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Vladimir Putin has had a tough few months. His military’s much-feared summer offensive has made incremental gains in Ukraine but not nearly the advances he had hoped. His economy has sputtered. Donald Trump has grown fed up with Putin’s repeated defiance of his calls for a cease-fire and, for the first time, has targeted the Russian president with consistently harsh rhetoric. Last week, Trump slapped one of Russia’s major trading partners, India, with sanctions.
Putin needs to buy time to change the trajectory of the conflict. So the former KGB spymaster has given Trump something that the U.S. president has wanted for months: a one-on-one summit to discuss the end of the conflict. Trump leaped at the chance. But as the two men prepare to meet in Alaska on Friday, foreign-policy experts—and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—are warning that Trump could be walking into a trap that the Russian leader is setting on American soil.
“Putin has already won. He is the leader of a rogue state, and he’ll get a picture on U.S. soil with the president of the United States,” John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, told me. “Trump wants a deal. And if he can’t get one now, he may walk away from it entirely.”
Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. His demands to reach an end to hostilities remain maximalist: He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine and the European nations that have rallied to its defense.
Having promised an end to the war during his campaign, Trump, above all, is desperate for the fighting to stop, and observers fear that, as a result, he might agree to Putin’s terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. Trump has already said in recent days that Russia and Ukraine will need to “swap lands” (without specifying which ones). But it is not clear that Russia is willing to give up anything. And if Zelensky were to reject a deal, no matter how one-sided it might be, in Trump’s mind, Kyiv would suddenly be the primary obstacle to peace. That could lead Trump to once again unleash his wrath on Zelensky, with potentially disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting the war.
[Read: Trump invites Putin to set foot in America]
“Clearly Putin’s strategy is to delay and play the president: string him along, concede nothing, exclude Zelensky,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, told me. “My preeminent fear is a bad deal that Zelenksy rejects, and then he becomes the bad guy, and that then Trump, once again in his classic mixture of vengeance and vanity, will turn against Ukraine.”
Trump has made clear that he wants peace. He also wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Several of his closest allies have told me that the fact that President Barack Obama received one infuriates Trump. He has taken to declaring that he has “ended six wars” in his second term. Fact-checkers say this claim is exaggerated, though it’s true that his administration has focused on global hot spots in recent weeks, receiving acclaim for brokering peace agreements between Cambodia and Thailand, India and Pakistan, and Azerbaijan and Armenia. The world’s most high-profile conflicts, in Gaza and in Ukraine, however, have only escalated in recent months. The situation in Gaza appears to be deteriorating, and Trump has not done anything to stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial plan to occupy Gaza.
So Trump sees an opportunity with Ukraine. The bloodiest war in Europe since World War II has become deadlier this year, and the warring sides have expanded their arsenals with weapons capable of striking deep into enemy territory.
The White House dismissed the notion that Trump could be outfoxed by Putin. “What have any of these so-called foreign policy ‘experts’ ever accomplished in their lives, other than criticizing Donald Trump?” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement. “President Trump has solved seven global conflicts in six months, and he has made extensive progress in ending the Russia-Ukraine War, which he inherited from our foolish previous president, Joe Biden.” Some Trump allies believe that he will stand up to Putin, and that he is appropriately skeptical of the Russian leader. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for instance, invoked the Cold War when he posted on social media on Friday that he was “confident President Trump will walk away – like Reagan – if Putin insists on a bad deal.”
Trump has been burned by Putin before. In recent months, the president has complained that Putin would tell him one thing in their phone calls and then act entirely differently on the battlefield. Trump reiterated that complaint to reporters yesterday at the White House. “I believe he wants to get it over with,” Trump said of Putin. “Now, I’ve said that a few times, and I’ve been disappointed. Because I’d have a good call with him and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place, and you’d have 60 people laying on a road dying.”
The summit was thrown together so quickly that, with days to go, U.S. officials are still scrambling to finalize the details. Trump yesterday characterized the summit as “a feel-out meeting,” perhaps hinting that no final deal would be reached in Alaska. That was taken as a hopeful sign by some who are skeptical of having the summit at all. “The least-bad outcome is that the men would have an exchange of views, but that Trump would stay noncommittal and no deal would be reached. That would be okay, even perhaps a small first step,” Richard Haass, who worked in three Republican administrations before leading the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The fear is that the president wants an agreement too much and will carry far too much of Moscow’s water.”
But if history is any indication, Putin might be able to use the summit to again curry Trump’s favor. Several times in both his first and second terms, Trump followed up a meeting or call with Putin by repeating Kremlin talking points. Most infamously, this occurred during a 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki, when I asked Trump if he believed U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. And yesterday, after Putin had signaled his interest in the summit, Trump took a swipe at Zelensky, who has strenuously objected to giving any territory to Russia and has noted that the Ukrainian constitution requires that any cessation of land must be done by national vote.“I get along with Zelensky. But you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody.”
[Tom Nichols: It was an ambush]
Since his blow-up with Trump in the Oval Office in February and Washington’s brief pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, Zelensky has tried to remain on Trump’s good side, with some success. He managed to secure a positive one-on-one meeting with Trump on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral at the Vatican in late April. And he has refrained from criticizing the president by name when voicing reservations about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, including a weapons pause in June. Although he has expressed dismay at being excluded from the Alaska summit, Zelensky has not gone after Trump. “We understand Russia’s intention to try to deceive America—we will not allow this,” Zelensky said in an address to his nation on Sunday.
Originally, Trump agreed to the Putin summit under the condition that a second meeting would be held with both Putin and Zelensky. But the Kremlin balked at that plan, and Trump dropped it. Trump said yesterday that he would instead brief European leaders shortly after the summit, potentially even from Air Force One on the flight back to Washington. He also will partake in a virtual meeting with leaders, including Zelensky, this week before heading to Alaska.
Europe has watched the summit run-up warily. Several European nations have vowed to fortify Ukraine with weapons if the United States bows out of the conflict. Vice President J. D. Vance, one of the administration’s loudest isolationist voices, this weekend declared, “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business” and said the United States would soon only be willing to sell arms to Europe to give to Ukraine. But Europe seems unlikely to be able to sustain the level of arms and intelligence that Ukraine would need to defend itself. And if Putin manages to secure a victory in Ukraine, he could soon look to expand his war aims elsewhere.
All of which heightens the stakes of the summit in Alaska. “Putin kept pushing Trump and eventually went further than Trump was willing to be pushed. He got mad, so Putin gave him this summit,” Bolton told me. “Now he wants to work his KGB magic on Trump and get him back in line.”
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