Kyiv, Ukraine
—
It was not the applause, or the red carpet, or the ride in the Beast, or speaking first on the podium, that were the biggest gifts offered up to Vladimir Putin at the Alaska summit. President Donald Trump’s greatest favor to his Russian counterpart was time.
Russian success or failure on the front line will be measured in a matter of weeks. Putin has until mid-October until the weather cools, ground softens, and advances become harder. That is a full two months. His forces are on the brink of turning painfully incremental and costly micro-advances into “nowhere” villages in eastern Ukraine into a more strategic gain.
Almost every day, another settlement falls. The secondary sanctions Trump has threatened – which would penalize those buying Russian oil and gas – and has now twice backed away, would not stop Putin’s war effort this year. But it has already clearly piled pressure on him, in the forms of calls from the leaders of India and China, and may have led him to accept the invitation to meet with Trump in Alaska, where he was welcomed so graciously.
Putin does not want to maintain a lengthy war effort under economic pressure from his two main energy customers and effective sponsors, themselves having to endure tariff pain from the United States. And so, he is in a rush on the battlefield, but agonizingly slow at the negotiating table.
Trump’s instincts correctly assessed that reality in Anchorage, his pained expression belying the positive claims from Russian and American staffers of how well the meeting had gone. Getting on well with another president you have welcomed with clapping and a limousine is not real diplomatic progress. And he perhaps knew that.
In truth, Alaska did not go as awfully as it could have for Kyiv. Ukrainians had to endure a relatively brief revisionist history lesson from Putin at the podium, and the distasteful repetition of how Ukraine and Russia are “brotherly” nations, despite Moscow’s nightly murder of Ukrainian civilians in air assaults. But there were two positive notes for Kyiv.
Firstly, Trump and Putin did not cook up a madcap, real-estate, Sharpie-map peace deal in a hurry, that was short on detail and heavy on wins for Moscow, as some had feared they might. The opposite happened – no deal emerged.
The second gain for Ukraine is that the intransigent nature of Putin – despite all of Trump’s fawning – was widely on display. Trump appeared sullen: no lunch, no questions from the press, no return invitation to Moscow unequivocally accepted, and even the suggestion, in an interview with Fox News, that – of all things – he wished he hadn’t agreed to talk to network host Sean Hannity. At the end, Trump apparently did not want to be there, and Putin may be in error to have made him feel that way.
But the evolution of Trump’s thinking is not all a win for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Paramount is the overnight evaporation of a demand for a ceasefire. It was the bedrock of European and Ukrainian thinking last week, and even crept into Trump’s talking points ahead of Alaska. But Putin has never wanted one, as it would stop his military advances.
And so, as of Saturday morning, the demand has vanished and the focus shifted to a quick, enduring peace deal. There is no such thing; a lasting deal could take weeks to formulate, if not much longer. But European leaders stepped back from their ceasefire demand in their Saturday joint statement and Zelensky even said the “killing must stop as soon as possible” rather than preconditioning further talks on a ceasefire.
Trump also took whatever the bad deal was that Putin proposed, and turned it into pressure on the resilient victim – Kyiv. It would be Zelensky’s decision what to do next, and Trump urged him to take the deal.
The proposed deal, from what we know, seems potentially quite bad for Ukraine. One European official told CNN that Putin had persisted with his demands for control of all of the Donbas region – something politically and practically impossible for Zelensky to concede, and which he’s already rejected. This part-maximalist demand emerged after US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s meeting in the Kremlin earlier this month, with added confusion over whether this demand meant Putin had given up on claiming the rest of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, now partially occupied by Russian forces.
But Putin is a studied, patient pragmatist. He can take what he can now and then come back for the rest later. He has no electoral cycles to worry about, given his grip on the country, although likely knows his overheated and hyper-militarized economy cannot keep going like this indefinitely.
In his post-talks remarks, Putin remained set on what he considers the “root causes” of the conflict being fixed — which have previously included Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign state and NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War – and on “peace” for Ukraine, which effectively means its surrender and more dead civilians. He even ominously urged Europeans and Ukraine to not get in the way of whatever proposal he had floated at Trump.
Trump has not fully fallen for this play. His Monday meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky will likely reveal an evolution in their relationship, and Trump’s view of Putin, since their ghastly February blowout. It will be another moment when, whatever Zelensky hears, he will have travelled with only one option available to him, and that is to nod along and play nice. But Kyiv has the massed ranks of European leaders on the phone with Trump now, and Trump perhaps is mindful they are better buddies to him than Putin has been.
The problem for Ukraine is not how the circus of diplomacy plays out, but the horrors outside of the tent. The time it would likely take to bring the parties together for further talks could be all Putin needs on the battlefield to effect real change.
The coming weeks are the slow limp forwards that Putin wants: Tension between Trump and Zelensky first, followed by European pressure on Trump to ease off on Zelensky, followed by awkward and technical stalling over a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin and Zelensky.
Putin only has to claim scheduling or location conflicts for a week to buy yet more time.
Then a trilateral meeting, if there is one, only risks repeating the cycle again; Putin makes unreasonable demands he knows Ukraine cannot accept, Trump pressures Zelensky to accept them to get quick points on the board, and European leaders lean on Trump to recall that Ukraine’s security is also theirs. And rinse and repeat.
Time. Putin needs it to conquer. Trump hates wasting it without points on the board. Zelensky’s forces do not have it. European leaders hope it erodes Russia’s economic ability to fight.
Much of it has passed since Trump came to power promising to end the war in 24 hours, and while he is clearly wiser to Putin than in February, little in terms of the hard dynamics and demands of this war have changed.
