that Putin makes some sort of offer that is acceptable to the United States but that Zelenskyy cannot swallow domestically,' said Samuel Charap, a political scientist and the co-author of a book about Ukraine and post-Soviet Eurasia.
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Putin, a veteran master of manipulation, will no doubt work hard in Alaska to cast Zelenskyy as an intransigent obstacle to peace.
'Trump thinks he can look into Putin's eyes and get a deal. He believes in his own talents as a negotiator,' said Nizhnikau, the Finnish expert on Russia. 'The problem is that Putin has been doing this his whole life and is going into this summit with the idea that he can manipulate Trump.'
Trump's last summit meeting with his Russian counterpart, held in 2018 in Helsinki during his first term, showcased his propensity to accept Putin's version of reality. He said then that he saw no reason to doubt the Russian president's denials of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
President Trump and Russian President Putin arrived for a one-on-one-meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2018, the last time the two world powers held a summit.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
Trump suggested this year that Ukraine was responsible for the invasion of its own territory and refused to join the United States' traditional Western allies in voting for a United Nations resolution condemning Russia's aggression. On Sunday evening, Zelenskyy worried aloud that Trump could be easily 'deceived.'
Trump responded testily Monday to Zelenskyy's insistence that he could not surrender territory. 'He's got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?' Trump snapped. 'There'll be some land swapping going on.'
Still, said Charap, the political scientist, 'Putin can't really count his chickens yet.' Despite his iron grip on Russia's political system and its major media outlets, he has his own domestic concerns, particularly on the issue of land, if the sort of swap floated by Trump advances. 'Territory is a third rail politically, especially for Ukraine but also for Russia.'
This article originally appeared in
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