Today, President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are meeting in Alaska in a negotiation effort to initiate a ceasefire and eventual deal to end the war in Ukraine.
That this summit meeting is even happening is a credit to Trump’s pressure campaign against Russia, wherein he threatened massive economic repercussions should Putin fail to seek a peace deal. While some media pundits are condemning this meeting as validating Putin and capitulating to his expansionist agenda, likening it to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at the 1938 Munich summit, the truth is, it’s Putin and not Trump who holds the weaker hand.
(Besides, everyone knows Trump is Hitler, right?)
After more than three years of the bloody war, Putin’s Russian forces are in a slugfest with the much smaller Ukrainian military force. Yet they are only advancing at a snail’s pace with an exceedingly high casualty rate. Indeed, one wonders if Putin will run out of men before he runs out of cash.
And it is that second issue, economics, that is likely what motivated Putin to agree to this summit with Trump. The Russian economy is not in great shape, and with oil prices dropping and the ruble strengthening, the cost of this war will only get higher.
So, for Putin, the play appears to be one wherein he gains Ukrainian land concessions, shoring up the rest of Ukraine’s far eastern Donetsk Oblast, and prepares for another invasion in the coming years to take the rest of Ukraine.
At the very least, Putin aims to drag out the process to buy more time for his military to avoid severe economic sanctions from hitting Russia too soon.
Trump, on the other hand, has expressed a measured clarity as to his expectations for the summit. As he stated earlier this week, “I’m not going to make a deal. It’s not up to me to make a deal.” He then added he is effectively measuring Putin to see if a peace deal is even in the cards, “Probably in the first two minutes, I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made.”
Trump also clarified, “The next meeting will be with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and Putin, or Zelensky and Putin and me. I’ll be there if they need, but I want to have a meeting set up between the two leaders.”
In other words, what Trump is looking for is whether Putin will agree to meet with Zelensky, as that will be the next essential step toward a possible peace deal.
Trump has also demonstrated that he knows what Putin’s ultimate objective with Ukraine is: “There are those that believe that Putin wanted all of Ukraine. I happen to be one of them. I’m going to be telling him, you’ve got to end this war.”
Trump is also being a realist, given the status of the war and the situation on the ground. He has expressed the option of a land swap being on the table. But as Trump has previously stated, any deal will ultimately be up to Ukraine and Russia to agree to.
Finally, Trump is willing to walk away from a deal with Putin if he believes he’s not serious. “We’re going to see what he has to say,” Trump told reporters. “That’s going to be up to him.” However, Trump did warn that if Putin failed to agree to negotiate a peace deal with Zelensky, there would be consequences. While he would not elaborate on what those consequences would be, he maintained, “There will be very severe consequences.”
Today’s summit may end up being one of Trump’s most consequential foreign policy endeavors of his presidency.
