The high-stakes meeting set to take place on Friday between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin has the potential to create a framework for ending the three-year, ongoing war in Ukraine.
The question, analysts say, is at what cost to the NATO alliance and to Ukraine itself?
Mr. Putin’s goals include securing territory in eastern Ukraine and getting his annexation of Crimea formally recognized. For Mr. Trump, a win would be as simple as fulfilling his campaign promise to end the war. But in this pursuit, he risks paying a high price in concessions to Russia, such as abandoning any efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO.
Why We Wrote This
Getting Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table has been a key first step. But U.S. President Donald Trump’s skills at dealmaking will be challenged, as Ukraine and other European countries see little room for compromise.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was not invited to the summit. Instead, he and other European leaders organized an emergency virtual meeting with Mr. Trump on Wednesday to explore ways to exert pressure on Russia, protect Ukraine’s interests and sovereignty, and help police any future peace agreement between Moscow and Kyiv. Mr. Zelenskyy said after the meeting that he told the U.S. president that Mr. Putin “does not want peace and wants to occupy our country.”
Presidents Trump and Putin come to the table with formidable powers of persuasion. For both leaders, these include nuclear-armed military might and a talent for crafting narratives.
Trump’s shifting position
Mr. Putin has said clearly, and repeatedly, that Ukraine rightfully belongs to Russia. Mr. Trump has, in the past, lent a willing ear to the Russian president’s historical grievances, including the widely rejected contention that Ukraine and the West started the war.
But as Mr. Putin launched a dozen of the war’s largest drone strikes in rapid succession in recent months, Mr. Trump got fed up. In a sign of his mood shift, after reportedly feeling disrespected by Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Zelenskyy why he didn’t target Moscow, though the White House later walked that comment back.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
Just as Russia faced an ultimatum from Mr. Trump last week – to stop attacks in Ukraine or face 100% U.S. tariffs – the White House announced these latest peace talks.
Getting to the table
That the two presidents are sitting down is a testament to Mr. Trump’s negotiating skills.
“Clearly, Putin is feeling the pressure,” says Heather Williams, a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Trump got the reluctant Mr. Putin to the table in part by persuading NATO members to increase defense spending for Ukraine and by selling 17 U.S. Patriot missile systems to Europe to support Ukraine’s air defenses last month. This was a considerable increase over the 10 such systems Kyiv was believed to have had up until that point.
Even as he made these moves, Mr. Trump appeared to hold out hope for a sit-down with the Russian president. “I’m disappointed in [Mr. Putin],” he said last month in a BBC interview. “But I’m not done with him.”
This is for the better, says Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank.
There is the matter of the optics, however, of Mr. Putin coming to America when there’s an International Criminal Court arrest warrant out for him. Because the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Alaska will be a safe zone for Mr. Putin, who cannot be arrested while in the U.S. The meeting will be the first time that Mr. Putin has visited the U.S., apart from the United Nations, since President George W. Bush invited him to Maine in 2007.
Choosing Alaska, a former Russian territory, as the meeting location is both geographically convenient for Mr. Putin and a not-so-subtle reminder that in times of conflict, land often serves as a bargaining chip.
As a result, the meeting has the potential to “serve as a breakthrough moment,” Dr. Kavanagh says. “You don’t need big victories here for this to be a success.”
Potential pitfalls and strategic moves
There is still concern that in his desire to make peace, Mr. Trump could agree to Russian demands that are objectionable to Ukraine and other European countries, including ceding Ukrainian territories to Mr. Putin. “Trump could see this as making a really good deal, without realizing the second- and third-order effects,” Dr. Williams says.
One lingering question early in the week was whether President Zelenskyy would attend the conclave. Though Mr. Trump said he was open to the idea, the White House announced Tuesday that the meeting would proceed without Mr. Zelenskyy. Speaking to reporters that day, press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Friday’s summit a “listening exercise” for Mr. Trump.
This is just how the Kremlin wants it, analysts say. It doesn’t regard President Zelenskyy as an equal, and it doesn’t want Mr. Trump to treat him as one, either.
An aide to Mr. Putin last week promised that Russia would take part in the discussions “actively and energetically.” No doubt, European allies say, but they question to what end.
What tops the agenda?
On the heels of Saturday meetings in England with Vice President JD Vance, Ukrainian and other European officials stressed that an immediate ceasefire should be the first step in negotiations, and that Ukraine shouldn’t give up any territory in exchange for it.
Mr. Zelenskyy, for his part, said last week that any decisions made without Ukraine at the table would be “stillborn decisions,” as he reiterated a call for “real and genuine peace.”
“Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” he said.
Mr. Trump said last week that a peace deal could involve “some swapping of territories.”
Mr. Putin has declared four Ukrainian regions under Russian rule and sent troops in to occupy them. These include Kherson, Zaporizhzhia – the site of a strategic nuclear power plant – as well as the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Kremlin has suggested that Russia could offer to relinquish other land it controls outside these four regions.
But the Russian military isn’t fully in control of any of these territories. A deal that would hand these areas to Mr. Putin would accomplish something that hundreds of thousands of his nation’s conscripts have been unable to do.
Russia – which has roughly 3.5 times the population of Ukraine – has, in some cases, spent more than two years trying to advance less than 7 miles. Ukraine still controls about 25% of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. On Tuesday, Russian forces made a surprise push into eastern Ukraine, in what analysts say may be an attempt to increase military pressure ahead of the summit.
The Kremlin also wants formal recognition of Russia’s occupation of the Crimean Peninsula, which it invaded in 2014.
Crimeans seem amenable to this. Opinion polls show that “Most of the population of Crimea and much of that of the Donbas do not want to return to Ukraine,” wrote Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in an online report last week.
The Kremlin also appeared to use a meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy and fellow real estate mogul Steve Witkoff last week to propose a moratorium on long-range strikes.
This sounds positive enough. The problem, from Ukraine’s perspective, is that it handicaps Kyiv’s long-range campaign, which damages Russia’s defense industrial base and energy infrastructure. At the same time, Moscow, notes a report from the Institute for the Study of War think tank, pummels primarily civilian targets.
“Russia is winning”
For now, Russia is advancing on the battlefield, slowly but steadily.
A U.S. Army report – written by a group of retired Russian-speaking American officers dubbed “the Troika” and assembled by U.S. commanders in Europe in 2020 to rebuild the military’s Cold War-era expertise in the region – paints a grim picture of the current battlefield.
“Although to American eyes repeated human-wave frontal attacks look senseless, even criminal, they have been effective,” they wrote in the report published last month. “This is a war of attrition, and Russia is winning.”
In both Russia and Ukraine, the majority of both populations say they want peace.
From these upcoming talks, Ukrainian officials will seek assurances that any peace agreements made will be kept.
Kyiv is looking for security guarantees, including the deployment of European peacekeepers to the country and the provision of weapons from the U.S.
Russia, for its part, is almost sure to demand that Ukraine’s NATO ambitions be crushed once and for all. Under certain scenarios, Ukraine may still be free to seek European Union membership.
An open question is whether Mr. Putin will also seek a guarantee to end any expansion of the NATO alliance.
“The question is, How do you make that legally binding?” says Dr. Kavanagh of Defense Priorities. “It’s a minority position to take that step, but even if current leaders commit to it, they can’t bind future leaders.”
Though there are many such specifics to be determined as part of any ceasefire deal, “Putin and Trump aren’t going to spend the afternoon getting into the nitty-gritty details of how a ceasefire will be implemented,” Dr. Kavanagh says.
For this reason, follow-up will matter.
In the meantime, analysts say, NATO allies must maintain their stepped-up spending commitments, as Mr. Putin is unlikely to give up either his ambition or efforts to control Ukraine, the U.S. Army’s Russia experts warn.
“Conceptually, this war is far bigger than Ukraine,” the Troika writes. “Russia sees itself in a global conflict with the West, of which Ukraine is but one theater. Neither success nor failure in Ukraine will alter Russia’s global calculus.”
These efforts will include gray zone activities to try to destabilize Ukraine from within and ultimately install puppet political leadership, as it has endeavored to do in neighboring Georgia.
Challenges at home
Mr. Putin has promised his citizens total victory, no matter how long it takes.
These sorts of pledges are, in part, for domestic consumption. But Mr. Putin is also eyeing the return of hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers accustomed to violence and high salaries “that dwarf anything they can expect to receive” back home in Russia, notes an Atlantic Council analysis by Peter Dickinson, editor of its UkraineAlert online publication.
Mr. Trump has domestic considerations to contend with as well, including his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine within the first 24 hours of his second term. Facing a recent dip in job approval ratings, the president is also trying to make good on that promise.
But in so doing, analysts warn, he must be careful not to be drawn in by Mr. Putin’s stalling tactics. “Putin is a really slippery negotiator. He’s been doing this a long time, he knows how Trump operates, and he’s going to be trying to outfox him,” says Dr. Williams of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While it’s clear Mr. Putin believes that time is on Russia’s side, it is Mr. Trump’s mandate, analysts add, to convince him that it’s not.
