Shrouded in security and anticipation, the summit in Alaska between the presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, and Russia, Vladimir Putin, to discuss the war in Ukraine without Ukraine, gets underway this Friday at the Elmendorf-Richardson Air Force Base, with the future of the occupied country at stake. The American makes no secret of it: he wants to be the one to achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia. He firmly believes he is the only person who can achieve it, and he clings to his personal relationship with the Russian as an argument for this.
After a phase of White House alignment with the Kremlin in February, when Trump was berating Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Putin's resistance to accepting a ceasefire led him to threaten him with the imposition of secondary sanctions and tariffs. Russia's attacks on Ukrainian targets led him to call his counterpart a"crazy man." But, following a visit to Moscow by his envoy, Steve Witkoff, , the deadline the Republican president gave himself to impose them has passed without further developments.
Instead of punishment, Putin has received an invitation to Alaska with the prospect of sharing his views on the war with Trump in a private meeting, without witnesses. Without the Kremlin offering anything in return, his American counterpart says Ukraine will have to"exchange" territory. While the results of the conversation between the two leaders are pending, for now, the Kremlin leader has already achieved a symbolic victory by stepping foot on US soil for the first time in 18 years—not counting his visits to UN headquarters in New York—thus breaking international isolation without being forced to make any prior concessions.
“Despite his recent criticism of Putin, Trump seems to continue to cling to the idea that he can talk to the Russian as a partner rather than an adversary,” notes Oleh Shamshur, a former Ukrainian ambassador to Washington and currently at the Atlantic Council think tank.
“The Alaska summit marks the end of Putin's international isolation,” adds Jana Kobzova of the European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR). “No major Western leader has met with him since the invasion. Now he has a summit with the US president. That, in itself, is a good result for the Russian.”
Seventh face to face
The meeting, hastily arranged after Trump announced it exactly one week ago, is the seventh face-to-face meeting between the two during their respective terms, and the first of Trump's new term. It is also the one that has received the most scrutiny, given the stakes. Just hours before it began, hundreds of people demonstrated in downtown Anchorage, a city of 290,000, to protest any attempt at a pact that could harm Kyiv and force it to cede territory without Moscow having to give up anything.
On the eve of the meeting, the US president stated his conviction that a second summit between Putin and Zelensky could follow, in which the conditions for peace would be negotiated.
“I believe now that [Putin] is convinced that he’s going to get a deal done,” the US president said in a statement on Fox Radio. “I think he’s going to get it done. And we’re going to find out, I’m going to find out very soon.” Trump boasted that it would take him “two, three, tops, five minutes” at the start of the meeting in Alaska to determine whether the Russian is serious about his claims of wanting peace. He also asserted: “At the summit, Putin is not going to want to get into trouble with me.”
He's not the first American president to believe he has a firm grasp on the former KGB agent, the Soviet secret service. In 2001, George W. Bush hosted Putin, who was making his debut as leader of his country, at his Texas ranch. In a comment that went viral, he claimed he had looked into his eyes and seen his soul.
But neither Bush nor the Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who maintained a contentious relationship with their Russian counterpart, ever boasted of knowing him intimately. Nor did any of their predecessors have such a benevolent attitude toward the Kremlin occupant: despite sporadic criticism during periods of frustration with him, Trump has repeatedly embraced Moscow's arguments, whether about Ukraine or US national security itself.
Russia's occupation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014 marked a turning point in the often thorny relationship between Putin's Moscow and Washington. That initial attack on kyiv's sovereignty began to deteriorate relations between the West and the Russian president, a process that accelerated with the full-scale invasion beginning in February 2022 and ultimately turned Putin into an international pariah.
But since taking office in his first term in 2017, Trump has emphasized his interest in improving relations with Moscow and collaborating with the Russian leader:"He's the leader of his country. I say it's better to get along with Russia than not," he told Fox News shortly after his first inauguration.
At the root of this affinity lies the 2016 election, in which US intelligence services detected Russian attempts to interfere to benefit the then-Republican candidate. Those findings, and attempts by lawmakers and senior officials to demand accountability, have since shaped Trump's perception of his counterpart, whom he views as another victim of what he describes as"the Russian hoax."
This week, the US president himself confirmed this. Those investigations"put a strain on the relationship. They created a danger for our country, because I couldn't deal with Russia the way I should have," he told the press.
In their first meeting as leaders, at a G-20 summit in Germany in 2017, Trump met with Putin twice. On the first occasion, only his then-Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was present, and the US president requested their notes from translators to ensure absolutely nothing was leaked. On the second occasion, only Putin's translator accompanied them.
At a subsequent summit in Helsinki in 2018, the American stated that the Russian had assured him that, despite what intelligence agencies in Washington claimed, the Kremlin had not attempted to interfere in the elections."I think he means it when he tells me that," he said.
In addition to his sense of solidarity with someone he perceives as another victim of state persecution, his affinity for Putin also stems, in part, from his fascination with authoritarian leaders. Trump has occasionally boasted of maintaining an excellent relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has never expressed himself in similarly warm terms toward him. During his first term, he met three times with one of the world's most disliked leaders, North Korea's Kim Jong-un. None of those three summits between 2018 and 2019 yielded any progress toward his stated goal: ending Pyongyang's nuclear program.
Trump himself, despite declaring his enthusiasm for his meeting with Putin, has remained cautious in the run-up to the meeting. After insisting for days that the Anchorage summit would be merely a preliminary meeting, with no agreements and only an exchange of views, hours before leaving, he estimated at a"25%" chance that the meeting would be a failure and that he would return to Washington empty-handed.
He also acknowledged that his powers of persuasion over Putin aren't exactly limitless. Asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he could convince the Russian to stop attacking civilian targets, he was pessimistic."I've already had that conversation with him," he replied."I've had many very positive conversations with him. And then I see a rocket launched at a nursing home, or at an apartment building, and people are dead in the street," he criticized.
