NYT: Trump and Putin put on a Show Of Friendship but come away without a deal

Mr. Trump greeted Mr. Putin on the tarmac. Flying overhead as Mr. Putin arrived was a B-2 stealth bomber.
Photo: publics

President Trump gave President Vladimir Putin a warm public reception, effectively ending his diplomatic isolation over the past three years for his invasion of Ukraine. But Mr. Putin did not agree to stop the war, ‘The New York Times’ writes.

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia reached no agreement to end the war in Ukraine at a high-profile summit meeting on Friday, although they reported making unspecified progress during a strikingly convivial reunion on American soil.

While Mr. Trump had hoped to seal a deal for an immediate cease-fire, he acknowledged that the two leaders fell short, at least for now. “We haven’t quite got there, but we’ve made some headway,” he told reporters after hours of meetings on a U.S. military base in Alaska. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

But if the substance remained unsettled, the atmospherics were extraordinary. The president rolled out a literal red carpet and even applauded as he welcomed Mr. Putin, who is under U.S. sanctions and faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes. The two laughed and spoke warmly with each other, and Mr. Trump even invited Mr. Putin to ride with him in the armored presidential limousine to their meeting.

At their subsequent joint appearance at side-by-side lecterns at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, they heaped praise on one another. “We really made some great progress today,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir.”

Mr. Putin referred to Mr. Trump as a “dear neighbor” with whom he can do business. “President Trump and I have established a very good, businesslike and trustworthy contact,” he said in Russian.

The Russian president even suggested that Mr. Trump visit him in the Russian capital. “Next time in Moscow,” he said, breaking into English.

“Ooh, that’s an interesting one,” Mr. Trump replied. “I don’t know. I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”

The two ended their encounter in Alaska, however, in a cloud of uncertainty. Mr. Trump referred obliquely to “agreement” on some undisclosed points but not on others, while Mr. Putin said even more elliptically that they reached an “understanding.” Neither explained nor took questions from reporters. Mr. Trump said he would follow up by calling fellow NATO leaders and Zelensky.

The meeting was a major diplomatic gamble by Mr. Trump unlike anything his predecessors might have tried and seen as a victory for Mr. Putin, who has not been welcome in the West for years and now has been effectively liberated from the diplomatic isolation he had been consigned to for the past three years.

In fact, it would be hard to imagine an event that could have gone better from the point of view of the Russian leader, who made no public commitment to stop his assault on Ukraine and yet was treated as a valued friend. Mr. Trump did not fault Mr. Putin for starting the brutal war and left without mentioning the sanctions that just hours earlier he had threatened to impose if there were no deal.

The images emerging from the Alaska encounter were remarkable in the history of U.S.-Russian summits. Mr. Putin, who has not been to the United States outside of U.N. meetings since 2007 and has been under U.S. sanctions since 2022, was invited to a military base that is on the front line of the defense of American territory against possible Russian aggression.

Flying overhead as Mr. Putin arrived was a B-2 stealth bomber that is key to the U.S. nuclear deterrent, flanked by the kind of fighter jets that are often deployed to intercept Russian planes in the airspace near Alaska.

American troops rolling a red carpet for Putin.

Standing on the tarmac waiting, Mr. Trump clapped for Mr. Putin as the Russian strode toward him, then gave him a warm handshake, patting his arm and hand. Mr. Putin smiled broadly and talked jovially with Mr. Trump like old friends.When a reporter asked Mr. Putin if he would stop killing civilians, he smirked and pointed to his ear as if to suggest he could not hear the question.

Mr. Trump’s invitation to Mr. Putin to join him in the armored presidential limousine for the ride to their meeting location without aides was a highly unusual gesture. Mr. Putin could be seen through the window laughing as the car pulled away.

While it was originally scheduled to be a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin, along with interpreters, the session was expanded at the last minute to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, who has been negotiating with the Russians.

Mr. Putin was joined by Sergey V. Lavrov, his often combative foreign minister, who sent a pointed message when he arrived in Alaska the previous night wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with CCCP, the Cyrillic letters for USSR.

Photo: ndtvimg.com

The two leaders, however, spent less time together than originally scheduled, raising questions about how far they got, and they scrapped plans to hold a news conference in favor of the two making back-to-back statements on camera without answering questions. Neither did much to illuminate what happened behind closed doors, and American officials did not brief reporters, as is traditionally done after such meetings.

In a rare move for the host of a diplomatic meeting, Mr. Trump deferred to his Russian visitor to speak first at their public appearance. Mr. Putin played to his host’s sensibilities by offering validation of his longstanding insistence that Moscow would not have staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if Mr. Trump had still been president.

“Today we hear President Trump say, ‘If I were president, there would be no war,’” Mr. Putin said. “I think that would actually happen. I confirm this.”

He suggested that the two would now succeed at ending that war without saying how. “I would like to hope that the understanding we have reached will allow us to get closer to that goal,” Mr. Putin said of security for Ukraine, “and open the way to peace in Ukraine.”

But he still insisted that any enduring resolution had to address the “root causes” of the war, a phrase that in the past he has used to insist on conditions unacceptable to the West, including a rollback of NATO and neutralization of Ukraine. And he asserted that Ukraine might throw a wrench in any peace effort “through provocations or behind-the-scenes intrigues.”

When it came to his turn, Mr. Trump was equally vague on what if anything they had concurred. “We had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to, and there are just a very few that are left,” he said. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

Photo: TASS