President Trump tried to put the best spin he could Friday on his summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and the mutual pleasantries were effusive. But the substantive news from the meeting seems to be that Mr. Putin refuses to end his war in Ukraine, and he won’t even agree to a temporary cease-fire. The killing that Mr. Trump rightly abhors will apparently continue.
Mr. Trump was full of praise for Mr. Putin and said the two “made some great
President Trump tried to put the best spin he could Friday on his summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and the mutual pleasantries were effusive. But the substantive news from the meeting seems to be that Mr. Putin refuses to end his war in Ukraine, and he won’t even agree to a temporary cease-fire. The killing that Mr. Trump rightly abhors will apparently continue.
Mr. Trump was full of praise for Mr. Putin and said the two “made some great progress today,” though “we didn’t get there” to an agreement. He offered no details about the “progress” and announced no end to hostilities. He said they agreed on many things but not on the biggest areas, which presumably means a cease-fire and any compromises on Mr. Putin’s war aims.
There will be some cautionary relief in Europe that Mr. Trump didn’t announce a deal with Mr. Putin that he would present to them as a fait accompli. Instead Mr. Trump said he would call European allies and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to brief them on what happened in Alaska. There’s no deal, he said, until there’s a final deal, which suggests he is at least listening to what Ukraine needs to feel secure if an armistice is reached.
Mr. Putin for his part gave nothing away on Ukraine. He offered his familiar line that the “root causes” of the war must be addressed before it can end. By this he means blaming Ukraine for wanting to determine its own future as part of the European Union with security help from NATO countries.
It was notable that Mr. Putin spent most of his soliloquy in front of the press flattering Mr. Trump, endorsing the U.S. President’s view that the war would never have happened if Mr. Trump had been in office in 2022, and extolling the possibilities for U.S.-Russia business ties. With his economy struggling, Mr. Putin wants financial relief.
In that sense the Russian achieved one of his major goals from the summit, which is the start of his rehabilitation as a world leader. The summit ended his isolation from the West, and he gave up nothing for it. He also appears to have gained more time to continue bombing Ukrainian cities and slowly taking more territory.
It isn’t clear what Mr. Trump gained. He had told the press that he would be angry if no cease-fire emerged from the parley, but Mr. Trump showed no pique afterward. Perhaps there was some quiet concession Mr. Trump will take back to Ukraine, and if so we will know that soon enough.
If there was nothing but niceties and a Putin stonewall, then Mr. Trump will have to decide if he will follow through on the red lines he has drawn. On Wednesday he had promised “very severe consequences” if Mr. Putin didn’t agree to end the war. Will he now move to impose sanctions on such buyers of Russian oil as China and Turkey as he has India? Or will he agree to a second summit, as Mr. Putin seems to want, in hope that next time will be different?
Mr. Trump’s desire to be a peacemaker is laudable, but in Vladimir Putin he is dealing with a hard man who has his eyes fixed on conquering Ukraine sooner or later. Mr. Putin will only bend from that goal if he sees a unified West determined to deny him that victory and willing to impose severe costs if he continues his march of death in Ukraine.
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