The Alaska summit was a dud as far as a ceasefire, let alone full peace, to end Russia’s assault on Ukraine, but it was a good TV show for Russian despot Vladimir Putin, who must be thrilled that Donald Trump, foremost and always a TV guy, put on such display for him.
Putin, a worldwide pariah, did score some wonderful visuals, including U.S. troops kneeling to literally roll out the red carpet by his plane.
What Trump doesn’t seem to really grasp is that even though he has a clear admiration for Putin, this does not flow both ways. The same shark-eyed desire for power and absolute conviction in his own abilities that led Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place now has him slow-rolling any potential peace process, partly given that he simply does not respect its main interlocutor, Trump.
The former KGB lieutenant colonel can tell that he can keep stringing the U.S. president along, and even kill two birds with one stone by getting the impressionable Trump to keep questioning the 2020 election results, thus advancing his project to undermine American democracy.
Trump is all too happy to play along, welcoming Putin — who, it’s worth noting, still has active warrants out at the International Criminal Court on allegations of war crimes in Ukraine — on U.S. soil and putting on the legitimizing show that the Russian despot had sought to engineer.
This is, quite frankly, embarrassing for the United States, one more in a long list of international humiliations. Still, at the very least, though, it’s better to have a meeting be a big nothing in practical terms than one where Trump actually made concessions like accepting the relinquishing of some of Ukraine‘s territory, as he had insinuated he might do.
Now, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who was not invited to this summit purportedly discussing his country’s future, nearly four years after Putin’s unprovoked all-out invasion — is headed to the White House for a meeting tomorrow.
If Trump wants to save some face, he can use this meeting to show the world that he won’t let Putin push him around or use him as a convenient backdrop and will instead stand behind the Ukrainian leader, who most of the rest of the world steadfastly supports for moral as well as practical reasons. It’s a chance at a redo after the globally broadcast shame of Trump and JD Vance’s now-infamous berating of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February.
For now, negotiators should be working towards an immediate ceasefire in advance of a fuller peace process; Putin has only escalated attacks within Ukraine, including on civilian infrastructure, trying to make gains and crush Ukrainian morale even as he is ostensibly engaging in a peace process.
He is a man trained to and used to taking any leeway he possibly can and using it to his own advantage, which is precisely why the combined global powers must make clear to him that there will be no resolution here where he gets the victory of keeping Ukrainian territory seized by force.
We hope rumblings that this will be an ask for Zelenskyy at his White House meeting are false; that path leads only one place, and it’s to more war and less global stability.
