Putin Returns to Moscow With Air of Triumph After Summit

Hindustan Times

a day ago

ANCHORAGE, Alaska—Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn't have scripted his first visit to the U.S. since 2015 much better.
The Russian leader strutted along a red carpet at a U.S. air base and posed smiling with President Trump, who had weeks earlier been expressing mounting frustration with him and threatening to hit Russia and its trading partners with sanctions. He met with Trump under a sign that read 'pursuing peace.'
When they emerged 3½ hours later, the leaders said they hadn't reached a deal. Instead, Putin used the stage to press his demands on Ukraine. Neither Trump nor Putin, who is facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes, took questions from the U.S. press.
Putin, by clinching a long-awaited summit with Trump, scored a win. The Kremlin leader, has staked his legacy on dismantling the post-Cold War world order and resurrecting Russia's great-power status to put it on par with the U.S.
'Putin achieved exactly what he wanted: He simultaneously preserved his relationship with Trump, avoided additional sanctions, and received the blessing to continue his war,' said Andrey Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst and a columnist at New Times, an independent Russian-language magazine.
The summit gave Putin a platform to turn longstanding narratives about the Ukraine war on their head, emphasizing that the U.S. and Russia are neighbors separated at their closest point by just over 2 miles of water. Meanwhile, he has tried to paint Europe and Ukraine as the two biggest obstacles to peace, while stepping up recent attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Putin and Trump emerged from talks Friday without having a deal.
Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders in the days before the summit to understand better their red lines in negotiations with Russia. But the images of the two leaders in Alaska were certainly unsettling on the continent.
Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin on the taxiway of the U.S. air base, applauding as the Kremlin leader approached. After a firm handshake, Trump invited him to ride in his armored limousine to the meeting.
'Putin loves trolling and rubbing Europeans' noses in the fact that there is a strong relationship with Trump,' said Andrew Weiss, who worked on Russian affairs in George H.W. Bush's and Bill Clinton's administrations.
Hours after arriving back in Moscow, Putin gathered his top officials inside the Kremlin to tell them the summit had been a resounding success.
'We have not had direct negotiations of this kind at this level for a long time,' he said to an array of officials, including the defense minister, the chief of staff and intelligence chiefs. 'I repeat once again: We had the opportunity to calmly and in detail once again explain our position.'
To be sure, Trump said in the days before the summit that he didn't expect any major breakthroughs and said he hoped he could clinch a cease-fire and lay the foundation for a lasting peace process.
But in the hours after the summit, previous calls for an immediate cease-fire evaporated. Meanwhile, Trump's own language mirrored that of the Russian side, calling in a post on Truth Social for an overarching peace agreement as opposed to a halt to fighting first. That effectively gives Putin the green light to continue the fighting to capture more land in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops are making gains.
'Tonight, the president of our great country showed Trump, the president of another great country, that Russia is a party to be reckoned with,' said Alexander Dugin, a far-right politician and a pro-Putin ideologue. 'Therefore, we cannot be forced to do things that anyone wants, be it the West or Trump.'
Putin, who has called the fall of the Soviet Union a geopolitical catastrophe, has been working to resurrect slowly Moscow's sphere of influence in parts of the territory that once encompassed the Soviet Union. Ukraine occupies a special place in Russian history. It is where the founding dynasty of the Russian Empire was formed.
He is unlikely to sacrifice his ambition to reclaim Ukraine as a part of Russia to improve relations with Washington. But it would be a coup for the Russian leader if he could accomplish both after years of Western isolation sparked by his invasion.
'Both sides want normalization, which has a very strong business aspect that could unlock some money flows for both countries,' said Elina Ribakova, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Putin seemed to signal as much on Friday when he signed a decree that could offer Exxon Mobil re-entry into the Russian market through a stake in the potentially lucrative Sakhalin-1 oil field, which it pulled out of after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.
Whether the takeaways from the summit can translate into a sustainable peace process is hard to determine. In a call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump relayed to the Europeans the outcome of the meeting and that Putin wanted to keep fighting, according to European officials. Trump plans to meet Monday with Zelensky, who wasn't invited to Friday's summit.
Analysts said expectations are low that a road to peace can be found in a war that Russia is slowly winning.
'The bubble of inflated expectations has burst, and the process itself has turned into 'Waiting for Godot,'' said Kolesnikov, referring to a play about endless waiting.
Write to Thomas Grove at [e-mail]