“Productive” Trump-Putin summit ends without deal

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President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from a nearly three-hour meeting on the Ukraine war and struck a cordial tone in brief public statements, but left without announcing a ceasefire or peace agreement.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said.

The White House had said there would be a news conference after the closed-door meeting, but both men walked offstage after 12 minutes without taking questions from the scores of American and Russian reporters in attendance.

Trump hosted the summit at a military base in Alaska in an audacious bid to broker a peace deal and stop Russia’s three-year war with Ukraine and its ever-rising body count. It was not immediately clear what was agreed upon in the talks. Trump said the two sides had made “some great progress,” but offered no specifics.

“We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said.

To Putin, he said: “We’ll probably see you again very soon.”

“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied.

Trump appeared buoyant at the start of the summit, deflated by the end.

He met Putin on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, applauding as his Russian counterpart approached. The leaders warmly clasped hands and then walked side by side along a red carpet to Trump’s limousine for the short drive to the closed-door meeting. They rode alone with no aides present. In a military flourish, a B-2 bomber and a quartet of F-35 jets took part in a flyover marking the start of the summit.

Hours later, Trump seemed subdued and unsmiling upon taking the stage for the joint appearance. He perked up, it seemed, when Putin said the war with Ukraine wouldn’t have happened had Trump been in office. Trump often makes the same point, blaming former President Joe Biden for the hostilities. He nodded and looked over at Putin when the Russian leader backed up his claim.

Trump was joined in the summit meeting by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a special U.S. envoy, Steve Witkoff — a departure from what was originally described as a one-on-one between the two leaders.

Putin was accompanied at the meeting by two Russian officials, foreign affairs aide Yuri Ushakov and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Ahead of the summit, Lavrov was spotted in Alaska wearing a shirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” a cheeky reference to the USSR. Before declaring its independence in 1991, Ukraine was part of the old Soviet empire.

Trump spent the run-up to the summit tempering expectations, casting the sit-down as a prelude to an as-yet-unscheduled meeting that would include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“I want to see a ceasefire rapidly,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday en route to Alaska. “I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today. Everyone said it can’t be today, but I’m just saying I want the killing to stop.”

Normally bullish about his negotiating skills, Trump told Fox News Radio earlier in the week that the odds are 1 in 4 that his sit-down with Putin would be a failure. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likened the summit to a “listening exercise” given that Zelenskyy wouldn’t be present.

Trump said as recently as Thursday that he would call Zelenskyy to discuss the outcome of his meeting with Putin if it went “well.” It is unclear if that call has happened.

Trump has pushed for the two nations to end the fighting as he makes an increasingly public campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

But if the bombing continues and Russia seizes more Ukrainian territory, Trump will have risked giving legitimacy to a Russian leader who has become an international pariah.

“My worry is that the photo-op in and of itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, telegraphs to other autocrats or evil men around the world that they can get away with murdering civilians and still get a photo-op with the president of the United States,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Russia’s early attempt to conquer Ukraine sputtered and the conflict has since devolved into a war of attrition, with casualties totaling about 1.5 million. At present, Putin holds a slight edge on the battlefield.

Though nothing was announced Friday, Trump still enjoys considerable leverage over both combatants. If he chooses, he could slap stiffer sanctions on countries such as India that buy oil from Russia. Or he could withhold much-needed money and military hardware that have kept Ukraine in the fight against its bigger adversary. For those reasons alone, the warring countries need to take seriously Trump’s insistence that the conflict end.

“Putin is clearly in a weaker position,” William Taylor, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. “This invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be a disaster for him. Trump has the cards this time.”

The summit location was itself rich in symbolism. For one, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin stemming from his conduct in the war, meaning he could have been apprehended if the site had been in a host of other nations. (The U.S. is not a signatory to the court.)

What’s more, Alaska used to belong to Putin’s country, a fact that Russian commentators and political elite had seized on as a positive signal for the talks. The U.S. purchased the territory in 1867 for $7.2 million, an acquisition that, ironically, strengthened America’s military position on the Pacific rim in a rivalry with Russia that has waxed and waned for decades.

“Putin has agreed to come to Trump, to come to America,” Robert O’Brien, White House national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “That’s critical because Alaska is a former Russian colony and Putin’s whole policy is about recovering what he believes to be former Russian Empire territory. Putin wants all of Russia’s territory back and yet he’s coming to a place that was a former Russian colony to meet with the president of the United States — when he has no chance of getting Alaska back.”

Trump was scheduled to have a working lunch with Putin and a number of top U.S. officials, but after the talks, the two presidents headed directly to the joint appearance instead.

Once a TV showman, Trump seemed well aware of the drama and intrigue surrounding a summit that drew worldwide attention.

“High stakes!! !” he wrote in all-caps on his Truth Social platform before departing for Alaska.

By day’s end, the stakes remained high, but a breakthrough seemed all the more elusive.

Of all western political leaders Trump is probably the one least capable of handling a former KGB agent like Putin. It is a shame that the leader of the by far most powerful country in the free world is an idiot when it comes to politics.

The Kremlin signaled Wednesday it was in no rush to agree to a leaders’ summit with Ukraine, and warned the West that talks over security guarantees for Kyiv were a “road to nowhere” without its involvement.

Moscow’s latest intervention came as the White House pressed ahead with arrangements for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while U.S. and NATO officials discussed how to ensure Ukraine’s protection as part of an eventual peace deal with Russia.

The White House was actively looking to secure a meeting location and date, a senior administration official said Tuesday, adding that the Hungarian capital, Budapest, and the Swiss city of Geneva were among the sites discussed.

But the Kremlin appeared in no hurry for the pair to sit down together.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Putin had suggested continuing negotiations in his call with Trump on Monday and that Russia was ready to consider “raising the level of the heads of delegations.”

But when it comes to meetings at the “highest level,” he said, “they must be prepared with the utmost care.”

Moscow also poured cold water on Western efforts to negotiate security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace deal with Russia.

Trump promised during a meeting with European leaders in Washington on Monday that the U.S. would provide security guarantees as part of any settlement with Russia — a red-line issue for Kyiv. The President made clear Tuesday that this would not include U.S. “boots on the ground” but could see the U.S. provide air support as part of such an arrangement.

Military chiefs from NATO’s 32 member countries will meet virtually later Wednesday to discuss the way forward. U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich will attend, the chair of NATO’s military committee said. Their meeting comes after Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hosted several European chiefs of defense on Tuesday evening, a defense official told NBC News.

Lavrov said Moscow was in favour of “truly reliable” security guarantees for Ukraine, but that any attempt to resolve the question of Ukraine’s security without Russia was “a utopia, a road to nowhere.”

“We cannot agree with the idea that now it is proposed to resolve questions of security, collective security, without the Russian Federation,” Lavrov said. “That will not work.”

Lavrov suggested security guarantees could be modelled on a draft accord discussed between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul in 2022, during the early weeks of the Kremlin’s war. Ukraine rejected the proposal, arguing it would have given Moscow veto power over any military response to come to its aid.

West of Ukraine, an object that landed overnight in a field in eastern Poland was a Russian version of the Shahed drone, Poland’s foreign ministry spokesperson Pawel Wronski told Reuters on Wednesday.

Ukraine’s neighbor has been on a high alert for objects entering its airspace since a stray Ukrainian missile killed two people in the village of Przewodow in 2022.

Russian air strikes on Ukraine continued Tuesday night, killing three civilians and injuring dozens more across multiple regions, Ukrainian officials said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had struck “pier facilities” used to supply fuel to Ukrainian forces.

Zelenskyy said on X that Russia had launched a strike “on a gas distribution station in the Odesa region.”