A reenactment of the August summit between Trump and Putin: while the US leader was confident he had an excellent offer, the Russian president launched into a historical analysis aimed at demonstrating that Ukraine is Russian territory. Trump, raising his voice, threatened to walk out, and then canceled the scheduled lunch.
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
WASHINGTON - When President Trump arrived in Alaska last August, he expected there to be a real possibility of a deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. But once he landed in Anchorage, the Russian leader rejected his proposal and began giving him a history lesson.
The Financial Times reports it, and the topic is more relevant than ever in view of the next Trump-Putin meeting in a couple of weeks in Budapest. In Anchorage, Putin had been welcomed with a red carpet, smiling widely between handshakes and pats on the back with Trump. But once the doors closed, the warm attitude disappeared.
According to the newspaper's sources, Putin immediately rejected the offer of lifting sanctions in exchange for a ceasefire, insisting that the war will end only when Ukraine surrenders and cedes its territories in Donbass. The Russian president then began talking about medieval princes such as Rurik of Novgorov and Yaroslav the Wise, Cossack leaders such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky, figures he often cites to support the idea that Ukraine and Russia are one nation.
Trump, surprised, reportedly raised his voice several times and at one point threatened to walk out, but ultimately cut the meeting short by canceling the lunch where the extended delegations were supposed to discuss relations and economic cooperation between the two countries. Journalists rushed ahead of time to the press conference that had been scheduled for later. The only problem for Putin is that that meeting made Trump more inclined to make concessions to Kiev, seeking to put pressure on Putin.
Yet the American president, in addition to selling weapons to NATO allies and applying an additional 25% tariff on Indian products in response to continued purchases of Russian oil, has not yet approved the long-range Tomahawk missiles, nor the tougher secondary sanctions against Russia that many Republicans in the US Congress are also pushing for. Many believe the reason is that Trump still wants to push for an agreement with Putin, because—as his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt explained on Thursday—the American president still believes that it is possible to end this war through diplomacy.
The American president refuses to call the Alaska summit a failure, and told reporters that it was an event that set the stage. But even before the summit, there had been immediate criticism from some European officials of Steve Witkoff, for having misunderstood the real chances of a peace agreement with Putin when he met him on his trip to Moscow in early August that paved the way for the Alaska summit. After that three-hour meeting between Trump's special envoy and the Russian leader, the Americans had told their allies that an agreement was suddenly possible, that Putin had seemed more flexible on the territories than in previous meetings with Witkoff.
But although in Alaska Trump was ready to recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea and push Ukraine to withdraw from some frontline areas in Donbas and the east of the country if Russia ended the fighting, Moscow proved only willing to freeze the frontline in areas it had failed to conquer anyway. Putin demanded that Zelensky give up all of Donbas. There are currently no indications that Putin is ready to make concessions ahead of the meeting in Budapest.
