‘The Atlantic’: Trump buys more time for Putin

The fallout from Donald Trump’s summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week continues to grow, ‘The Atlantic’ notes.

What happened after the handshakes, as the two men went behind closed doors in Anchorage, remains a secret, but it couldn’t have been pleasant for the American president. When the two leaders emerged, Putin spoke first and said very little of substance except to reiterate his insistence on solving the “root” causes of the conflict.

Later, Trump told Sean Hannity that Zelensky has “got to take” Putin’s deal, implying that the United States was endorsing Putin’s demand to freeze the front lines and partition Ukraine.

The plan — such as it is at the moment — to put Zelensky and his team in a room with Putin makes little sense. Trump believes that he can arrange a one-on-one meeting, with no mediators, to be followed by a trilateral meeting among Putin, Zelensky and Trump. The American president has backed away from his calls for a cease-fire, saying instead that he’s solved several wars without a cease-fire.

Meetings require some level of basic agreement among the principals in order to produce results. Both sides have to have at least some shared goals; otherwise, such meetings are not negotiations but two sides reading each other their demands across a table. Without the pressure of further U.S. sanctions or more arms to Ukraine, Putin is likely to meet Zelensky only to renew his demands that Kyiv surrender and certify Putin’s gains, an ultimatum to which Zelensky cannot agree.

The Russians, for their part, are being a bit more cautious about Trump’s offer of further negotiations. Their readout of the call said that the Kremlin supports “continuing direct talks” and that Trump and Putin have “discussed raising the level of the contacts.” Putin can easily afford to say that he’s thinking it over, and he loses nothing by humoring Trump.

Still, it could have been worse. The Europeans, for now, seem to have moved Trump away from a land-for-peace deal, in which a grim handover of Ukrainian territories and the people who live in them would have been followed by haggling with Putin over what a “security guarantee” means.

Trump did, however, buy time for Putin, who has never been in as much of a hurry for a peace deal as Trump. Setting up a bilateral meeting with Zelensky and Putin while the fighting goes on will take a lot of planning.

Such a meeting could happen, but without a cease-fire or a basic agreement on Ukraine’s existence, it would yield little more than Putin reiterating his demands, declaring Zelensky the obstacle to peace, and then continuing the war.

Perhaps the Europeans did the best they could, stiffening Trump’s spine a bit after whatever browbeating he took in Alaska. But in the end, all of Trump’s showmanship has resulted in no substantive progress. That said, Alaska is still part of the United States, America is still in NATO, and Kyiv remains free — and in this second Trump presidency, perhaps that counts as a good-enough day.

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