ANcHORAGE, Alaska — President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from a nearly three-hour meeting on the Ukraine war and struck a cordial tone in brief public statements, but left without announcing a ceasefire or peace agreement.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said.
The White House had said there would be a news conference after the closed-door meeting, but both men walked offstage after 12 minutes without taking questions from the scores of American and Russian reporters in attendance.
Trump hosted the summit at a military base in Alaska in an audacious bid to broker a peace deal and stop Russia’s three-year war with Ukraine and its ever-rising body count. It was not immediately clear what was agreed upon in the talks. Trump said the two sides had made “some great progress,” but offered no specifics.
“We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said.
To Putin, he said: “We’ll probably see you again very soon.”
“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied.
Trump appeared buoyant at the start of the summit, deflated by the end.
He met Putin on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, applauding as his Russian counterpart approached. The leaders warmly clasped hands and then walked side by side along a red carpet to Trump’s limousine for the short drive to the closed-door meeting. They rode alone with no aides present. In a military flourish, a B-2 bomber and a quartet of F-35 jets took part in a flyover marking the start of the summit.
Hours later, Trump seemed subdued and unsmiling upon taking the stage for the joint appearance. He perked up, it seemed, when Putin said the war with Ukraine wouldn’t have happened had Trump been in office. Trump often makes the same point, blaming former President Joe Biden for the hostilities. He nodded and looked over at Putin when the Russian leader backed up his claim.
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Trump was joined in the summit meeting by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a special U.S. envoy, Steve Witkoff — a departure from what was originally described as a one-on-one between the two leaders.
Putin was accompanied at the meeting by two Russian officials, foreign affairs aide Yuri Ushakov and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Ahead of the summit, Lavrov was spotted in Alaska wearing a shirt with the cyrillic letters “cccP,” a cheeky reference to the USSR. Before declaring its independence in 1991, Ukraine was part of the old Soviet empire.
Trump spent the run-up to the summit tempering expectations, casting the sit-down as a prelude to an as-yet-unscheduled meeting that would include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I want to see a ceasefire rapidly,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday en route to Alaska. “I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today. Everyone said it can’t be today, but I’m just saying I want the killing to stop.”
Normally bullish about his negotiating skills, Trump told Fox News Radio earlier in the week that the odds are 1 in 4 that his sit-down with Putin would be a failure. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likened the summit to a “listening exercise” given that Zelenskyy wouldn’t be present.
“The president is realistic that this is likely a multistep process and he’s ready and positive about this step forward,” a senior Trump administration official told NBc News on Friday morning, when asked about the president’s mindset.
Still, the face-to-face meeting between the two leaders loomed as one of the few hopeful moments in a grinding conflict that started in February 2022 when Russia sent tanks rolling across the border into Ukraine with the goal of swallowing up its democratic neighbor.
Trump said as recently as Thursday that he would call Zelenskyy to discuss the outcome of his meeting with Putin if it went “well.” It is unclear if that call has happened.
Trump has pushed for the two nations to end the fighting as he makes an increasingly public campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
But if the bombing continues and Russia seizes more Ukrainian territory, Trump will have risked giving legitimacy to a Russian leader who has become an international pariah.
“My worry is that the photo-op in and of itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, telegraphs to other autocrats or evil men around the world that they can get away with murdering civilians and still get a photo-op with the president of the United States,” Sen. chris Murphy, D-conn., who sits on the Foreign Relations committee, said Friday on MSNBc’s “Morning Joe.”
Russia’s early attempt to conquer Ukraine sputtered and the conflict has since devolved into a war of attrition, with casualties totaling about 1.5 million. At present, Putin holds a slight edge on the battlefield.
Though nothing was announced Friday, Trump still enjoys considerable leverage over both combatants. If he chooses, he could slap stiffer sanctions on countries such as India that buy oil from Russia. Or he could withhold much-needed money and military hardware that have kept Ukraine in the fight against its bigger adversary. For those reasons alone, the warring countries need to take seriously Trump’s insistence that the conflict end.
“Putin is clearly in a weaker position,” William Taylor, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. “This invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be a disaster for him. Trump has the cards this time.”
The summit location was itself rich in symbolism. For one, the International criminal court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin stemming from his conduct in the war, meaning he could have been apprehended if the site had been in a host of other nations. (The U.S. is not a signatory to the court.)
What’s more, Alaska used to belong to Putin’s country, a fact that Russian commentators and political elite had seized on as a positive signal for the talks. The U.S. purchased the territory in 1867 for $7.2 million, an acquisition that, ironically, strengthened America’s military position on the Pacific rim in a rivalry with Russia that has waxed and waned for decades.
“Putin has agreed to come to Trump, to come to America,” Robert O’Brien, White House national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “That’s critical because Alaska is a former Russian colony and Putin’s whole policy is about recovering what he believes to be former Russian Empire territory. Putin wants all of Russia’s territory back and yet he’s coming to a place that was a former Russian colony to meet with the president of the United States — when he has no chance of getting Alaska back.”
A subplot of the meeting was the personal chemistry between the American and Russian presidents. Trump took office in 2017 wanting a good relationship with Putin, who has become an outcast over his yearslong assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty. Upon his return to the White House in January, Trump at one point suggested he had a certain kinship with Putin over investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during a televised meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February. During his appearance with Putin on Friday, he again made reference to the Russia “hoax.”
Recently, Trump has voiced irritation with Putin over continued Russian attacks on Ukraine. Though Putin has sounded accommodating in phone calls, Trump has said, Russia hasn’t let up its military assault.
“We get a lot of bulls--- thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said last month. “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
As a candidate in 2024, Trump was confident he could end the war quickly. That early optimism has given way to a rueful recognition that the problem is tougher than he anticipated.
A central point of contention is land. Zelenskyy insisted last week that Ukraine would not cede territory to Russia.
“Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” he said.
Trump has suggested that some mutual “swapping” of territories would be part of a ceasefire. In his remarks Friday on Air Force One, he said that he would discuss divisions of territory in his meeting with Putin, though he added, “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.”
In a post on X Friday morning, Zelenskyy wrote in English: “The key thing is that this meeting should open up a real path toward a just peace and a substantive discussion between leaders in a trilateral format — Ukraine, the United States, and the Russian side. It is time to end the war, and the necessary steps must be taken by Russia. We are counting on America. We are ready, as always, to work as productively as possible.”
Trump was scheduled to have a working lunch with Putin and a number of top U.S. officials, but after the talks, the two presidents headed directly to the joint appearance instead.
Once a TV showman, Trump seemed well aware of the drama and intrigue surrounding a summit that drew worldwide attention.
“High stakes!!!” he wrote in all-caps on his Truth Social platform before departing for Alaska.
By day’s end, the stakes remained high, but a breakthrough seemed all the more elusive.
