For several months now, Donald Trump has been promising to get tough on Vladimir Putin, warning, repeatedly, that his patience is running out.
“Vladimir, STOP!” Trump commanded in a Truth Social post on 24 April after the latest barrage of Russian missile and drone attacks on Kyiv, to no discernible effect. “We’re gonna find out whether or not [Putin is] tapping us along,” the US president vowed on 28 May, “And if he is, we’ll respond a little bit differently.” By July, he had dispensed with the niceties. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters at the start of a cabinet meeting on 8 July. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Trump duly set a 50-day deadline for Vladimir Putin to mend his ways. Then, when it became clear that Russia was, in fact, only escalating its assault on Ukraine, he shortened the timeline to “ten or 12 days” during his meeting with Keir Starmer in Scotland on 28 July. As he returned home on Air Force One the following day, he clarified that the final deadline for Putin to agree a ceasefire would be “ten days from today”.
And yet, 24 hours before that deadline was due to expire, with no indication that Russia is any closer to halting its attacks, the Kremlin announced that Putin and Trump had agreed to meet, perhaps as early as next week. The Russians claimed it was the Americans who had requested the meeting. Washington said it was Moscow’s idea. Putin suggested they could meet in the United Arab Emirates. “I think we’ll decide, but this would be a perfectly suitable place,” he said on 7 July.
The White House then injected fresh confusion into the situation by insisting that Trump would only meet Putin if he also agreed to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The Russian leader responded that this was “possible” but only if “certain conditions” were created first, and “unfortunately, we are still far from that”. Or to put that more plainly: no – or at least not until after many more months of prevarication and delay. (The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later said that Trump was “open” to meeting Putin even if he did not agree to meet Zelensky.)
If Trump and Putin do meet, without any meaningful concessions from the Russian leader in advance, then this will rightly be celebrated as a diplomatic victory in the Kremlin. At a minimum, Putin will have won yet another reprieve from the prospect of imminent US action, as well as an end to the diplomatic isolation that had been imposed by the West. No US presidents – and vanishingly few European leaders – have agreed to sit down with Putin since the start of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the Russian opposition activist and former chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote on social media in response to reports of the planned meeting: “It’s a process of normalising and elevating [Putin], offering him concessions and lifelines that only embolden him to further aggression.”
The Russian leader also has reason to believe that he can, perhaps, extract even more from his US counterpart. In their past interactions, Trump has proved to be highly susceptible to flattery, openly admiring of Putin, and inclined to take his word over, say, the clear conclusions of his own intelligence agencies. During their infamous summit in Helsinki in 2018, Trump defended Putin against allegations of Russian-meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, telling reporters, “I don’t see any reason why it would be [Russia],” as Putin smirked alongside him. He presumably likes his chances of emerging with a renewed declaration of friendship – and promises to do great business deals in the future – if he can get a few hours alone in a room with Trump.
Putin will similarly be well aware that Trump’s abiding concern over the past few months seems to be how he has been treated by the Russian leader. It is not the fundamental injustice of Russia’s assault on Ukraine – or the troubling precedent this sets for other autocrats weighing their own wars of aggression – that appears to offend Trump, so much as the sense that Putin has been feeding him “bullshit” and “tapping” him along, dangling the prospect of peace talks during their “lovely” phone conversations, and then bombing Ukrainian civilians later that night.
Trump has made clear since last year’s election campaign that his main interest in the conflict is ending it, and perhaps winning a Nobel Peace Prize in the process, not in securing a viable future for Ukraine as a sovereign state and pushing back against the threat to European security. He has derided Zelensky as a “dictator” while declining to use the same term for Putin, publicly humiliated the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office, and dismissed the conflict during a meeting with Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte last month as “a Biden War”. “There are no winners here,” he insisted on 15 July. “This is a loser.” He did not exactly sound like a leader who is intent on ensuring a fair settlement for Ukraine and backing Zelensky, as Biden repeatedly promised, for “as long as it takes”.
Putin’s objectives in this war have always gone far beyond merely seizing territory in Ukraine. He wants to ensure the country’s subjugation, the capitulation of its elected leaders, the imposition of strict limits on its armed forces, and the end of any possibility that Ukraine might, one day, be admitted to Nato. In his wildest dreams, perhaps he also imagines that he can redraw the post-Cold War security architecture of Europe and roll back what he views as Nato’s treacherous eastward expansion. With Trump so clearly signalling his lack of interest in the fundamental principles at stake in this conflict, Putin may well be keen to assess the prospects for a settlement on his terms. Failing that, he will at least have bought more time to pursue these objectives on the battlefield.
This is not the first time Trump has blundered into a high-profile summit with a US adversary, apparently convinced that the talks themselves were a form of victory and that he alone could secure a resolution that had eluded decades of American diplomacy. In 2018, he became the first sitting US president to meet a North Korean leader when he shook hands with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, a feat that neither the young dictator’s father or his grandfather had managed to achieve. The nascent bromance abruptly ended during their second meeting in Hanoi the following year when it became clear to Trump, as any analyst of North Korea could have told him, that Kim was not seriously interesting in giving up his nuclear arsenal after all. Instead, by the end of Trump’s first term, Kim’s weapons programme was only more advanced.
Like Kim, Putin has long wanted this meeting. He has been hinting since Trump’s return to office in January that they should sit down together and “talk calmly about all areas that are of interest to both the US and Russia”. Perhaps Trump has learned from his past experience that there are limits to what his personal charisma and supposed deal-making prowess can achieve, but it seems more likely that he believes that this time, this summit, this great new deal, will prove to be the charm, and perhaps, finally, the key to that Nobel prize. No wonder Putin seems so convinced he can keep tapping him along.
[See also: North Korea’s guide to going nuclear]
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