REMEMBER WHEN, A FEW WEEKS BACK, commentators suddenly started talking about Donald Trump’s “pivot” or “dramatic shift” on Ukraine and Russia? The promises of aid to the one and scary sanctions against the other? Trump’s tough talk about the “bullshit thrown at us” by Vladimir Putin and the “nice phone calls” followed by bombings of Ukrainian cities? The fifty-day deadline to make peace or else, which then abruptly became a ten- to twelve-day deadline that expired over the last few days?
Well, guess what. The pivot seems to have fully unpivoted. We’re back to more diplomacy for dummies by Trump’s real estate pal and golf buddy Steve Witkoff, who went on another trip to Moscow and had—as Trump announced with a straight face on Truth Social—a “highly productive meeting” with Putin. So productive, in fact, that it took a while to figure out exactly what sort of deal Putin offered Witkoff, since Witkoff initially reported a garbled—and more attractive—version of the offer. (Witkoff did get to consume a monster-sized cheburek meat pie which greatly excited the Russian media, so it wasn’t a total loss. Oh, and he brought back an Order of Lenin that Putin gave him for a CIA deputy director whose son was killed in the Donbas last year fighting for the Russians. Is Putin trolling Trump at this point?)
And now, Trump and Putin are set to have a summit in Alaska (of all places!) this coming Friday. Trump’s initial proposal for a three-way summit with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has quietly fallen by the wayside; Vice President JD Vance has told Fox News that “we’re trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that” for the three to meet. So Zelensky may yet get invited to Alaska, but it’s not clear if he will ever be in the same room with Putin. At least for now, it looks like the summit will be a blatant violation of a principle repeatedly proclaimed by Western leaders, from Joe Biden to former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Or, in as Russian-Ukrainian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, currently a scholar at University College London, put it in an interview: “Two mob bosses decided to sit down and have a chat about the capitulation of Ukraine.”
Of course, we don’t know at this point what the final version of the proposed settlement will look like. Trump has talked about “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.” Presumably, this means that Ukraine will be expected to cede territory that Russia wants but hasn’t managed to seize in exchange for other Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Russia. But even that, it turns out, is unlikely to happen: Russia is demanding unilateral land concessions in exchange for a peace agreement or a temporary truce. Zelensky has already rejected such concessions, as he has consistently done since the invasion.
But whatever the outcome of the summit, its mere fact already hands Putin a huge win—unless, of course, Trump should decide that after Zelensky’s disgraceful Oval Office humiliation in February, it’s Putin’s turn for an internationally televised verbal beatdown. (Right. And then he’ll give Ukraine a shipment of alien superweapons from a super-secret vault in Area 51.)
In the words of Ekaterina Kotrikadze, foreign policy analyst for the exiled Russian cable news channel TV-RAIN:
A one-on-one meeting with Trump is unquestionably a diplomatic victory for Putin. . . . That’s actually the dialogue he wanted from the start. His goal was precisely this: to talk to the American president one on one, without the participation of the Ukrainian president. And that’s precisely what Trump is giving him now.
Indeed, many Russia analysts have long argued that being treated as an equal by the president of the United States—for reasons of ego as much as policy—has been a key element of Putin’s agenda even outside the context of the war in Ukraine. But in that context, it will also go a long way toward ending Russia’s relative diplomatic isolation since February 2022 and giving Putin the validation and respectability he wants: However negatively Trump may be viewed in much of the world, he is still the president of the world’s only superpower.
To be sure, there are other ways of looking at the situation. The maverick Russian expatriate pundit Alexander Nevzorov has argued that, in reality, Putin is being treated as a vassal coming to pay humble tribute to his overlord and that the choice of a venue in Alaska—a former Russian possession turned American state—is a subtle humiliation. But that smacks of wishful thinking. It’s far more likely that whoever came up with that idea saw Alaska as a Russia-friendly venue that represents the two countries’ shared history. Pastukhov has even speculated, only half-jokingly, that the summit may end with an announcement of a joint U.S.-Russian Arctic project of some sort—like a “Trump Bridge” across the Bering Strait.
Of course, that’s fantasy for now—but, unfortunately, the prospect of a “settlement” offer that throws Ukraine under the bus is all too real. The proposal Witkoff brought back from Moscow apparently involves Ukraine agreeing to hand over the still-unoccupied parts of the Donetsk region—including the so-called “Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration,” a major industrial hub where heavy fortifications make a successful Russian offensive extremely unlike anytime soon—and to freeze current lines of contact in the rest of Ukraine. Early reports that Putin would agree to withdraw Russian troops from the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which he formally annexed in 2022 and which are partly under Russian control, turned out to be based on Witkoff’s screwup.
As Ukrainian journalist Viktor Portnikov put it on his YouTube stream: “If we even imagine a situation in which Trump forces Ukraine to abandon its territories in Donetsk, it is absolutely naïve to think that Russia will abandon the occupied territories in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.” Among other things, Portnikov points out, those territories are part of the “land bridge” to Crimea that Putin considers so essential.
What’s more, while Putin would presumably make some sort of commitment under the peace settlement not to try to seize the rest of the two regions by military force, we all know how much his commitments are worth. Absent enforcement with real teeth (the presence of NATO peacekeeping troops, for example), is there any guarantee that Russia will not resume the war in two or three years? A pretext can always be found, whether it’s an alleged Ukrainian provocation or intolerable persecution of ethnic Russians.
SOME UKRAINIAN COMMENTATORS, such as political scientist Petro Oleshchuk, see a possible encouraging sign in the fact that the current discussions of peace proposals don’t mention of the kind of Russian demands that would amount to a full surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty—a drastic reduction in the size of the Ukrainian military, an end to arms shipments to Ukraine, or a veto on Ukraine’s future membership in NATO or other military alliances. But, of course, that doesn’t mean Russia is giving up those demands; it’s far more likely that they’re simply being downplayed in the runup to the summit.
Ukraine’s leaders are thus likely to find themselves facing a painful choice: Accept a peace deal the vast majority of Ukrainian reject or risk becoming Trump’s designated scapegoat for the failure of the peace deal and losing even the limited U.S. assistance—including intelligence-sharing—that Ukraine is receiving right now. “A betrayal,” Pastukhov said in his interview. That’s how it’s likely to be seen by most Ukrainians—and by Russian dissidents who know that Putin’s defeat is the only thing that may put Russia on a new road to liberalization.
On Fox, Vance was blunt about the fact that the summit is a step toward his and Trump’s wish fulfilment of using America’s “economic points of leverage” to force an end to what he bizarrely kept calling a “conflict.” (He added that “it’s not going to make anybody super-happy”—as if the aggressor unhappy about not getting to pillage as he wanted is morally equivalent to the victim unhappy with the pillaging.) Vance also made it clear that this supposed peace plan would amount to the United States washing its hands of Ukraine:
What we said to the Europeans is simply, first of all, this is your neck of the woods, this is in your back door. You guys have got to step up and take a bigger role in this thing. And if you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a more direct and a more substantial way in funding this war yourself. . . . The president and I certainly think that America—we’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing. We want to stop the killing. But Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars to this particular conflict.
(In fact, support for doing more for Ukraine has been rising in recent months: In a March Gallup poll, a plurality of 46 percent of Americans said that the United States was not doing enough for Ukraine, compared to just 26 percent who thought it was doing too much, and 53 percent wanted the United States to help Ukraine reclaim its lands even if it meant prolonging the war.)
Vance did say that the United States was willing to let the Europeans buy American weapons for Ukraine. But, notably, Europeans are not invited to participate in the meeting. And Vance’s contemptuous tone—Ukrainians such as political and military analyst Taras Berezovets were particularly rankled by his reference to Ukraine as Europe’s “back door”—makes it clear that, for all the sanctimony about stopping the killing, the real message is (to paraphrase Melania Trump’s famous jacket), “We don’t care.”
IF THIS SUMMIT IS A BAD MOMENT for Ukraine and for everyone else with a stake in opposing Putin’s aggression, it is also likely to be a moment of national disgrace for the United States. There are several possible explanations for Trump’s behavior, one more humiliating than the next: (1) He’s a chump who has been taken in, yet again, by Putin’s crude manipulation; (2) he has simply caved in to Putin’s pressure in yet another TACO episode; (3) he’s an egomaniac so intent on getting a Nobel Peace Prize (preferably along with some location named after him) that he’s perfectly fine with negotiating a peace or even ceasefire agreement even if it amounts to a meaningless piece of paper; and (4) he’s never really gotten over his bromance with Putin.
Barring any surprise developments in the next few days, the only question that remains is whether Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin will rival the Trump-Vance-Zelensky Oval Office fiasco as a national day of shame.
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