The Beginning of the End for Putin’s War?
August 13, 2025
The safest prediction about the Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin summit on Friday at Elmendorf Air Force Base has to do with the first five minutes of small talk: The most imperialist of Russian presidents will recall for his host that Alaska once belonged to Imperial Russia. Beyond that trivial point of certainty, there is no knowing what the outcome will be.
President Trump, who boasted 53 times before his 2024 re-election that he would end the war over Ukraine “in 24 hours,” has downscaled his ambition for the meeting, calling the summit “a listening exercise.”
But on Wednesday, after a conference call with European allies fearful Trump would side too much with Putin, the US President toughened up, warning “there would be very severe consequences,” for Russia if Putin does not agree to stop the war after the Friday meeting.
Worried US allies recall the fateful last meeting of these two presidents, in Helsinki in 2018, after which Trump pronounced his “trust” in the Russian, validating Putin’s analyses of all relevant issues over those of US intelligence agencies.
Whatever the outcome in Anchorage, Trump’s unilateral decision to meet Putin already gives the Russian outcast multiple “wins”: a meeting on US soil; breaking the NATO taboo on receiving the invader of Ukraine; lifting Russia’s status to a level Putin would like to believe approximates Cold War days when the two nuclear superpowers met as peers; and meeting over Ukraine without the President of Ukraine, thereby breaking the tenet of “no discussion of Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Trump had reportedly hoped the meeting would enable him to pronounce a cease-fire, perhaps convincing the deciders of the Nobel Peace Prize to devolve to him its grand award.
Most civil wars and conflicts between states do end in ceasefires, once the evidence on the ground shows little prospect of a breakthrough, and when the endurance and enthusiasm of both publics, including their armies, is spent.
Till now, Putin has held publicly to objectives: to occupy Ukraine by force, oust the Zelensky government from office, and absorb the demilitarized husk of the obliterated country into his vision of “Greater Russia”. These are obsessive features of the dream cycle of a fanciful dictator, a child of Russia’s traumatically terrible communist 20th century, amplified by his shame over the break-up of the USSR, which he once dubbed the “worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” It reduced Russia to a mere “regional power” (as Barack Obama once put it) that he believes was always the strategy of NATO and the “degenerate West.”
Dream as he might, Putin badly underestimated the willingness of a very viable Ukrainian state and people to resist. By almost any estimate, Ukraine has in its resistance, succeeded in self-defence, and Russia has failed.
The February 24, 2022 invasion turned into a debacle within weeks. There has been no breakthrough, though Putin keeps trying, his propaganda machine braying in recent weeks about the certain total victory to come. Russia has made some recent gains, but its forces have, in the almost three years of the war, only increased their territorial holdings in Ukraine by 1%, to about 19% of the country.
Drawing from its threefold population superiority, Russia has thrown more and more Russians as cannon and drone fodder into attacks on Ukrainian lines. Putin’s aggression has incurred a million Russian casualties. Sooner or later, there will be a reckoning from the Russian people on Putin and the costs of his personal war.
The Russian police state, whose cords of suppression, fear, and punishment of dissent have been reconsolidated by the rationale of war, is by now addicted to administrating its dictator’s massive abuse. The effect is, per Masha Gessen’s New York Times op-ed this week, to make the war “the political, psychological, and economic centre of Putin’s regime.”
The harsh fact that Donald Trump seems only slowly and vaguely to grasp is that while Vladimir Zelensky and all European leaders of significance, and Canadians, want the war to stop, Vladimir Putin doesn’t.
Trump had reportedly hoped the meeting would enable him to pronounce a cease-fire, perhaps convincing the deciders of the Nobel Peace Prize to devolve to him its grand award.
What Putin probably aims to do at Elmendorf is rag the puck, to string his host along with sweet talk about a Russia/USA reset that promises American access to lucrative partnership deals for Siberian minerals.
He may well table a few apparent concessions to forestall heavier US sanctions, especially secondary sanctions on importers (India and China) of Russian oil whose revenues account for 1/3 of the budget of the Russian state. But Putin also hopes to separate the US from the “venal” and “weak” Europeans.
The second Trump administration came into office with a real hostility to the EU, expressed in public statements by its officials castigating European leaders on their own soil, echoing Trump’s derision for a project he has said was conceived to “screw the US”.
Europeans were worried that Trump would unilaterally pull the US out of Europe, even out of NATO (as he had hinted he would do in his first term), and so gave him the “win” at the NATO Hague summit in June of 5% of GDP per year on defence (3.5% on direct military expenditure, and 1.5% on relevant infrastructure). In return, the US would continue support for Ukraine. (This was a week after he left the Kananaskis G7 after one day that included openly pining for Putin’s readmittance to the group.)
In the several weeks since the Hague, EU — and Canadian — ministers of finance have been aghast at the prospect of finding hundreds of billions of dollars’ for defence spending at such an accelerated pace, especially given the concurrent costs of Trump’s tariff war.
Moreover, the US interpretation of “continued support” for Ukraine seemed mainly rhetorical. The US will cease to contribute to what Vance derisively called “the Ukrainian military support business,” but will sell US equipment to the Europeans to provide to the embattled Ukrainians.
So, while European leaders mostly sucked up to Trump at first in the hope of avoiding high tariffs, they’ve seethed in private over US extortion, but also at the wrecking ball Trump has taken to international institutions, common aims and norms. He is changing the world for worse and benefitting China, whose dictatorial leader seems like the adult in the room.
At the same time, his apparent willful ignorance on the specifics of the Ukraine invasion has EU leaders panicked that Trump’s rambling disquisition this week on “land swaps” signals the awarding to the Russian dictator by diplomacy what he could not achieve by force.
Trump remarked last week he is “bothered” that the Ukrainian constitution forbids ceding territory, complaining that Zelensky needs such “approval,” adding sarcastically that “He has approval to go to war to kill everybody but he needs approval to do a land swap?”’
In the last 10 days or so, under the impulse especially of new German Chancellor Merz, European leaders have come together, aligning tightly with Zelensky, and insisting they confer with Trump before Friday’s meeting, which they have. They are clear they will not be sidelined from the discussion over Ukraine as Putin intends.
Moreover, they will term any Russia-US agreement on land “swaps” without Ukrainian approval to be a non-starter. The starting position for peace talks has to be a ceasefire first, along present lines of demarcation, and only afterward an effort to discuss borders, security guarantees, and what Russia calls “the underlying causes of the war” that consist mainly of Putin’s paranoid fears of NATO expansion to include Ukraine.
Trump has seemed to show he has heard the Europeans, backing off his grandiose ambitions for this Summit, saying he wanted just to clarify Russian intentions for himself, by looking at Putin “eye to eye.” Fair enough, the Europeans say. Merz and Zelensky wish Trump luck. They and their allies know that the US has the power to force Russia to conclude a cease-fire. It is doubtful negotiating issues will be settled for years, during which NATO and Russia will be at daggers drawn. The 5% commitment, however fantastical may well prove necessary.
What is the longer-term forecast?”
The world won’t return to its old “normal” after Trump. But the EU, UK, Canada, and others can work together, without the leadership of the US, to draw up new and effective lines of cooperation. Russia will eventually swallow Putin, and hopefully try again for democracy. Ukraine will thrive as an eventual member of the EU.
So, the Alaska Summit is a meeting, not an historic game-changing event. But it’s nonetheless a possible start on ending a war that never should have begun.
Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.