Putin Summit Yields Nothing

NYT (“Trump Returns to Washington After Putin Talks Yield No Ukraine Deal“):

President Trump returned to Washington early Saturday after his summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ended without a stated agreement on any issue, much less on ending the war in Ukraine. Mr. Trump spoke after the summit with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who said he would travel to Washington on Monday.

Mr. Zelensky, who was not invited to the summit with Mr. Putin in Alaska, said he would meet with President Trump and “discuss all of the details regarding ending the killing and the war.” Mr. Zelensky said that he “had a long and substantive conversation” with Mr. Trump, who discussed his meeting Mr. Putin.

At a joint appearance after their nearly three-hour meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Mr. Trump gave vague but positive assessment that progress had been made with Mr. Putin, saying, “Many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left.” But he did not describe those points, or even specify that they had to do with Ukraine. “We’ve made some headway,” he added. “So there’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

Moments earlier, Mr. Putin had signaled no change in his hard-line position on Ukraine, claiming that it “has to do with fundamental threats to our security.”

“We’re convinced that in order to make the settlement lasting and long-term, we need to eliminate all of the primary causes of the conflict,” he said, repeating the phrasing he and other Russian officials have used to refer to a list of Kremlin positions that Ukraine — and, for the most part, the West — have called unacceptable.

Moscow has demanded that Ukraine cede a large part of its land to Russia, disarm, swear off joining NATO and change governments.

Mr. Putin referred obliquely to agreements between him and Mr. Trump, without elaborating, and added, “We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive that constructively and will not throw a wrench in the works.”

The Russian leader also gave the U.S. president a major public relations boost, endorsing Mr. Trump’s oft-stated claim that if he had been in the White House, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Before they left without taking questions from the hundreds of journalists assembled, Mr. Trump said, “Probably see you again very soon.”

“Next time in Moscow,” Mr. Putin replied in English.

“Ooh, that’s an interesting one,” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t know, I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”

AP (“Trump leaves Alaska summit with Putin empty-handed after failing to reach a deal to end Ukraine war“):

President Donald Trump failed to secure an agreement from Vladimir Putin on Friday to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, falling short in his most significant move yet to stop the bloodshed, even after rolling out the red carpet for the man who started it.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” the U.S. president said, after Putin claimed they had hammered out an “understanding” on Ukraine and warned Europe not to “torpedo the nascent progress.” Trump said he would call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders to brief them on the talks.

Trump, who for years has balked at American support for Ukraine and expressed admiration for Putin, had pledged confidently to bring about an end to the war on his first day back in the White House. Seven months later, after berating Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and stanching the flow of some U.S. military assistance to Kyiv, Trump could not bring Putin even to pause the fighting, as his forces make gains on the battlefield.

The U.S. president had offered Putin both a carrot and a stick, issuing threats of punishing economic sanctions on Russia while also extending a warm welcome at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, but he appeared to walk away without any concrete progress on ending the war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year.

Instead, he handed Putin long-sought recognition on the international stage, after years of Western efforts to make him a pariah over the war and his crackdown on dissent, and forestalled the threat of additional U.S. sanctions.

In a sign that the conversations did not yield Trump’s preferred result, the two leaders ended what was supposed to be a joint news conference without taking questions from reporters.

During a subsequent interview with Fox News Channel before leaving Alaska, Trump insisted that the onus going forward might be somehow on Zelenskyy “to get it done,” but said there would also be some involvement from European nations. That was notable since Zelenskyy was excluded from Trump and Putin’s meeting.

Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker (“Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin“):

Nothing says standing up to Russian aggression quite like welcoming the aggressor on a red carpet and applauding him. On Friday, Donald Trump did both at the start of his summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. This triumphant greeting was followed by multiple friendly handshakes, a cordial pat or two on the arm, and a companionable stride past an enfilade of American F-22 fighter jets at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. When the pair got within shouting distance of the American press corps, a bit of harsh reality crept in. “President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” someone called out. But, on the twelve-hundred-and-sixty-eighth day since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Trump never wavered from the chummy cordiality with which they had greeted each other for their first meeting in six years. Putin pantomimed not being able to hear the question and shrugged. In an instant, Trump ushered him away for an apparently impromptu ride in his Presidential limousine; pictures of the Beast rolling slowly toward the venue where their formal talks would be held showed Putin, through the window, grinning broadly.

When they emerged a little more than three hours later, after a shorter-than-expected session that did not include a scheduled lunch, the mutual admiration still flowed freely. Both men smiled. Trump gushed to the media about the “fantastic relationship” he’d always had with Putin and praised his “very profound” opening statement. Putin was, if anything, more over the top than Trump, praising the American President’s personal commitment to “pursuing peace,” as the logo projected on the stage behind them put it. Putin even played to Trump’s loathing of his predecessor, Joe Biden, adopting his talking point that the war with Ukraine never would have happened if Trump, not Biden, had been the American President. After twenty-five years in power, the former K.G.B. agent has learned well how to stroke the ego of his fifth U.S. counterpart.

[…]

The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.

In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.

But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”

Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic (“Well, What Did You Think Would Happen?“):

So what was that all for?

President Donald Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say. Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage. But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting, Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed. Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference, he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.

[…]

“Summits usually have deliverables. This meeting had none,” Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told me. “I hope that they made some progress towards next steps in the peace process. But there is no evidence of that yet.”

At their last summit, in Helsinki in 2018, Trump and Putin captivated the world when they took questions, revealing details of their private discussions as the American president sided with Moscow, rather than his own U.S. intelligence agencies, over Russia’s 2016 election interference. This time, they quickly ducked offstage as reporters shouted in vain. When the two men did speak, they mostly delivered pleasantries. Putin even repeated Trump’s talking point that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would never have happened had Trump been in office then. And Trump, once more, said that the two men “had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

That the summit happened at all was perceived by many as a victory for Putin, who, after years as an international pariah, was granted a photo with a U.S. president on American soil—on land that once belonged to Russia, no less. And he was greeted in an over-the-top, stage-managed welcome that involved a literal red carpet for a man accused of war crimes. Putin disembarked his plane this morning moments after Trump stepped off Air Force One, and the two men strode toward each other past parked F-22 fighter jets before meeting with a warm handshake and smiles. After posing for photographs, and quickly peering up at a military flyover that roared above them, the two men stepped into the presidential limousine, the heavily fortified vehicle known as “the Beast.”

The White House had announced earlier in the day that the two men would not have a previously planned one-on-one meeting, but would instead have a pair of sitdowns flanked by advisers. But here, in the backseat of the Beast, Putin had his time alone with Trump. As the limousine drove off the tarmac to the summit site, Putin could be seen in a rear window laughing.

McFaul’s reaction was the same as mine: presidential summits almost always wind up with meaningful deliverables. That’s because they are usually preceded by serious staff work by professional diplomats and not scheduled until there’s a working deal in place. Freelancing like this leave the President, and thus the country, at serious risk of embarrassment.

President Trump has long thought of, and certainly presented, himself as a great deal maker. Indeed, he put his name on a book called Art of the Deal almost four decades ago. His actual success in making deals, alas, is questionable.

The idea that Putin was going to make any concessions here was just laughable. He rightly believes himself to be in a position of advantage with Ukraine and has no reason to think Trump will follow through with any “sticks.” We’ll see what comes of the meeting with President Zelenskyy this week, but I fear he’ll be pressured into making major concessions.