U.S. President Donald Trump was en-route to Alaska on Friday for a landmark summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that he hopes will enable him to fulfill a campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine. Photo by Will Oliver/UPI | License Photo
The countdown to U.S. President Donald Trump’s much-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to agree a cease-fire in Ukraine was in full swing early Friday.
Air Force One was awaiting the arrival of Trump at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to fly him the 4,000 miles across country to his rendezvous with Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, with their meeting scheduled to get underway at 3:30 pm EDT — late morning in Alaska.
The Putin delegation was also en route on a much longer 12-hour flight via the far eastern Russian region of Magadan, where the party broke their journey for a “full-fledged regional trip,” including a visit to an industrial plant and a meeting with the regional governor, according to the Kremlin.
Before departing the White House, Trump simply posted “HIGH STAKES” on his Truth Social media platform, having earlier set high expectations by saying he believed Putin wanted to make a deal to end the conflict and putting the chance of failure at just 25%.
Putin was also upbeat.
In comments before departing Moscow on Thursday, he praised what he called the American administration’s “quite energetic and sincere efforts to stop the hostilities, stop the crisis and reach agreements that are of interest to all parties involved in this conflict.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was already on the ground in Alaska, said the Russian side would present a “clear and unambiguous position” building on the strong foundations laid by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff during his Aug. 6 visit with Putin.
Trump earlier expressed confidence that Putin would not attempt to “mess around” when the pair sit down for their one-to-one session with only interpreters present.
However, he made it clear he regarded Friday’s summit as just the starting point of a process and that a second three-way meeting he hoped to set up — provided Friday went well — between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin and himself was far more important.
“We’re gonna find out where everybody stands. And I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, or five minutes… whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting. And if it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly. And if it’s a good meeting, we’re going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future,” Trump told reporters in the White House on Thursday.
Expectations among the United States’ allies and in Ukraine, however, hovered somewhere between low and realistic and the hosting on U.S. soil of Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court to answer war crimes charges, undermines a concerted three-and-a-half-year effort to isolate Moscow.
British Defense Secretary John Healey reiterated the position of London and the vast majority of European capitals that Ukraine must be at the heart of determining its future.
“The Ukrainians are the ones who are fighting, with huge courage — military and civilians alike. It’s for President Zelensky and the Ukrainians to determine the end to the fighting and the terms on which that takes place,” Healey said.
As an ally, Britain’s job was, working with partners, to “lead the charge on intensifying diplomacy” by providing military assistance and being willing to boost economic sanctions on Russia, added Healey.
There was no word from Zelensky.
His last comments followed a virtual meeting on Wednesday with European leaders and Trump, when he reiterated his rejection of the idea of conceding territory to Russia and that decisions made without Ukraine at the table would be illegitimate.
Ukrainian MP and parliamentary foreign affairs spokesperson Oleksandr Merezhko called the summit a diplomatic win for Putin that brought Putin “into the limelight.
“I don’t expect any tangible results for the simple reason that Putin doesn’t want to stop the war. His goal is to destroy Ukraine, and Trump doesn’t seem to be keen to provide sanctions to Russia and those supporting Russia,” Merezhko told the BBC.
“Maybe they already have come up with some kind of agreement, which they may finalize during the summit. We don’t know anything and that creates lots of risks for our security and our future.”
Unease over the staging of a summit on Ukraine without Zelensky also showed little sign of abating, with protests in the streets of Anchorage in support of Kyiv and questioning Trump’s ability to negotiate a deal with Putin.
Ukrainians were also on the streets of Kyiv, demonstrating outside the U.S. embassy, demanding the return of their loved ones held by Russia over “land swaps” envisaged in any peace deal.
The mercantile-heavy make up of the Russian delegation which includes the finance minister and head of its sovereign wealth fund suggested Moscow hoped to discuss a much wider set of issues than just Ukraine.
Putin told senior Russian officials a nuclear arms control deal could come out of a “broader” peace, the stage for which he hoped would be set by the summit “creating long-term conditions for peace between our countries, as well as in Europe, and in the world as a whole.”
