The best news for Ukraine is that Donald Trump hasn’t forgotten about its war and is still trying to solve it. This is the optimal way to view the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump, in Alaska next week.
Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition against an aggressor that has far greater manpower and is not afraid to squander the lives of its soldiers on Putin’s orders. Ukraine knows it can’t survive without US aid and engagement, despite warm encouragement from Britain and other European allies.
Embarrassing though it was for President Zelensky to be berated by Trump at the White House last winter, he learned his lesson and now feeds Trump’s insatiable vanity by routinely including sycophantic messages of “gratitude” in all of his dealings with the US.
This is because Zelensky knows that Trump represents Ukraine’s only hope of ending the war. Trump knows it too and revels in this power. He enjoys the pomp of one-to-one meetings between superpowers and won’t want to come away from a summit with Putin empty-handed.
The summit, first flagged after US envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin for three hours in Moscow on Wednesday, was supposed to include Zelensky, according to White House briefings, but the Russians nixed that idea, at least during the first round of talks.
Trump didn’t mind. Asked if Putin had to meet the Ukrainian leader, he replied briskly, “No, he doesn’t, no,” adding, “They would like to meet with me, and I’ll do whatever I can to stop the killing.”
This has raised fears that Trump will sell out Ukraine to its wily enemy. The Russian leader, a former KGB man, has proved more adept at manipulating Trump than plenty of America’s closest allies (ask Canada, a frustrated Japan, and Switzerland about their battering by tariffs).
Viewed more positively, though, it will be up to Trump – and Trump alone – to secure a peace deal that Ukraine can live with. He still wants that Nobel Prize badly. “You know, we’ve solved five wars,” he told White House reporters this week.
Chalking up “victories” on the Cambodia-Thai border, between Rwanda and the Congo and India and Pakistan, won’t cut it. With Israel’s total war against Gaza continuing, only Ukraine can offer the grand peace settlement he craves.
The worst outcome of the summit would be an agreement to halt the aerial war. This would spare Ukrainian civilians from nightly missile attacks on their cities, but leave their soldiers at the mercy of Russian troops on its eastern flank without the drone power to stop them.
Trump must be left in no doubt that this would be a victory for Putin and a personally humiliating outcome for him. He conceded on Friday that there would, however, be some “swapping of territories”. Moscow is crowing that a prospective summit is a coup for Russia. “Putin has won,” boasted the tabloid Moscow Komsolets.
But Ukrainians are open to a ceasefire or settlement that would leave occupied territory in Russian hands, given the impossibility of regaining land without more troops and sophisticated weaponry.
A Gallup poll this week found that 69 per cent of Ukrainians support a negotiated end to the conflict. This gives Trump some flexibility going into the summit. Much as it pains his critics, he is inching towards his goals.
It’s not what he boasted – a peace settlement on Day One of his presidency – but for a few weeks this summer, Trump did turn on Putin. He renewed arms shipments to Ukraine and threatened Russia with secondary tariffs on its allies, setting a deadline that expired on Friday.
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Ukrainians hailed “Agent Melania” after Trump said she had helped to toughen his stance. “I go home, I tell the First Lady, ‘I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation’. She said: ‘Really? Another city was just hit’.”
Trump described the Russian bombings as “disgusting” and followed up his threat of secondary sanctions this week by rounding on another US ally – India under President Narendra Modi (possibly for not being flattering enough about Trump’s “peace-making” with Pakistan).
Trump announced the imposition of an extra 25 per cent tariff on India for importing Russian oil, bringing the total levy to a punitive 50 per cent. Notably, though, it won’t be effective until August 27, giving the prospective summit with Putin a chance to pan out.
We don’t know how successful the Alaska talks will be. “I’ve been disappointed before with this one,” Trump admitted. But he is still trying. And that is something.
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