Sometimes the best outcome from a high-profile summit is just another summit, and that may well be the case when Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin at a US military base in Alaska around midday local time.
The US President has been lowering expectations this week, in the face of growing alarm he’d agree to terms amounting to Ukraine’s capitulation. And yet, a simple get-to-know you isn’t exactly consistent with the threat he also made to impose “very severe consequences” should Moscow fail to show interest in ending a war of choice that it started in 2014. As skeptical as I remain that Trump is ready to impose those costs, it’s worth remembering that he can. And if he does, I’ll be the first to admit to underestimating him.
Success is possible. Trump has the tools to drive Putin toward a settlement, one of which is his rejection of traditional US foreign policy norms when it comes to embracing autocrats. It isn’t that Putin swoons in Trump’s presence (if anything, that works the other way around). But Russia’s leader is fully aware that no successor in the White House will be better disposed toward himself or Moscow’s interests. That knowledge alone creates some potential for leverage.
More concretely, Trump could carry through on his repeated threat to impose secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, including China, India and Turkey. As Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, Putin’s debt-fueled war economy is increasingly fragile, with senior government and central bank officials issuing public warnings. A plunge in revenue from oil exports could cause genuine pain.
Trump could also tighten financial sanctions, cutting the access to dollar-based clearing systems that some Russian banks still enjoy. Although sanctions alone are never likely to force Putin to end the war, they can set conditions for other forms of pressure that do.
Those would have to relate to the war itself, including a clearly signaled upgrade to US military assistance for Ukraine. Since coming to office in January, Trump has twice cut off US arms supplies and once halted intelligence sharing with Kyiv, to devastating effect and Russia’s advantage. He relented more recently, offering to let Ukraine and its European allies buy US weapons, but this still amounts to a substantial weakening of battlefield support to Ukrainian forces, because the available funds are limited.
Combined with acute Ukrainian manpower shortages and Moscow’s intensified long-range drone and missile campaign on cities and other targets far behind the lines, the US withdrawal has made for months of attritional Russian gains. Putin is convinced, as a result, that he is winning on the battlefield. He has little reason to wind down a war he began with far more ambitious goals, just as it shows potential for success.
Granted, the cost of each square kilometer gained over the last year makes no rational sense, either in terms of casualties suffered or the opportunity costs inflicted on a Russian economy that , even when adjusted for purchasing power parity , remains less than one tenth the size of Ukraine’s allies. But that’s to misconstrue Putin’s understanding of what will secure his place in Russian history, which is to recover Moscow’s status as the center of one of the world’s great powers.
This is why Putin cleaves so hard to his original war aims and it’s something Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would instinctively have understood. For, as he famously once wrote: “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is not the obstacle here. His country badly wants and needs a ceasefire, for the same reasons that Putin is reluctant to grant one without first getting everything he wants. Zelenskiy knows and accepts that any ceasefire must inevitably take shape along the lines of the current battlefield. What he can’t do is legitimize Putin’s gains by agreeing to recognize occupied territories as part of Russia. Nor can he hand over territory that Russia has yet to take, as Putin is demanding, oragree to Ukraine’s “demilitarization” (for which read giving up the means to defend itself when Russia renews its assault), and “denazification” (for which read the imposition of a new pro-Russian regime in Kyiv).
All of this makes it unrealistic to believe a lasting ceasefire could be agreed upon today. Russian forces have just penetrated thinning Ukrainian lines in the east and are no doubt trying now to find the reserves to turn that tactical success into the kind of breakthrough that changes the course of wars. Ukraine’s intelligence services report that Putin is shifting forces along the front to mount a new offensive. The Kremlin has no incentive whatsoever to stop now.
Putin’s task today will be to ensure he can continue his invasion without triggering any meaningful response from the US. It’s up to Trump to decide what his own aims are. But if he really wants to end the bloodshed, he needs to make sure Putin leaves Alaska persuaded that the cost of intransigence would be to trigger a level of financial punishment and US support for Ukraine’s defense that would put the victory he craves out of reach.
The US President has been lowering expectations this week, in the face of growing alarm he’d agree to terms amounting to Ukraine’s capitulation. And yet, a simple get-to-know you isn’t exactly consistent with the threat he also made to impose “very severe consequences” should Moscow fail to show interest in ending a war of choice that it started in 2014. As skeptical as I remain that Trump is ready to impose those costs, it’s worth remembering that he can. And if he does, I’ll be the first to admit to underestimating him.
Success is possible. Trump has the tools to drive Putin toward a settlement, one of which is his rejection of traditional US foreign policy norms when it comes to embracing autocrats. It isn’t that Putin swoons in Trump’s presence (if anything, that works the other way around). But Russia’s leader is fully aware that no successor in the White House will be better disposed toward himself or Moscow’s interests. That knowledge alone creates some potential for leverage.
More concretely, Trump could carry through on his repeated threat to impose secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, including China, India and Turkey. As Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, Putin’s debt-fueled war economy is increasingly fragile, with senior government and central bank officials issuing public warnings. A plunge in revenue from oil exports could cause genuine pain.
Trump could also tighten financial sanctions, cutting the access to dollar-based clearing systems that some Russian banks still enjoy. Although sanctions alone are never likely to force Putin to end the war, they can set conditions for other forms of pressure that do.
Those would have to relate to the war itself, including a clearly signaled upgrade to US military assistance for Ukraine. Since coming to office in January, Trump has twice cut off US arms supplies and once halted intelligence sharing with Kyiv, to devastating effect and Russia’s advantage. He relented more recently, offering to let Ukraine and its European allies buy US weapons, but this still amounts to a substantial weakening of battlefield support to Ukrainian forces, because the available funds are limited.
Combined with acute Ukrainian manpower shortages and Moscow’s intensified long-range drone and missile campaign on cities and other targets far behind the lines, the US withdrawal has made for months of attritional Russian gains. Putin is convinced, as a result, that he is winning on the battlefield. He has little reason to wind down a war he began with far more ambitious goals, just as it shows potential for success.
Granted, the cost of each square kilometer gained over the last year makes no rational sense, either in terms of casualties suffered or the opportunity costs inflicted on a Russian economy that , even when adjusted for purchasing power parity , remains less than one tenth the size of Ukraine’s allies. But that’s to misconstrue Putin’s understanding of what will secure his place in Russian history, which is to recover Moscow’s status as the center of one of the world’s great powers.
This is why Putin cleaves so hard to his original war aims and it’s something Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would instinctively have understood. For, as he famously once wrote: “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is not the obstacle here. His country badly wants and needs a ceasefire, for the same reasons that Putin is reluctant to grant one without first getting everything he wants. Zelenskiy knows and accepts that any ceasefire must inevitably take shape along the lines of the current battlefield. What he can’t do is legitimize Putin’s gains by agreeing to recognize occupied territories as part of Russia. Nor can he hand over territory that Russia has yet to take, as Putin is demanding, oragree to Ukraine’s “demilitarization” (for which read giving up the means to defend itself when Russia renews its assault), and “denazification” (for which read the imposition of a new pro-Russian regime in Kyiv).
All of this makes it unrealistic to believe a lasting ceasefire could be agreed upon today. Russian forces have just penetrated thinning Ukrainian lines in the east and are no doubt trying now to find the reserves to turn that tactical success into the kind of breakthrough that changes the course of wars. Ukraine’s intelligence services report that Putin is shifting forces along the front to mount a new offensive. The Kremlin has no incentive whatsoever to stop now.
Putin’s task today will be to ensure he can continue his invasion without triggering any meaningful response from the US. It’s up to Trump to decide what his own aims are. But if he really wants to end the bloodshed, he needs to make sure Putin leaves Alaska persuaded that the cost of intransigence would be to trigger a level of financial punishment and US support for Ukraine’s defense that would put the victory he craves out of reach.
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