And just like that, Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic isolation was over.
From the moment the Russian president arrived in Alaska on Friday (15 August) he was treated as a venerable statesman the United States was honoured to host, rather than an indicted war criminal who has been personally sanctioned by Washington for his ongoing assault on Ukraine. In an unfortunate piece of choreography that it seemed no-one on the US side had thought through, three American soldiers knelt on the ground before Putin’s plane after it came to a stop, rolling out a red carpet to the base of his steps.
Donald Trump could barely contain his excitement. As he waited for Putin to reach him on his own red carpet, he smiled and applauded and then held out his hand. The two leaders greeted each other like the long-lost friends they proclaim themselves to be and strolled side-by-side towards the cameras, where they posed for photographs and Putin ignored questions about whether he planned to stop killing Ukrainian civilians.
Putin later revealed that his first words to Trump had been, “Good afternoon, dear neighbour, very good to see you in good health, and to see you alive.” (The latter was a reference to the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, after which the Russian leader praised Trump for acting like a “real man”.) For his part, the US president had arranged a military flypast to welcome Putin. He pointed up at the sky as a formation of US fighter jets and a stealth bomber roared overhead and said, “This is for you.” Then he invited the Russian leader to join him in his armoured limousine, known as “The Beast,” apparently without even an interpreter present. Putin was smiling and laughing as the car pulled away.
For Trump, those first few giddy minutes turned out to be as good as his long expedition to Alaska was going to get. While he subsequently insisted that the meeting “was a 10” and they had made “great progress,” it was a failure on his own terms. Before the summit, Trump had said that he was “not going to be happy” if he left without a ceasefire, and that a key objective would be to quickly arrange a second, trilateral summit, this time involving Volodymyr Zelensky, if the talks went well. Perhaps, he had even mused, they could simply stay in Alaska and summon the Ukrainian president to join them there. But in the end, he left without a ceasefire, or a clear commitment to three-way talks. “It’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he told Fox News that evening. “And I would also say the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit.” Never mind that he had excluded both from the talks.
When Putin and Trump emerged from their initial meeting for what was billed as a press conference, they read prepared statements instead, standing in front of a backdrop that read “Pursuing Peace” and showering each other with compliments, but offering no details as to what had been discussed. “Many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left,” Trump said. “So there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” Putin appeared more convinced that they had reached some form of agreement, which he said he hoped would be a starting point to “restoring businesslike, pragmatic relations between Russia and the US.” But he did not elaborate and they left without taking any questions. The planned working lunch with the two sides’ wider delegations, which included finance ministers and economic envoys on both sides, was cancelled, and the two men were back on their planes heading for their respective capitals less than six hours after they had arrived.
Despite both leaders’ efforts to frame their discussions as “constructive” and “very productive,” and to laud the strength of their personal relationship, it was clear from Putin’s comments that he had not budged on his original demands, which amount to an invitation to Ukraine to capitulate.
The Russian leader made sure to praise his “very good, businesslike, and trustworthy” discussions with the US president, and, as expected, to back-up Trump’s claim that the war would never have started if he had been in power, instead of Joe Biden in 2022. During their private talks, Putin reportedly also assured Trump that he believed his claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him, somehow involving the use of mail-in voting, which presumably appealed to Trump. But he reiterated his insistence, which he has repeated at regular intervals since the start of this war, that the fighting will only end when the “root causes” of the conflict have been resolved. These include Ukraine renouncing any ambition to join Nato, adopting a formal position of neutrality and accepting strict limits on the size of its military. Putin has also repeatedly demanded that Ukraine formally cedes Crimea along with the four eastern Ukrainian regions his forces partially occupy, which he claims to have annexed in 2022. Ultimately, Putin wants an end to Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence.
“Ukraine is a brotherly nation,” Putin insisted as he stood alongside Trump in Anchorage. “Everything that is happening is a tragedy to us, and a terrible wound.” As he presented the situation, he was merely a passive actor surveying a senseless conflict, rather than the man who had started, and could, if he so desired, stop it at any time. “We’re going to stop thousands of people a week being killed and President Putin wants to see that as much as I do,” Trump said when it was his turn, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Russian leader seems wholly unmoved by the staggering number of soldiers who have been killed or wounded on both sides in this war so far, let alone the devastating toll on Ukrainian civilians.
“Next time in Moscow?” Putin suggested hopefully, in English, at the end of their joint appearance. “That’s an interesting one,” Trump replied. “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”
This is by no means the worst outcome for Ukraine. There were real fears in Kyiv ahead of this summit, fuelled by Trump’s talk of “land-swaps” and his palpable enthusiasm to make a deal, that Ukraine’s territory might be carved up between the two leaders in Alaska and Zelensky presented with a fait accompli. He would then have been left in the impossible position of agreeing to hand over large swathes of the country, or risking Trump’s wrath and American abandonment. While we do not know the details of what Putin and Trump discussed – and thus what demands might yet be conveyed to Ukraine – the current state of anticlimax is far preferable for Zelensky than being pressured to accept a bad deal.
The broad contours of this conflict are the same after Trump’s big spectacle in Alaska as they were before. Russia continues its assault, probing Ukraine’s defences at multiple points while the Ukrainian military fights hard to hold the line. The US, in its current iteration, is erratic, easily distracted, and signalling that there is no more military aid to come from this administration. But Europe is still welcome to buy American weapons, at least for the time being, and pass them on to Ukraine. It will be encouraging to Kyiv and its allies that while Trump is clearly still susceptible to flattery and Putin’s company, he was also prepared to walk away and cut the meeting shortwhen it became clear there was no bright, shiny deal to be made, just as he did during his 2019 summit with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi. Zelensky and his fellow European leaders now have another opportunity to persuade Trump that Putin is still “tapping him along,” as he has previously suggested, and merely stringing out the summitry to buy more time for his war. As the two leaders said their farewells, at least seven regions of Ukraine were under air raid alerts, with warnings of incoming Russian missiles and drones.
The one clear victor in Alaska was Putin. While Trump looked tired and somewhat deflated as he boarded Air Force One, the Russian leader looked understandably pleased with himself. At a minimum, he has seen off Trump’s latest threats to impose “very severe” consequences if he doesn’t end the war, as yet another deadline has come and gone, and their friendship has returned to more solid ground. The Russian media is already portraying the summit as a triumph for Putin, who has forced the US to recognise him as an equal – the fellow leader of a great and respected power – and to listen to his concerns. A report on the state-run news channel Rossiya 24 gloated that the red-carpet welcome for Putin in the US was evidence that the “Europeans” had failed in their years-long attempt to render Russia “a pariah country.” (The effort had long-since foundered in the Global South.)
Little wonder Putin wants to meet Trump again soon. Only this time, with the US president coming to him.
[See also: VJ Day: The forgotten war]
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