Trump-Putin Summit: Peace In the Making, or Just Theatre?

London: The Alaska summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin last week has left Ukraine caught between hope and peril.

What began on August 15 with talk of “historic” security guarantees for Kyiv has since hardened into Moscow’s explicit demands – Ukraine must surrender the Donbas, abandon its NATO ambitions and bar Western troops. In return, Russia hints at freezing the current front lines and even relinquishing parts of Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected these conditions outright, describing them as incompatible with sovereignty. On August 18, he joined European leaders in Washington for crisis talks convened by Trump. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and others pressed for binding, NATO-style security guarantees, warning against concessions that would legitimise Russia’s land grab.

Yet Moscow has underscored its terms with firepower. Within days of the summit, Russia launched missile and drone strikes that killed civilians and damaged infrastructure linked to the US presence in Ukraine. Trump, visibly frustrated, even wrote a post on Truth Social that seems to urge Zelenskyy to go on the offensive.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov meanwhile insisted Putin was “prepared” to meet Zelenskyy, but only after key issues have been worked out by officials, casting doubt on whether any such encounter will ever materialise.

The Alaska meeting itself had been dressed up as a breakthrough. On August 17, Zelenskyy called Washington’s offer of security guarantees a "historic decision", while a virtual gathering of European leaders, co-chaired by Macron and Starmer, ‘commended’ Trump’s commitment.

Steve Witkoff, who along with US secretary of state Marco Rubio joined Trump in his dialogue with Putin and his team at the Alaskan summit, told CNN, “We agreed to robust security guarantees that I would describe as game changing.”

After Trump's three-hour exchanges with Putin, Fox News asked the former about territorial concessions by Ukraine and US security cover for the country. He replied, “Well, I think those are points that we negotiated and those are points that we largely have agreed on.”

Putin, chuckling in English, suggested “next time in Moscow”, to which Trump replied: “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”

The optics were carefully staged. A ballroom at a US Air Force base in Anchorage was turned into a press conference hall, though neither leader took questions. Behind them stretched the slogan “Pursuing Peace”. Trump declared, “There were many, many points that we agreed on – most of them, I would say,” before admitting, “There’s no deal until there’s a deal”.

John Bolton, once his national security adviser, judged: “I think Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won.”

On his flight back to Washington, Trump phoned Zelenskyy for an hour, before being joined by European leaders for another half-hour call.

For Putin, simply sharing the stage with Trump was a victory. Russia has long dismissed Zelenskyy as unworthy of equal standing with its president. Lavrov turned up in Anchorage wearing a vest emblazoned with the CCCP, a Soviet throwback underscoring Moscow’s ambition to reclaim Ukraine. The Kremlin’s strategic goal has never wavered: a Ukraine folded back into Russia’s sphere.

The context of these negotiations is rooted in decades of grievance. In 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed a treaty promising to respect each other’s borders – torn up by Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe after 1990 was the original sin for Putin. Addressing the Munich Security Conference in 2007, he warned: “One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way… We’re witnessing the untrammelled use of the military in international affairs.”

Historian Mary Elise Sarotte in her book, Not an Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, catalogues private dialogue between Moscow and the West. She concludes that extending NATO’s presence to Russia’s borders was a recipe for conflict.

As recently as a month before Russian troops entered eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow had placed draft treaties at a NATO-Russia Council meeting seeking to reverse NATO’s expansion eastward.

On February 9, 1990, the then-US secretary of state, James Baker, assured the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not advance to Warsaw Pact countries if Russia accepted the reunification of East and West Germany.

Soon after, German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, went a step further by telling Gorbachev that NATO would not even spread to ‘the GDR’ (or communist-ruled USSR ally German Democratic Republic or East Germany).

On May 17 of the same year, NATO secretary-general Manfred Worner echoed this pledge. Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported, ‘In his memoirs, Gorbachev described these assurances as the moment that cleared the way for compromise on Germany (or its reunification).’

However, the promises were never formalised into a signed agreement, because US President George H.W. Bush shot them down. In fact, the pact sealed in September 1990 on reunifying Germany contained an addendum, which permitted non-German NATO forces soldiers stationed in West Germany to cover East Germany (hitherto east of the ‘Iron Curtain’) as well.

The Guardian also revealed that in March 1991, Russian defence minister Marshal Dmitry Yazov enquired of British Prime Minister John Major about Eastern Europe’s interest in seeking NATO membership. “Major, according to the diaries of the British Ambassador to Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, assured him ‘nothing of that sort will ever happen’,” the paper cited.

In 1993, Yeltsin wrote to US president, Bill Clinton, stating that any further NATO footprint eastward would breach the spirit of the 1990 treaty. Thereafter in 1997, when a NATO and Russia in a ‘Founding Act’ jointly committed to building lasting peace between each other and declaring, ‘NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries’, Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, NATO’s alleged duality in the context Baker’s promise to Yeltsin.

In August 1993, though, Yeltsin conceded to Polish leader Lech Walesa Poland’s right to join NATO. At that juncture, Russia anticipated becoming a member state of NATO. The US was opposed to this, but had seemingly kept Moscow in suspense.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 disregarded a Soviet-era internal reorganisation that had placed the peninsula on the Black Sea under Ukraine. It was a bloodless takeover. Ukrainian troops did not resist. With NATO’s enlargement to Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea, Russia’s fleet unhindered presence gained a counterweight to the West.

Russia and Ukraine are branches of the same tree – the Soviet Union. Glasnost or openness are not exactly in either’s blood. Abandonment of communism rendered neither into liberal democracies. The Zelenskyy regime, an outcome of a US-backed revolt against a pro-Russian government, reflects this contested legacy.

The Alaska summit, then, was never just about Ukraine. It was about whether Russia and the US could redraw Europe’s security order over Kyiv’s head.

Trump’s return to office has created fresh fissures across the Atlantic, with Europe resisting what it sees as appeasement and Moscow exploiting Washington’s eagerness to strike a deal.

Putin, seasoned and phlegmatic, met a counterpart more interested in optics and a Nobel Prize than strategy. Bolton summed it up thus: “Putin … has gone a long way to re-establishing the [US-Russia] relationship… He has escaped sanctions.”

On Alaskan soil, ironically sold by Russia to the US in 1867, Putin strode a red carpet, clasped Trump’s hand, and in an instant shifted from pariah to partner. The two even shared Trump’s armoured limousine, leaving Putin’s own Moscow-plated car unused. It was a tableau of camaraderie that now looks less like peace in the making, and more like theatre against the backdrop of fresh Russian bombardment.

Ashis Ray is the author of The Trial that Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence published by Routledge.

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