Fear of a new Oval Office fiasco over Ukraine

Officials worry Trump backs the Kremlin’s land grabs and fantasies

TIME DIFFERENCES meant that most Ukrainians only learned about the Alaska summit on Saturday morning. Though their initial reaction was relief, now they are dreading what comes next. The immediate sigh of calm was understandable. The feared grand bargain in Anchorage between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had not materialised. Initial reports highlighted that the talks at an American military base were truncated and lacked any clear outcome. “Disaster averted: Trump has not sold us down the river,” commented one MP early yesterday morning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky (AFP FILE)

But as the sketchy details have hardened into a growing prospect of forthcoming demands that will prove impossible for Ukraine to accept, confidence is giving way to unease, not least about the planned meeting in Washington on Monday between Mr Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The warning signs were visible from the start of the summit. A red carpet, laid down before Mr Putin’s presidential plane by American soldiers. Applause and handshakes for Mr Putin from Mr Trump. The very fact of a summit happening at all before a ceasefire had been agreed, despite earlier tough rhetoric from Mr Trump to the contrary. Ukrainian officials insist that holding negotiations is constructive, and point to European talk of American-backed security guarantees for Ukraine. “There is an attempt to get somewhere,” said one. But privately they worry the American president has just allowed the ending of the war to be re-written on Russian terms.

The most obvious change is the new acceptance of Russia’s preferred sequencing. Gone is any prospect of a full ceasefire as a first stage, or of the crippling sanctions once promised by Mr Trump if Mr Putin would not agree to one. On Saturday Serhiy Leshchenko, an adviser in the Ukrainian presidential office, reiterated the Ukrainian position: a ceasefire must come before a more general agreement to freeze or end the conflict. But Mr Trump, abruptly siding with Mr Putin, now says the immediate goal must be a comprehensive peace. It is an “all or nothing” prospect that could be easily sabotaged by bad actors—or used to extract the maximum concessions. European leaders are meeting later today by videoconference to co-ordinate their responses.

Ukrainian security sources say they worry about what a “comprehensive peace” means. For Mr Putin, it appears to still mean removing what he calls the “root causes” of the Ukrainian war, a vision he outlined in a belligerent essay in 2021 that put forward his case for invasion: in translation, he objected to NATO’s eastward expansion since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to Ukrainian independence. In that essay, Mr Putin talked about Ukraine and Russia as “one people”. On Friday, at least, his rhetoric softened to talking of “brotherly” relations, something that most Ukrainians would however have huge difficulty in detecting three and a half years into a savage invasion that has led to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and millions of refugees.

Mr Trump may or may not have understood the signalling from Mr Putin, but he said nothing to contradict him. “For Putin, a comprehensive peace means changing us,” complains a Ukrainian source. “And now the Americans appear to be on board, whether they are conscious of it or not.” Roman Bezsmertny, a former Ukrainian diplomat, says Mr Putin has “mocked” the American president and his desire for a Nobel peace prize. “This is not a tragedy for Ukraine. It is a tragedy for America and for the world. Under Mr Putin’s spell, Trump is an incapacitated politician.”

Throughout July secret contacts between Ukraine and Russia had brought the two countries closer to an understanding of how the war could be frozen. But subsequent talks between Mr Putin and Steve Witkoff, a confidant of Mr Trump from his real-estate days, created a series of impossible new territorial demands on Ukraine. At the summit on Friday Mr Putin once again demanded that Ukraine retreat from the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces that it still holds, which together represent the most fortified sections of the front line. This would put Mr Putin in a far stronger position to attack again in the future, should he choose to do so. In return, the Russian president offered to give back tiny chunks of occupied territory in Sumy and Kharkiv provinces, and to freeze the current lines in Zaporizhia and Kherson.

Years of war have strained the Ukrainian people, and Russia continues to press its advantage in metal and men on the front lines. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls show a clear switch to pragmatism on concessions for peace. A majority of those asked are now in favour of acknowledging de facto occupation of the areas Russia already holds in exchange for genuine security guarantees from the West. But there are nonetheless consistent and overwhelming majorities against making any further territorial concessions to Russia. According to Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, less than one in five would be prepared to accept the kind of land swap Mr Trump is said to be favouring.

A Ukrainian intelligence officer says the Americans are being “unbelievably aggressive” in pushing Ukraine to forfeit more land. The Russian interest is clear enough, he says. “They want to maximise the package they will get in return—from sanctions relief, to the return of seized assets, to the re-opening of energy markets.” What, he says, is far less clear is why the Trump administration was pushing so forcefully to promote Russia’s interests.

Despite the obvious headwinds, Mr Trump appears committed to his quick-fix peace. The Economist understands a three-way meeting between Mr Trump, Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky could come as early as the end of next week. Before that, on Monday, the Ukrainian leader is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first visit since his humiliation in February. Some of the ingredients appear ominously similar to then. Channelling the logic of Mr Putin, Mr Trump is already preparing to blame Ukraine if his plans blow up, Ukrainians fear. “Make a deal,” he advised Mr Zelensky, via Fox News. “Russia is a very big power. [You] are not.”