President Trump’s summit Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin is fraught with geopolitical risks for Europe and the U.S., experts say, but it also offers the potential reward of moving one step closer to ending more than three years of brutal war in Ukraine.
Before the meeting in Alaska, the gulf between Russia’s and Ukraine’s negotiating positions remained as wide as ever. Some analysts predict the war will grind on into next year.
For the meeting to succeed, Mr. Trump must persuade Mr. Putin to back off his more stringent demands and move on to more meaningful talks among Kyiv, Moscow and Washington.
Most analysts agree that it is worth a try.
“The only way you are going to end this war is through negotiations,” said Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Still, negotiating with Mr. Putin has plenty of downsides. The Russian leader started the conflict by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launched a full-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Kyiv is nervous that Mr. Putin will use the meeting to persuade Mr. Trump to support a deal that’s too advantageous to Russia, effectively extending the war or forcing Ukraine to give up too much land.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that the Russian president wants to “deceive America.” He said Mr. Putin would portray the meeting as “his personal victory and then continue to act exactly as before.”
Another risk is that the U.S. waves off some sanctions on Russia and normalizes trade relations to extract a peace deal. European leaders worry that it would essentially reward Mr. Putin for 11 years of aggression, including three years of full-scale warfare. Mr. Putin then would keep fighting because he sees it as in Russia’s interest to keep grinding down Ukraine.
Russia has a significant military edge with a 3-1 manpower advantage over Ukraine and more than twice as much ammunition as all of NATO. Ukraine’s battlefield position is also shrinking. Kyiv is struggling to recruit soldiers, and its desertion rates remain high.
Mr. Trump views the summit as a “listening session” to set the stage for trilateral talks to end the war.
“There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting, which will be more productive than the first, because the first is [where] I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing,” Mr. Trump said this week.
He has been vague about what a peace deal should entail, but he has floated a land exchange and said he would “try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”
Mr. Trump has said he will know “within two minutes” if Mr. Putin isn’t negotiating in good faith. He threatened “severe consequences” for Russia if Mr. Putin isn’t serious about a peace deal.
Although not specifying what those penalties would be, Mr. Trump previously threatened to increase tariffs on Moscow and punish countries that buy Russian oil. Earlier this month, he increased tariffs to 50% on India, one of the few nations still buying Russian oil.
If Mr. Trump walks away from a bad deal, that would still be a victory for Ukraine and Europe, said Peter Doran, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“The best outcome here is if President Trump recognizes there is a bad deal,” he said. “There is definitely a risk that Trump would make a bad deal at any cost.”
Moscow’s most recent demands to end the war were unacceptable to Ukraine. Russia currently controls 19% of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, all of Luhansk, more than 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and portions of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Moscow previously proposed:
• A full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
• A permanent abandonment of Kyiv’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
• An acknowledgment by Ukraine that Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are now part of Russia.
• A guarantee that the rights and freedoms of Russian speakers in Ukraine would have to be codified in an international agreement.
Mr. Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected Moscow’s demands as an absurd ultimatum. Giving up territories that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died defending would be a bitter pill to swallow.
He has called giving up any land a nonstarter.
It’s unclear whether Russia would return any land or what that would look like. This week, Mr. Trump talked vaguely about Russia exchanging “oceanfront property,” a possible reference to the shoreline along the Sea of Azov or Black Sea. That is part of Mr. Putin’s land bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.
Mr. Trump, who last year promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in the Oval Office, is still convinced he can strike a peace deal. He has done it in other conflicts, and if he succeeds this time, it will bolster his case for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Trump has taken credit for a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, although India insists it played a major role in brokering peace. He also helped end the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which was sealed with a peace deal ceremony at the White House.
The president also had a hand in ending several smaller regional conflicts, but ending the big wars, including in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, has remained elusive. By resolving the war in Ukraine, Mr. Trump can save face on his campaign promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office.
The implications of a peace deal extend beyond Mr. Trump’s political fortunes. It would lower energy prices, which would boost the global economy, ease tensions between Russia and Europe and likely usher in an era of prosperity.
A research briefing by Oxford Economics revealed that even a fragile ceasefire would increase the European Union’s gross domestic product by 0.5 percentage points by 2030 and ramp up defense spending by all EU NATO members to 3% by 2028.
If a more stable ceasefire can be reached, gas prices would drop to prewar values, which would lead to a 1.4% decline in inflation in 2026. The economy would also benefit from a sizable increase in military spending as well as spending on reconstruction efforts in Ukraine.
“I am very encouraged to see that the White House has rapidly engaged Europe and Ukraine this week. This communicates to the world that the United States is not going to negotiate about them without them,” Mr. Doran said. “I am even more encouraged by Trump’s own statements that he’s going to have the Europeans and Ukrainians on the phone immediately after the meeting with Putin.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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