US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russia's President Vladimir Putin ahead of a meeting in Helsinki, in 2018. Photo / Alexey Nikolsky, AFP
Late last month, President Vladimir Putin of Russia was facing a stark reality.
He was on the verge of losing United States President Donald Trump, the one Western leader possibly willing to help him get his way in Ukraine and achieve his long-held goal of rupturing the European security order.
After months of trying to get Putin to end the war, Trump had grown tired of ineffectual phone calls and talks and had begun issuing ultimatums.
Even worse for Putin, Trump appeared to have patched up his relationship with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, despite an Oval Office blow-up earlier this year that delighted Moscow.
It was not clear that Trump would be able or willing to follow through on the threats he had made to put punishing tariffs on nations buying Russian oil, or what real impact such moves would have on Moscow.
But Trump’s deadline for Putin to end the war was swiftly approaching, presaging some sort of further rift between the White House and the Kremlin.
So Putin shifted tack ever so slightly.
Despite previous refusals by Russian officials to negotiate over territory in the Russia-Ukraine war, the Russian leader, during a meeting at the Kremlin last week, left Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, with the impression that Russia was now willing to engage in some deal-making on the question of land.
“We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched,” Trump said on Friday. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”
By speaking a language Trump understands — the language of real estate — Putin secured something he had been seeking ever since January: a one-on-one meeting with the US leader, without Zelenskyy present, to make his case and cut a deal.
“It has been a very good week for Putin,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at Kings College London.
“He has taken himself out of a position of significant vulnerability.
“He has manoeuvred this entire process into something that is more or less exactly what he needed it to be.”
At the same time, tensions between Washington and Kyiv have reappeared.
Zelenskyy said that the Ukrainian Constitution does not allow his Government to negotiate away the country’s land.
Trump initially told European officials that the meeting with Putin would be followed by a three-way summit with both Putin and Zelenskyy. The Kremlin quickly said no such promise had been made. The White House proceeded anyway.
Few analysts believe the Russian leader will be content to stop the war based on a real estate negotiation alone.
Putin has made it clear that, among other things, he wants a formal promise that Ukraine will not enter Nato or any other Western military alliances, host Western troops on its territory or be allowed to build up a military that threatens Russia — making Ukraine perpetually vulnerable.
“The fundamental thing for Russia is domination,” Greene said.
Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, said Putin would come into the summit in Alaska pursuing various scenarios.
Those include a favourable deal with Trump that the US President successfully forces upon Ukraine or a favourable deal with Trump that Zelenskyy refuses, causing the US to walk away from Ukraine, Gabuev said.
The third option, he noted, is that the Russian leader continues his current path for another 12 to 18 months, with the expectation that Ukraine will run out of soldiers faster than the Russian war economy runs out of steam.
Putin understands that Trump is willing to offer things few other American leaders would ever consider, which could help Russia fracture Ukraine and divide the Western alliance.
“If you could get Trump to recognise Russia’s claim to the lion’s share of the territory that it has taken, understanding that the Ukrainians and the Europeans might not come along for the ride on that, you drive a long-term wedge between the US and Europe,” Greene said.
Despite wanting those things, Putin won’t stop the war for them, if getting them means agreeing to a sovereign Ukraine with a strong military, aligned with the West, that is able to make its own arms, Gabuev said.
“Trump is a big opportunity for him,” Gabuev said. “I think that he understands that. But at the same time, he is not ready to pay the price of Ukraine slipping away forever.”
Stefan Meister, a Russia analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said the two leaders would come into the summit with different goals — Trump’s being to end the war and Putin’s being a strategic repositioning of Russia.
“For Putin, it’s really about bigger goals,” Meister added. “It is about his legacy. It is about where Russia will stand after this war. It is much more fundamental. This creates a different willingness to pay costs.”
And despite negotiations about his country’s land, Zelenskyy will not be in the room.
“For Ukraine, it is a disaster,” Meister said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Paul Sonne
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