Russia sees victory as Trump adopts Putin’s approach to ending Ukraine war In President Donald Trump’s warm red-carpet greeting at the Alaska summit, Russians saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe.
Within hours of the meeting, Trump had discarded his previous position — one also held by Ukraine and Europe — that a full ceasefire was required to allow the details of a peace agreement to be hammered out. The move enables Russia to keep fighting without the risk of U.S. sanctions, and puts pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russian terms or face open-ended attacks.
After Friday’s summit, Trump told Zelensky and European leaders that Putin had demanded that Ukraine cede all of Donbas, which includes the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and other occupied territory, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Trump told them of his shift from a ceasefire to negotiations on a comprehensive peace deal, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump spoke to Zelensky before European leaders joined the call.
Russia does not control the roughly 3,500 square miles of Donetsk, a highly reinforced region of strategic importance to Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself from future Russian attacks, military analysts say.
Trump told Zelensky that Putin was “ready to promise” to end the war and not start wars against other nations, in exchange for Donbas and the other Ukrainian territory he has seized, one official said. Zelensky is unwilling to give up any territory, he added, but Trump wants a fast deal — setting the stage for a potentially difficult clash.
Kyiv insists that handing territory to Putin would violate Ukraine’s constitution and embolden Russia to plan further attacks on the rest of Ukraine.
A triumphant Putin told top Russian officials Saturday that the meeting was “very useful” and “in my opinion, it brings us closer to the right decisions.”
Trump’s call to Zelensky and European leaders, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the leaders of France, Germany, Finland, Italy, Britain, Poland, NATO and the European Commission, was more tense than the phone call between the Europeans and Trump earlier this week, a second official said.
In another setback for Kyiv, the Kremlin on Saturday raised doubts over the one public result of the summit that went some way to meeting Ukrainian demands — Trump’s promise of a three-way meeting with Putin and Zelensky.
Senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said such a meeting had not been discussed, even after Trump referred to it in comments after the summit. The Kremlin has so far firmly resisted any meeting with Zelensky until the very last stages of peace negotiations.
One bright spot for European leaders, however, appears to be a continued American buy-in for some form of security guarantees for Ukraine in the wake of any agreement.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in a statement Saturday that the discussion included “credible and robust” security guarantees for Ukraine, although the framework for doing that would remain outside NATO. The guarantees would be equivalent to NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense, according to the statement. Article 5 states that if one nation is attacked, each other nation must treat it as an attack against all, and “take the actions it deems necessary to assist” the attacked nation.
Russian officials and commentators, however, saw the results of the summit as extending far beyond the conflict in Ukraine, describing it as a global realignment bringing together the world’s two top nuclear powers.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, counted out a list of Russian achievements from the Alaska summit, focusing primarily on Putin’s restoration of ties with Washington on an equal basis.
“A full-fledged mechanism of meetings between Russia and the United States at the highest level was restored. Calm, without ultimatums and threats,” he wrote. He celebrated that Putin had given no ground while Trump had stepped back from increasing pressure on Moscow through sanctions, allowing Russia to fight on.
“The meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions and at the same time with the continuation of the special military operation,” he said, using the Kremlin’s term for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s most important achievement, he said, was that “both sides explicitly placed the responsibility for achieving future results in the negotiations on the cessation of hostilities squarely” on Kyiv and Europe.
Trump appeared to have been swayed by the Kremlin’s contention that only a comprehensive peace deal was acceptable — which Putin has so far used to delay efforts to halt the fighting, arguing that the many questions, details and nuances involved would require a great deal of time to negotiate.
“This means that Putin has succeeded in persuading Trump that any effort toward a prompt, unconditional ceasefire will fail,” Russia analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in an interview.
It also indicated that Putin had convinced Trump of the need to address what Russia calls the “root causes” of the war, she said, a formulation that the Kremlin has used to mean demilitarizing Ukraine and changing its politics — and even to renegotiate Europe’s security architecture.
But Stanovaya said the failure to get a ceasefire raised the question of what Trump would do when Putin continues a war that he feels confident of winning. “We should look at how the situation develops further because Putin will continue the war.”
The Kremlin, which artfully played up Russia’s nuclear arms and history as a Cold War superpower, appears to have convinced Trump that Ukraine could never win a war against a nuclear power, she wrote in separate remarks on social media.
“Putin, unsurprisingly, underlined Russia’s nuclear strength, which left a strong impression on Trump,” she wrote.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide warned that Putin’s demand to address the “root causes” of the war was “code for the Russian justification for the illegal invasion of Ukraine,” calling for increased pressure on Russia.
“We know that President Putin wants to split Europe and the United States. With all our allies, we must do everything we can to avoid that,” he said in comments to Norwegian media.
Kaja Kallas, the European Commission foreign policy chief, said the United States has the power to force Russia to negotiate seriously.
“But the harsh reality is that Russia has no intention of ending this war anytime soon,” she wrote in comments to The Washington Post. “European security is not up for negotiation,” she added.
Putin’s other important wins at Friday’s summit included deflecting, for now, tough new U.S. sanctions that would hamper his capacity to keep waging war and repairing his fraying relationship with Trump.
Trump told Fox News after the meeting that his relationship with Putin was “fantastic,” adding that there was no need to go ahead with sanctions at this point.
Pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov said Trump had natural empathy with Putin and natural antagonism with the Europeans and Zelensky — and he was moving closer to Putin.
“It means they are developing good friendly relations. They are both from the same generation. They both respect each other,” he said. While sanctions had not been lifted, “the trend is good. There has been a qualitative transition.”
Putin also succeeded, to some extent, in deflecting pressure to end the war onto Zelensky — rather than keeping it on Russia as the aggressor — with Trump telling Fox News after the summit that Zelensky should “make a deal” now because “Russia’s a very big power. And they’re not.”
But Putin still faces domestic pressures to end the war, with Russian troops being killed, the economy declining, spending on the war sky high, and companies facing bankruptcies due to high interest rates. Russian elites — and the population — are weary of the conflict.
“He is losing very many people. And it is difficult to support the economy. Society is tired. His leaders are tired. He needs to end the war. But he needs to do it on his conditions and here he doesn’t want to make any compromises,” Stanovaya said.
Leaders in Europe and Kyiv were relieved that Trump did not appear to be immediately forcing a deal that would surrender Ukrainian territory to Russia.
Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt said that “from the European point of view the best thing that could be said about the meeting is that it could have been even worse. Combined European efforts blocked at least any deal over the head of the Ukrainians,” he wrote on X.
But he said Trump had suffered “a distinct setback” as Putin once more deflected the full ceasefire he had demanded. “What the world sees is a weak and wobbling America.”
Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia; Francis from Brussels; Belton from London; and O’Grady from Kyiv. David S. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
Summary:
The comments overwhelmingly criticize President Trump's handling of the Alaska summit with Putin, viewing it as a significant diplomatic failure for the United States. Many commenters express concern that Trump's approach, characterized by a lack of preparation and perceived deference to Putin, has weakened America's global standing and emboldened Russia. There is a strong sentiment that Trump's actions have betrayed Ukraine and America's allies, with some drawing historical parallels to appeasement policies. The comments reflect a belief that Trump's negotiation style is ineffective and detrimental to U.S. interests.
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