President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both said their face-to-face meeting in Alaska was productive, but did not reach a deal to end the fighting in Ukraine.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Mr. Trump told reporters following the three-hour summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”
At a joint press conference, the two leaders offered no specifics about their talks and did not detail any signs of significant progress. They did not take questions from the press after both delivered brief remarks alongside each other.
Mr. Trump said that both sides were close on the “most significant” difference, but did not say what that was or how large the gulf remains.
The Russian leader offered a more optimistic view of the meeting. He said Russia sees that the U.S. and Mr. Trump “personally” want to help facilitate the “resolution of the Ukrainian conflict.”
“As I’ve said, the situation in Ukraine has to do with fundamental threats to our security. Moreover, we’ve always considered the Ukrainian nation, and I’ve said it multiple times, a brotherly nation,” Mr. Putin said. “However strange it may sound in these conditions, we have the same roots, and everything that’s happening is a tragedy for us and a terrible wound.”
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Mr. Putin said Russia is “sincerely interested in putting an end to” the war and at the same time they want to make sure the agreement is “lasting and long term.”
However, the Russian leader warned that Ukraine and other European leaders should not go behind closed doors and make side deals to potentially hurt any potential agreement.
“I would like to hope that the agreement that we’ve reached together will help us bring closer that goal and will pave the path towards peace in Ukraine,” Mr. Putin said. “We expect that Kiev and European capitals will perceive that constructively and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works.”
He added, “They will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”
The Russian president said that to reach a permanent deal, they need to eliminate “all the primary roots, the primary causes of that conflict.”
“I agree with President Trump, as he has said today, that, naturally, the security of Ukraine should be ensured as well. Naturally, we have prepared to work on that,” he said.
SEE ALSO: Putin sees summit with Trump as the end of Russia’s international isolation
Mr. Putin, seeking to reestablish Russia’s dominance of Ukraine, annexed the country’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launched an all-out invasion in 2022.
Mr. Trump made it clear that they didn’t reach a compromise but called the meeting “extremely productive.”
Some sticking points still need to be resolved, Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump said his next step was to talk to Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, NATO leaders and and European allies to brief them on the talks with Mr. Putin.
“It’s ultimately up to them,” he said.
In his remarks, Mr. Putin was very complimentary to his American counterpart. He said the war in Ukraine would not have happened had Donald Trump been the U.S. president in 2022. Mr. Trump has long claimed that he would have avoided the full-scale war that broke out during President Biden’s administration.
He also invited Mr. Trump to meet again in Moscow, which appeared to catch Mr. Trump by surprise. He said the meeting would provoke criticism but that he could “possibly see that happening.”
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee declared on social media that Mr. Putin’s “back is against the wall.”
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania Republican and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, hailed Mr. Trump’s statesmanship.
“I commend and credit President Trump’s peace through strength policies which forced Putin to come to America to discuss a possible cease-fire, which Ukraine has already and repeatedly agreed to.,” he wrote on X.
Others quickly labeled the meeting a disappointment.
“President Trump declared that he would quickly know whether Putin was open to negotiations or merely stringing him along at their Alaska Summit. It looks like Putin continues to string Trump along,” said Peter Doran, adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Democrats were quick to bash Mr. Trump.
Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the meeting “an undeserved reward for Putin.”
“President Trump should have pressured Putin by imposing crushing sanctions on his war machine and providing Ukraine with the tools it needs to defend itself,” he said in a statement. “Instead, quite literally rolling out the red carpet, Trump has legitimized Russia’s aggression and whitewashed Putin’s war crimes.”
The prospects were always dim for a breakthrough at the summit, and the odds also are long for Mr. Putin adhering to a peace deal.
Russia has broken every ceasefire agreement going back to 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, violating the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership that the two countries signed in 1997. But this time, Mr. Putin is leading a country that is financially struggling and has suffered massive casualties in the last three years, and has captured only 20% of Ukraine’s territory.
Still, Mr. Putin has a long history of toying with peace deals and was angling to make the summit a moral victory for Moscow regardless of the outcome. Russian news media cast the summit with the U.S. president as a break in the international isolation of Russia.
En Route to the summit, Russian reporters were served chicken Kyiv by the Russian government, and Mr. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was seen wearing a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with “CCCP” — the Russian letters for USSR.
In early May, Russia and Ukraine reported attacks on each other’s forces on the first day of a 72-hour ceasefire called by Mr. Putin.
By Mr. Zelenskyy’s count, Russia has broken 25 ceasefire agreements since 2014, when Russia first attacked its neighbor.
Russia has a significant military edge with a 3-1 manpower advantage over Ukraine and more than twice as much ammunition as all of NATO. Ukraine’s battlefield position is also shrinking. Kyiv is struggling to recruit soldiers, and its desertion rates remain high.
And yet, both sides have sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Moscow’s most recent demands to end the war were unacceptable to Ukraine. Russia currently controls roughly 20% of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, all of Luhansk, more than 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and portions of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Moscow previously proposed:
• A full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
• A permanent abandonment of Kyiv’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
• An acknowledgment by Ukraine that Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are now part of Russia.
• A guarantee that the rights and freedoms of Russian speakers in Ukraine would have to be codified in an international agreement.
Mr. Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected Moscow’s demands as an absurd ultimatum. Giving up territories that tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died defending would be a bitter pill to swallow.
He has called giving up any land a nonstarter.
It’s unclear whether Russia would return any land or what that would look like. This week, Mr. Trump talked vaguely about Russia exchanging “oceanfront property,” a possible reference to the shoreline along the Sea of Azov or Black Sea. That is part of Mr. Putin’s land bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.
Ahead of the sitdown with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said he wasn’t bargaining with Ukraine territory.
“I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision. And I think they’ll make a proper decision,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One en route to Alaska. “But I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine. … Look, Vladimir Putin wanted to take all of Ukraine. If I wasn’t president, he would right now be taking all of Ukraine. And he’s not going to do it.”
Despite negotiations and deals for prisoner swaps and some pauses in the conflict, Russia and Ukraine have not had a significant pause in warfare that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.
The failure of ceasefires between the two Eastern European neighbors goes back to February 2014, when Russia took Crimea.
By Sept. 5, 2014, Ukraine and Russia signed the first major ceasefire agreement. It fell apart within hours as Russian proxy forces attacked Donetsk airport and other places in Ukraine, Ukrainian sources reported.
The Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement on Feb. 15, 2015, collapsed even faster. Just minutes after its adoption, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported an attack in Donetsk.
Although the organization went to the war zone to identify ceasefire violations by either side, it could not determine any.
Other subsequent ceasefire efforts were intended to allow for respites during major holidays, academic periods and key agricultural cycles.
Those include Easter, Christmas and New Year’s Eve lulls in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
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