Putin’s wins leave Trump with hard choices

Russian President Vladimir Putin got everything he could have hoped for in Alaska. President Donald Trump got very little — judging by his own pre-summit metrics.

The question now is whether Trump secured any moderate gains or planted seeds for Ukraine’s future security if there’s an eventual peace deal with Russia that were not immediately obvious after Friday’s summit.

And he’s left with some searing strategic questions.

Despite Trump’s claim to have made “a lot of progress” and that the summit was a “10 out of 10,” all signs point to a huge win for the Russian autocrat.

Trump’s lavish stage production of Putin’s arrival Friday, with near-simultaneous exits from presidential jets and red-carpet strolls, provided some image rehabilitation for a leader who is a pariah in the rest of the West and who is accused of war crimes in Ukraine.

And by the end of their meeting, Trump had offered a massive concession to his visitor by adopting the Russian position that peace moves should concentrate on a final peace deal — which will likely take months or years to negotiate — rather than a ceasefire to halt the Russian offensive now. As CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh pointed out, that just gives Putin more time to grind down Ukraine.

Most importantly, Trump has, at least for now, backed away from threats to impose tough new sanctions on Russia and expand secondary sanctions on the nations that buy its oil and therefore bankroll its war. He’d threatened such measures by a deadline that expired last week out of frustration with Putin’s intransigence and a growing belief the Russian leader was “tapping” him along.

This leverage may have brought Putin to Alaska. But Trump seems to have relaxed it for little in return. “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News after the summit.

Trump briefed European leaders after the summit, telling them that Putin called on Ukraine to yield the roughly a third or so of the Donbas, encompassing the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, that Russia does not currently control. In return, he’d offer to freeze the front lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, CNN’s Kevin Liptak reported, citing European officials. This would force Ukraine into an agonizing dilemma. Some analysts fear such a deal would allow Moscow’s forces a platform to launch a future attack.

European leaders also said Trump voiced openness to providing US security guarantees for Ukraine once the war ends. This could be significant because the president has yet to commit to US support for any Western-led peace mission in the country.
But he didn’t specify what kind of backing he’s willing to provide.

Dueling shows of force

Friday’s meeting began with a B-2 stealth bomber and F-22 fighters roaring overhead in a dramatic moment of US superpower signaling.

But Putin one-upped that symbolism by greeting Trump with the words “Good afternoon, dear neighbor,” as he leveraged the summit’s location in Alaska to imply that the two countries had important and immediate mutual interests that should not be disrupted by a distant war in Europe.

For Ukrainians and their European allies — who were shut out of the meeting and whom Trump briefed afterward — there was at least a moment of relief that Trump didn’t sell Kyiv out. The fact that a US-Russia land swap plan didn’t emerge from Alaska is a win for Europe’s emergency pre-summit diplomacy.

Still, Trump hinted that he will pile pressure on Ukraine’s leader when they meet at the White House on Monday. It’s “now up to President Zelensky to get it done,” Trump told Fox News in the friendly post-summit interview, after refusing to answer questions with Putin in what had been billed as a joint press conference.

Trump’s options moving forward

Before the summit, Trump obliterated careful efforts by his staff to lower expectations when he told Fox News, “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”

The failure to get there is important.

Russia is happy to commit to a detailed peace process with interminable negotiations that would allow it to continue fighting — including in its increasingly successful summer offensive — while it talks. But Ukrainians are desperate for relief from years of Russian drone and missile attacks on civilians as a generation bleeds out on World War I-style battlefields. Peace talks without a ceasefire will leave it open to Russian or US pressure.

Trump’s zeal to work for peace in Ukraine is commendable, even if his repeated public requests for a Nobel Peace Prize raise questions about his ultimate motives. And one upside of the summit is that the US and Russia — the countries with the biggest nuclear arsenals — are talking again.

But the underlying premise of Trump’s peacemaking is that the force of his personality and his supposedly unique status as the world’s greatest dealmaker can end wars. That myth is looking very ragged after his long flight home from Alaska.

And by falling short of his own expectations in the Alaska summit, Trump left himself with some tough calculations about what to do next.

► Does he revert to his previous attempts to pressure Ukraine in search of an imposed peace that would validate Putin’s illegal invasion and legitimize the idea that states can rewrite international borders, thereby reversing a foundation of the post-World War II-era?

► Or as the dust settles, and he seeks to repair damage to his prestige, does he revert to US pressure and sanctions to try to reset Russian calculations? He at least left open the possibility of sticks rather than carrots in his Fox News interview, saying: “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

► Alternatively, Trump could commit to the Russian vision of talks on a final peace agreement. History shows that this would be neither quick nor honored by the Russians over the long term. He’s hoping for a three-way summit between Putin, Zelensky and himself. That would satisfy his craving for spectacle and big made-for-TV events. But after Friday’s evidence that Russia doesn’t want to end the war, it’s hard to see how it would create breakthroughs.

► Another possibility is that Trump simply gets discouraged or bored with the details and drudgery of a long-term peace process that lacks big, quick wins he can celebrate with his supporters.

“A large part of (Trump) is all about style. There’s not a lot of real enjoyment of getting into the substance of things,” Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy who is now affiliated with the Center for New American Security, said before the summit. “He likes the meringue on top. And I think that’s how you can be manipulated.”

Trump’s style-before-substance strategy clearly backfired in Alaska. Putin appeared far more prepared as Trump winged it. In retrospect, it’s hard to see what the Russian president offered to US envoy Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin that convinced the administration that the Alaska talks were a good idea.

And Russia is clearly playing on Trump’s desire for photo-op moments in the expectation that it can keep him engaged while offering few other concessions.

Trump’s Nobel campaign suffered a setback

Trump may remain the best hope for peace in Ukraine. He can speak directly to Putin, unlike Ukraine or its European allies. Ultimately, US power will be needed to guarantee Ukrainian security, since Europeans lack the capacity to do it alone. And the US retains the capability to hurt Russia and Putin with direct and secondary sanctions.

But Trump has to want to do it. And for now he seems back under Putin’s spell.

The Russian leader’s transparent manipulation of the US president and Trump’s credulity will worry Ukraine. On Fox News, Trump said Putin praised his second term, saying the US was “as hot as a pistol” and he had previously thought the US was “dead.”

Putin also publicly reinforced Trump’s talking point that the invasion three years ago would “never have happened” if he had been president. “I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” said Putin.

Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he was “so happy” to hear validation from Putin and that the Russian leader had reinforced another one of his false claims, telling him that “you can’t have a great democracy with mail-in voting.” That a US president would take such testimony at face value from a totalitarian strongman is mind-boggling — even more so in the light of US intelligence agency assessments that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win.

Ultimately, events in Alaska drove a hole through a White House claim in a recent statement that Trump is “the President of Peace.” Trump has touted interventions that cooled hostilities in standoffs between India and Pakistan; Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo; Thailand and Cambodia; and Armenia and Azerbaijan to argue he’s forging peace around the globe at an extraordinary clip.

“I seem to have an ability to end them,” Trump said on Fox News of these conflicts.

He does deserve credit for effectively using US influence in these efforts, including with the unique cudgel of US trade benefits. He has saved lives, even if the deals are often less comprehensive than meets the eye.

But his failure so far to end the Ukraine war that he pledged would be so easy to fix — along with US complicity in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza — means a legacy as a peacemaker and the Nobel Prize that he craves remain out of reach.

Once, he predicted he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. Despite his bluster, a comment on Fox News shows that after Alaska, he has a better understanding of how hard it will be.

“I thought this would be the easiest of them all and it was the most difficult.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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