Last week, the White House blew past its own deadline of imposing sanctions on Russia for continuing its three-year invasion of Ukraine, and then, in a misguided effort to clean up that mistake, President Donald Trump gifted Russian President Vladimir Putin a one-on-one meeting in Alaska. It was impossible to make sense of what Trump expected to gain by doing so. It’s not even clear what Trump wants, other than a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump said he and Putin had decided not to try for a ceasefire at all, “which often times do not hold up.”
It’s even less apparent now what Trump wanted and expected. But after Trump and Putin met for more than two hours Friday, and then praised each other to the media for about 12 minutes, it was clear that Trump, in his rush to meet with Putin, not only risked whatever was left of his image as a dealmaker-in-chief, but he also may have damaged the United States’ image as a global champion for democracy.
Did the meeting bring us any closer to a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine? Trump said the two countries “haven’t quite gotten there” but “made some headway” and then landed on the tried-and-true holding statement that “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”
He said, “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate. And I’ll, of course, call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”
Then, early on Saturday, a few more details were released. Trump said he and Putin had decided not to try for a ceasefire at all, “which often times do not hold up,” but instead work directly on a peace agreement. Zelenskyy confirmed he would visit Trump in Washington to discuss that possibility on Monday. But the end result of Friday’s meeting remains unchanged.
Notably, before the summit, Trump had upset Zelenskyy and Europe when he said, with no input from Ukraine, that in a ceasefire deal “there’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.” Russia elaborated that it anticipated getting control of all of eastern Ukraine. At the same time, the Trump team planned to move ahead with revoking the legal statuses of more than 200,000 Ukrainian refugees living in the United States.
While even anodyne meetings between friendly heads of state are typically highly choreographed, with goals and discussion boundaries outlined well in advance by other officials, Trump’s freewheeling style and misplaced confidence that he has a personal relationship with Putin, a former KGB officer, created an unnecessary level of unpredictability to the proceedings in the days leading up to the so-called “Pursuing Peace” event.
“If you roll into the meeting not prepped, you can get jammed by Putin,” Michael McFaul, who was U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration, said last week. “Summits are to achieve an objective that advances American national interests. They’re the means to end, and I sometimes feel that Trump feels the meeting is an end in itself.”
Trump’s misplaced confidence that he has a personal relationship with Putin, a former KGB officer, created an unnecessary level of unpredictability to the proceedings.
When it appeared that Trump was going to walk into that meeting with Putin and offer him part of Ukraine on a platter, other countries took up the pro-democracy mantle the U.S. had dropped. The European Union objected to the concept of appeasing invaders who ignore national boundaries, an experience Europeans are keen to avoid after the infamous 1938 meeting that preceded World War II. Also, after a virtual meeting with Trump and other leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron affirmed that “the territorial issue relating to Ukraine cannot and will not be negotiated by anyone but the Ukrainian president.” But Macron maintained that something needed to come out of this meeting, such as a ceasefire and a return of kidnapped Ukrainian children.
The pressure on Trump to actually consider the details and impacts of his statements worked — at least to a degree. The White House dramatically lowered the expectations that any ceasefire or peace settlement would be reached by referring to the summit as “a listening session,” during which Trump would simply tell Putin, “You’ve got to end this war.” Shortly before the meeting began, Trump also stated he is “open to the possibility of security guarantees” for Ukraine, though how that can be managed without membership in NATO — the multinational entity holding the line against Russian aggression — remains to be seen.
At the beginning of the meeting, there was a palpable sigh of relief from European allies as the real-time decision was made for Trump and Putin to meet alongside their senior diplomats. This at least guaranteed that there’d be some level of note-taking, that American officials would have basic insight into the discussions and that the world would not be left to rely solely on the Russian spin of the events. The idea of Trump meeting Putin without those parameters in place wouldn’t have been a worry if Trump hadn’t had secret meetings with Putin in the past where no one else knows what really happened.
But Russia clearly felt like it could flex its muscle even heading into this meeting. The Russian foreign minister arrived in the U.S. wearing a CCCP sweatshirt, something he has not done before. Russian officials began telling media outlets they anticipated getting mineral rights in Alaska. While the Russian energy sector and economy is suffering, the truth is Putin didn’t need anything more than a photo of him on the same military base the U.S. once used to counter the Soviets. Trump legitimized Putin as the leader of a superpower that must be dealt with directly and not a rogue state kicked out of the G8. Trump completely ignored U.S. sanctions and the international arrest warrant for Putin, essentially siding with Putin against the democratic world order. He again illustrated how potentially easy it is for him to be manipulated into playing second fiddle to Putin’s imperial ambitions, gaining nothing for himself or the U.S. in return. The Russian foreign minister arrived in the U.S. wearing a CCCP sweatshirt. After 20 minutes of speaking in Russian to the mostly American media, Putin, who speaks English well enough, closed out his time in Alaska by saying: “Next time, in Moscow.” Trump said Putin’s remark would get him “a little heat,” but that he “could see it possibly happening.” Putin naming Moscow as the site of a follow-up meeting is another way way of proclaiming that Russia is back in the great power game. Thanks to the president who wants us to believe he’s the world’s best negotiator and maker of deals.
Nayyera Haq is a global affairs journalist. 
