ANCHORAGE — President Trump made his expectations clear entering a summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday: “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire,” he said aboard Air Force One.
Yet he did, emerging from their meeting in a diplomatic retreat, endorsing Russia’s territorial ambitions and adopting Putin’s position that would put off ceasefire negotiations in favor of more comprehensive talks.
Trump told his European counterparts he had agreed with Putin’s demand that Ukraine make territorial concessions to end the conflict, a painful prospect for Ukrainians at the heart of the war, a European official told The Times on Saturday.
Trump also wrote on social media that he would adopt the Kremlin line deferring talks on an imminent ceasefire.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” Trump wrote on social media. “If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin. Potentially, millions of people’s lives will be saved.”
It was a remarkable success for Putin, who sees a Russian edge on the battlefield and has put off discussions of a ceasefire for months as Russian forces press their advantage along the Ukrainian front lines.
Putin was greeted on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson with applause and smiles from the American president and offered a ride in his iconic vehicle. After years in isolation over his repeated invasions of Ukraine, facing an indictment from the International Criminal Court over war crimes, a red carpet awaited Putin on U.S. soil.
Landing in Washington, Trump spoke with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as the secretary-general of NATO and other European leaders. A follow-up meeting with Zelensky is scheduled for Monday in Washington.
But achieving a peace agreement is an even higher bar than the ceasefire that has eluded the Trump administration in recent months, requiring comprehensive, often protracted negotiations that, in the meantime, will allow Russia to continue its battlefield offensive.
The New York Times first reported details of Trump’s conversations with European leaders.
Details of the meeting are still unclear. In Alaska, both men referenced “agreements” in statements to reporters. But Trump acknowledged the question that matters most — whether Russia is prepared to implement a ceasefire — remains unresolved.
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“We had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left,” Trump said. “Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”
In a follow-up interview on Fox News, Trump said the meeting went well. “But we’ll see,” he said. “You know, you have to get a deal.”
Trump’s failure to secure a ceasefire from Putin surprised few analysts, who see Putin with the military initiative, pushing forward with offensive incursions along the front, and offering no indication he plans to relent.
The question is whether Putin will be able to sustain Trump’s goodwill when the war continues grinding on. On Friday alone, hours before the summit began, Russian forces struck a civilian market in the Ukrainian city of Sumy.
The Russian delegation left immediately after the press availability, providing no comments to the press corps on how the meetings went behind closed doors. And after sitting down with Fox, Trump promptly left Anchorage for Washington. The White House issued no statements, readouts or fact sheets on the summit. Administration officials fell silent.
“Putin is going to have to give Trump some kind of concession so that he is not completely embarrassed,” said Darren Kew, dean of the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, “probably a pledge of a ceasefire very soon — one of Trump’s key demands — followed by a promise to meet the Ukrainians for talks this fall.”
“Both serve Putin’s goals of delay and appeasing Trump, while allowing more time for Russian battlefield victories,” Kew added, “since ceasefires can easily be broken, and peace talks can drag on for years.”
In brief remarks of his own, Putin said that points of agreement reached with Trump would likely face opposition across Europe, including from Ukraine itself, warning continental allies not to “torpedo nascent progress” in follow-up talks with the White House.
“I would like to hope that the agreement that we have reached together will help us bring us close to that goal, and will pave the path toward peace in Ukraine,” Putin said. “We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive that constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works.”
It was an acknowledgment that whatever terms agreed upon bilaterally between Putin and Trump’s team are almost certainly unacceptable to Ukraine, a party to the conflict that has lost hundreds of thousands of lives fighting Russia’s invasion since February 2022.
The Financial Times reported Saturday that Putin had demanded Ukraine cede two eastern administrative divisions at the heart of the conflict — Donetsk and Luhansk — in exchange for Moscow agreeing to freeze the rest of the front line.
Trump told Fox that a Russian takeover of Ukrainian lands was discussed and “agreed upon,” pending Ukrainian approval — an unlikely prospect given vocal opposition from Zelensky and provisions in the Ukrainian Constitution that prohibit the concession of territory.
“Those are points that we negotiated, and those are points that we largely have agreed upon, actually. I think we’ve agreed on a lot,” Trump said. “I think we’re pretty close to a deal. Now, look. Ukraine has to agree to it. Maybe they’ll say no.”
Europe and Ukraine have argued that conceding land to Putin is not enough. After invading Crimea in 2014, and successfully holding it, Putin came back for more territory in the eastern Donbas — only to launch a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said this week that its war aims remain unchanged.
“We’re convinced that in order to make the settlement last in the long term, we need to eliminate all the primary roots, the primary causes of that conflict,” Putin said, “to consider all legitimate concerns of Russia, and to reinstate a just balance of security in Europe, and in the world on the whole.”
“The root causes of the conflict,” he added, “must be resolved.”
