Trump-Putin Meeting: The Presidents Have Different Goals For Anchorage Summit

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will measure success at their summit in Alaska very differently, even as both leaders are already looking toward a second meeting.

The US president sees any kind of ceasefire in Ukraine as a key objective of the talks. For the Russian leader, getting face time with Trump on American soil without having made any concessions on the war is already a win.

Those are the contrasting stakes as both leaders head to Anchorage for their first summit since 2018 in Helsinki. The imbalance points to the perils and opportunities for Trump, who has long cast himself as the only one who can end the war. Putin has little incentive to stop the fighting as Russia’s military slowly grinds out gains in Ukraine, but can ill afford to alienate a president with whom he’s long cultivated a relationship. 

En route to Anchorage on Friday morning, Trump didn’t rule out that Ukraine might get some form of security guarantees from western nations, or that it might have to agree to swap land with Russia. But he said it wasn’t his place to decide.

“I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision,” Trump said of the idea of the two countries trading land. “And I think they’ll make a proper decision. But I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine. I’m here to get them at the table.”

By invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin began Europe’s biggest war for 80 years and became an international pariah. The summit with Trump helps him to chip away at the isolation the US and its Group of Seven allies have sought to impose on the Russian leader over his aggression.

Even more symbolically potent is the decision to host the encounter at a military base, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, in the US. By that metric, Putin has scored a victory simply by showing up. 

The meeting also marks a repudiation of former President Joe Biden’s approach of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” a mantra that made sure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy always had a seat at the table.

“Russia wants to continue to pursue its objectives, which are to dramatically weaken Ukraine and essentially undermine its independence and sovereignty,” Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official, said in an interview. “So Russia sees negotiations not as an alternative to that, but as a means toward that end.”