President Donald Trump’s pivot toward the Russian position on Ukraine after his summit in Alaska Friday with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, has set the stage for a dramatic confrontation at the White House Monday. Key European and NATO leaders said they would join Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said they would attend what had been planned as a bilateral discussion between the American and Ukrainian leaders.
That extraordinary gesture of European solidarity comes after Mr. Trump said Saturday that, following his meeting with Mr. Putin, he now favors going “directly” to a comprehensive peace deal in Ukraine without first securing a ceasefire. His announcement, analysts say, marks an embrace of the Russian perspective on the war.
Why We Wrote This
After the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska and a whirl of Ukrainian diplomacy, European and U.S. leaders seem increasingly divided on how to end the war in Ukraine, setting the stage for a dramatic Volodymyr Zelenskyy visit to the White House Monday.
“We’ve seen a lot of shifts from Trump on Ukraine, but this one [on a ceasefire] is a real flip-flop,” says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
“Now it seems the White House is on board with Russian positions, including ceding territory the Russians don’t even occupy,” he adds. “It’s going to be very hard for Zelenskyy to say ‘yes’ to that.”
In the run-up to Friday’s summit, Mr. Trump had threatened “severe consequences” if Mr. Putin did not agree to an immediate ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine. In part, his aim had been an end to the indiscriminate and near daily killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian missiles and drones.
But no ceasefire was agreed on, no consequences were imposed – and in the post-summit hours, Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets continued unabated.
U.S. pressure on Ukraine
Just how far Mr. Trump has shifted post-summit toward Mr. Putin’s positions on ending the war should become clearer Monday afternoon in the Oval Office.
But even before that meeting, indications are that Mr. Trump will press Mr. Zelenskyy to accept territorial concessions that Mr. Putin presented at the summit. Mr. Zelenskyy has for months called for a ceasefire as a necessary prelude to any peace negotiations, and until Friday Mr. Trump endorsed that approach.
Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Reuters
“It’s impossible to do this [negotiate an end to the war] under the pressure of weapons,” Mr. Zelenskyy said Sunday in Brussels. “So it’s necessary to cease fire and work quickly on a final deal.”
It now seems likely the Ukrainian leader will be presented with a set of demands that Mr. Putin is said to have laid out for Mr. Trump as his requirements for reaching a peace deal. Among those, according to some European leaders and officials who participated in a call Saturday with Mr. Trump, are territorial concessions in eastern Ukraine that Mr. Zelenskyy has already ruled out.
Mr. Trump told European leaders Saturday that Mr. Putin is ready for a peace deal that would include Ukraine ceding the entire eastern Donbas region. That includes the Donetsk region, about 30 percent of which is controlled by Ukrainian forces.
“The Ukrainians will object to the idea of giving up territory through a peace deal that Russia has been trying for more than three years to take by their land war,” says Ambassador Pifer, now an affiliate with the Center for Security and International Cooperation at Stanford University in California.
Mr. Putin’s ability to impose his will on the question of an immediate ceasefire is just one example of how the Russian leader emerged the winner of the Alaska summit, some international affairs analysts say.
“It’s an open-and-shut case” that Mr. Putin “came out on top,” says Michael Desch, an international affairs professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. “President Putin shifted the terms of the discussion clearly to the Russian position and … emerged as the only one in the room with a strategic vision. It’s a very bad look for President Trump,” he adds, “although I doubt he sees it that way.”
Others point out that while Mr. Trump may indeed have shifted toward Mr. Putin’s perspective on the war, he did not give the Russian leader everything he sought from the meeting.
“Overall, Putin left the summit as the bigger winner of the two,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting a realist U.S. foreign policy.
Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Sputnik/Kremlin/AP
“But it’s also true that Putin didn’t achieve his objective of significantly solidifying U.S.-Russia relations by returning home with a bunch of bilateral deals on things like the Arctic and space,” she adds. “So in a sense, Trump did seem to stick to his initial position of keeping the summit focused on Ukraine.”
“Concession to reality”
Moreover, as bad as Mr. Trump’s switch on a ceasefire might look, it also could suggest the president understood that Mr. Putin was never going to accept a ceasefire while his forces have the upper hand on the ground.
“Yes, it was a concession to Putin,” she says, “but it was also a concession to reality.”
Details emerging from the Alaska summit also suggest some changes in Russian positions that could be considered sweeteners for Mr. Trump to sign on to Moscow’s vision for ending the war, some analysts say.
Among those is a Russian proposal to declare a ceasefire in two other eastern regions they partially occupy, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. “If indeed the Russians are saying they would only take the part [of the two regions] they now occupy – both being regions they declared in 2022 they had annexed – that would be a change in the Russian position,” Ambassador Pifer says.
On the other hand, the Russian proposal to freeze the conflict along the existing front line in the two regions also suggests a “strategic rationale” that Russia already has what it needs – like high ground in Kherson – to dominate those regions, Dr. Desch says.
Other “intriguing” points emerging from the summit are Mr. Putin’s apparent willingness to “recognize Ukraine as de jure independent” and to accept “security guarantees” for Ukraine with international participation, Dr. Desch says.
White House special envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed Sunday in an appearance on CNN that Mr. Putin is ready to accept some form of U.S. security guarantee for Ukraine. European states would also be expected to participate, though probably not with a NATO role.
“Of course, the devil will be in the details,” he adds, “but we’re starting to see the sort of deal that is likely to be on the table.”
“Big powers” dynamic
One reason European leaders are hastily traveling across the Atlantic to stand at Mr. Zelenskyy’s side is that they don’t want to see him eventually seated alone at that negotiating table with two big powers that appear to be increasingly aligned.
Mr. Trump has long operated based on a perspective of the world where the “big powers” matter more and hold sway over smaller states by virtue of their might and economic heft. The Trump-Putin summit was the perfect venue for the president to expound on this perspective.
In a post-summit interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump said Ukraine should agree to a peace deal because “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”
More broadly, Mr. Trump justified his “10-over-10” grade for the summit by saying, “It’s good when two big powers get along, especially when they’re nuclear powers. We’re No. 1,” he added. “They’re No. 2 in the world.”
European powers and others may see an American shift away from the postwar international order as alarming, but others say it may be an inevitable return to global reality. “As one who sees great power politics as the norm,” Dr. Desch says, “I’d say it’s actually the past 80 years since the end of World War II of building and adhering to international institutions that have been a bit of an aberration.”
Still, some question whether the Alaska summit demonstrated the U.S. fulfilling the role of the assertive and reliable big power.
“Not only was Alaska a big win for Putin, but at the same time, it made the president of the United States look weak,” Ambassador Pifer says. “That is going to have serious consequences with other leaders Trump has to deal with.”
Citing at the top of the list Chinese President Xi Jinping, he adds, “You can already hear Xi saying, ‘I just need to play Trump as well as Putin did, and I’ll be all set.’”
