Trump, a man who likes to hear himself talk, was noticeably subdued at the press conference and said very little. He consistently claimed progress on the major topics of discussion without telling us what those topics were.
THE TELEGRAPH
On his way to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, president Trump told Fox News’s Brett Baier that he wouldn’t be happy if he left the summit without a ceasefire in Ukraine. “Now, I say this, and I have said it from the beginning: This is really setting the table today,” Trump said. “We’re going to have another meeting, if things work out, which will be very soon, or we’re not going to have any more meetings at all, maybe ever.” In short, Trump was well aware that anything could have happened in Alaska on Friday.
In the event, after nearly three hours of talks, Trump and Putin stepped up to their lecterns touting unspecified progress and calling their discussions very productive. Putin, in his typical monotone, referred to the meeting with the US president as “long overdue”, cast blame on the Biden administration for allowing US-Russia relations to deteriorate, and credited Trump for at least being willing to meet face-to-face. Putin laid it on thick, going so far as to confirm Trump’s repeated assertions that the war in Ukraine would never have happened if he had still been holding court in the White House in February 2022.
Trump, a man who likes to hear himself talk, was noticeably subdued at the press conference and said very little. He consistently claimed progress on the major topics of discussion without telling us what those topics were. Ever the gracious host (unless your name is Volodymyr Zelensky), Trump returned Putin’s flattery; the Russian leader, he commented, wanted peace in Ukraine as much as he did. Of course, there’s very little evidence supporting that statement.
When all was said and done, there was no peace deal in Ukraine. Nothing on the conflict was settled. The immediate ceasefire that Trump, Zelensky and the Europeans hoped to squeeze out of the Russian strongman was nowhere to be found. On the big items, the summit failed.
But none of this should have been a surprise. Anybody who has been monitoring the three-and-a-half year war will tell you that neither Putin nor Zelensky is prepared to cede their maximum negotiating positions. The differences between Moscow and Kyiv remain unbridgeable at this point in time, so much so that many foreign policy analysts in the West were wondering why Trump even bothered to fly to Alaska in the first place.
Zelensky wants a ceasefire before real negotiations begin; Putin wants to fight and talk simultaneously. Zelensky doesn’t want to cede any Ukrainian territory that Russia doesn’t already occupy, and he most certainly won’t recognise Russia’s territorial gains; Putin wants Ukrainian forces to lay down their arms, withdraw and gift the entire Donbas region, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to him on a silver platter. Zelensky wants Western security guarantees; Putin doesn’t want any Western involvement in Ukraine’s future defence at all. The divergences go on and on, and a single high-level meeting, particularly one to which Zelensky wasn’t invited, was never going to resolve them.