What Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shared in the back of the US presidential limousine on the short ride to their longest on-the-record meeting will likely remain a mystery.
There was a lot the two presidents left unsaid at the end of an inconclusive Alaska summit — most notably, they made no mention of a ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump’s stated goal in going into the talks. Their get-together was capped by one of the shortest news conferences Trump has ever held.
The much-anticipated event was surprising for the lack of fireworks and the unusual restraint of a free-wheeling president who’d been upstaged by Putin in Helsinki seven years ago. This time, they took no questions from the packed room of journalists in Anchorage, leaving them to wonder about the details of the tantalizing agreement the pair had mentioned but kept under wraps.
The fear going in had been that Ukraine would get sold out. The implication going out was that Trump planned to relay a message that Kyiv and European allies didn’t want to hear as he made his way back to Washington on Air Force One.
“I’m going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened, but we had an extremely productive meeting,” Trump said. “Many points were agreed to. There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant, one is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We didn’t get there but we have a very good chance of getting there.”
In the moment, Ukraine’s worst fears weren’t realized — Trump didn’t give anything away, at least publicly. But that sentiment could change quickly over the weekend as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy starts piecing together what Trump and Putin hashed out in that nearly 3 hour meeting.
What exactly were the outstanding points of issue?
There were plenty of intimations of Russian contentment. Putin seized the initiative by speaking first at the podium alongside Trump, typically the privilege of the host.
The Russian leader spoke of an “understanding” that he and Trump had reached that he said may even open the door to ending the war that he’d started.
Then Putin issued a warning. “We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will take all this in a constructive manner and will not put up any obstacles, will not attempt to disrupt the planned progress through provocations or backstage intrigues,” he said.
There was little solace for Ukraine in an interview Trump then gave to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in which he explicitly put the ball in Zelenskiy’s court to “get it done,” He said he might be at a meeting between the Ukrainian leader and Putin, but didn’t entirely commit, and still he offered no details of what had been discussed.
“There’s one or two pretty significant items but I think they can be reached,” Trump said. “It’s really up to President Zelenskiy to get it done. And I would also say the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit.”
John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, said Trump may well tell his allies “to keep their mouth shut” once he briefs them on the secret details of the meeting with Putin. That will be hard for them to do, especially if the UK, France and Germany conclude that Ukraine is about to be told to accept a bad deal.
“We’re in the early stage of a poker game,” said Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on Bloomberg Television.
By inviting the Russian president onto American soil and giving him an audience, Trump had already delivered a diplomatic win for the strongman leader who became an international pariah for ordering the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin, by all accounts, has ceded nothing in return.
Trump had talked a big game in the lead-up to the summit, saying that he’d know in an instant whether Putin was serious and that he wouldn’t hesitate to walk out if he wasn’t convinced. In the end he walked down the red carpet — not always in a straight line — and clapped as a jaunty Putin walked over to grab his hand.
Perhaps taking stock of the lessons of previous encounters, when the two were left unsupervised without note takers or aides, the White House announced that top aides would join Putin and Trump for their sit-down this time.
And yet minutes after the two leaders got off the tarmac, Putin was spotted beaming from inside the ‘Beast,’ as the armored limousine is known, seated alone with Trump.
The US president appeared solicitous of his guest, urging Putin to walk ahead as they stepped off a podium in front of reporters. The Russian leader had made a point of showing he couldn’t hear questions lobbed at him.
“President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” one reporter shouted. Putin put his hand up to his ear but didn’t answer.
Those private 10 minutes were all the time Putin needed to feel the flight across the Bering Strait had been worth it.
He was in Alaska, the US state the Russian Czar had sold to the Americans more than 150 years ago, for about as long as the flight over: four hours. His pool reporters were treated to ‘Chicken Kiev’ along the way.
Putin’s veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, played his part by arriving in Anchorage in jeans and a white sweater emblazoned with USSR in black Cyrillic letters. Earlier in the day, Trump had made of point of saying he’d consulted with Belarus’s autocratic leader Alexander Lukashenko.
That was an alarming signal for many traditional US allies. Dubbed “the last dictator in Europe” by the Republican administration of President George W. Bush, Lukashenko is Putin’s closest ally and under international sanctions, including by the US. None of that seemed to bother Trump, who said they’d had a “wonderful” chat.
Putin laid the flattery on thick in Anchorage, putting the focus firmly on the relationship with the US as Russia’s neighbor separated by a only a few kilometers of water across the Bering Strait.
“When we met, we got off the planes, I said ‘good afternoon, dear neighbor, it’s very nice to see you in good health and alive’. And it sounds very neighborly, in my opinion, kind,” he told the assembled reporters. “We are close neighbors, that is a fact.”
He made little reference to the Ukrainian neighbor that Russia invaded.
In a day punctuated by memorable images though ultimately wrapped in enigma, there was a telling moment of clarity. Putin, in power for more than a quarter of a century, has studied English but rarely resorts to speaking it in public.
Even before he landed in Alaska, it was clear that Putin was already angling for another meeting with Trump, this time on Russian soil. Just as he opened the briefing to reporters, he also found a way to close it.
“Next time in Moscow,” Putin suggested in English.
“Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump replied. “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”
With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska, Natalia Drozdiak, Annmarie Hordern, Josh Wingrove and Kate Sullivan.
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