In President Donald Trump’s warm red-carpet greeting at the Alaska summit, Russians saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe.
For Russia, the results of the Alaska summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin marked a turning point in relations with the United States, underlined by Trump subsequently abandoning demands for a halt in fighting in Ukraine.
Russian officials and commentators were especially enamored by Trump’s unusually warm red-carpet greeting to Putin on Friday in which they saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe. “A new European and international security architecture is on the agenda, and everyone must accept it,” Andrei Klishas, an influential Russian senator, said after the summit.
Within hours of the meeting, Trump had discarded his previous position — one also held by Ukraine and Europe — that a full ceasefire was required to allow the details of a peace agreement to be hammered out. The move enables Russia to keep fighting without the risk of U.S. sanctions, and puts pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russian terms or face open-ended attacks.
After Friday’s summit, Trump told Zelensky and European leaders that Putin had demanded that Ukraine cede all of Donbas, which includes the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and other occupied territory, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Trump told them of his shift from a ceasefire to negotiations on a comprehensive peace deal, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump spoke to Zelensky before European leaders joined the call.
Russia does not control the roughly 3,500 square miles of Donetsk, a highly reinforced region of strategic importance to Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself from future Russian attacks, military analysts say.
Trump told Zelensky that Putin was “ready to promise” to end the war and not start wars against other nations, in exchange for Donbas and the other Ukrainian territory he has seized, one official said. Zelensky is unwilling to give up any territory, he added, but Trump wants a fast deal — setting the stage for a potentially difficult clash.
Kyiv insists that handing territory to Putin would violate Ukraine’s constitution and embolden Russia to plan further attacks on the rest of Ukraine.
A triumphant Putin told top Russian officials Saturday that the meeting was “very useful” and “in my opinion, it brings us closer to the right decisions.”
Trump’s call to Zelensky and European leaders, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the leaders of France, Germany, Finland, Italy, Britain, Poland, NATO and the European Commission, was more tense than the phone call between the Europeans and Trump earlier this week, a second official said.
In another setback for Kyiv, the Kremlin on Saturday raised doubts over the one public result of the summit that went some way to meeting Ukrainian demands — Trump’s promise of a three-way meeting with Putin and Zelensky.
Senior Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said such a meeting had not been discussed, even after Trump referred to it in comments after the summit. The Kremlin has so far firmly resisted any meeting with Zelensky until the very last stages of peace negotiations.
One bright spot for European leaders, however, appears to be a continued American buy-in for some form of security guarantees for Ukraine in the wake of any agreement.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in a statement Saturday that the discussion included “credible and robust” security guarantees for Ukraine, although the framework for doing that would remain outside NATO. The guarantees would be equivalent to NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense, according to the statement. Article 5 states that if one nation is attacked, each other nation must treat it as an attack against all, and “take the actions it deems necessary to assist” the attacked nation.
Russian officials and commentators, however, saw the results of the summit as extending far beyond the conflict in Ukraine, describing it as a global realignment bringing together the world’s two top nuclear powers.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, counted out a list of Russian achievements from the Alaska summit, focusing primarily on Putin’s restoration of ties with Washington on an equal basis.
“A full-fledged mechanism of meetings between Russia and the United States at the highest level was restored. Calm, without ultimatums and threats,” he wrote. He celebrated that Putin had given no ground while Trump had stepped back from increasing pressure on Moscow through sanctions, allowing Russia to fight on.
“The meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions and at the same time with the continuation of the special military operation,” he said, using the Kremlin’s term for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s most important achievement, he said, was that “both sides explicitly placed the responsibility for achieving future results in the negotiations on the cessation of hostilities squarely” on Kyiv and Europe.
Trump appeared to have been swayed by the Kremlin’s contention that only a comprehensive peace deal was acceptable — which Putin has so far used to delay efforts to halt the fighting, arguing that the many questions, details and nuances involved would require a great deal of time to negotiate.
“This means that Putin has succeeded in persuading Trump that any effort toward a prompt, unconditional ceasefire will fail,” Russia analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in an interview.
It also indicated that Putin had convinced Trump of the need to address what Russia calls the “root causes” of the war, she said, a formulation that the Kremlin has used to mean demilitarizing Ukraine and changing its politics — and even to renegotiate Europe’s security architecture.
But Stanovaya said the failure to get a ceasefire raised the question of what Trump would do when Putin continues a war that he feels confident of winning. “We should look at how the situation develops further because Putin will continue the war.”
The Kremlin, which artfully played up Russia’s nuclear arms and history as a Cold War superpower, appears to have convinced Trump that Ukraine could never win a war against a nuclear power, she wrote in separate remarks on social media.
“Putin, unsurprisingly, underlined Russia’s nuclear strength, which left a strong impression on Trump,” she wrote.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/16/putin-trump-russia-summit-ukraine-war/
