President Donald Trump will meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, face-to-face Friday for the first time in six years — a summit some foreign policy experts fear could do more harm than good for Ukraine and the world.
It’s a high-stakes meeting. The president’s aides have said that no one is better suited to make a deal with Putin than Trump. “Don’t underestimate Trump,” a White House official told NOTUS, requesting anonymity to speak about the meeting.
But Trump and his aides have also sought to temper expectations.
For a president who once promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day 1 of retaking office, Trump now has a far less ambitious goal: “All I want to do is set the table for the next meeting,” he said Thursday at the White House before traveling to Anchorage, Alaska.
“He’s a realist,” the White House official told NOTUS. “And I don’t think there are any pretenses here.”
Friday’s summit is slated to include a one-on-one meeting, joined by interpreters, along with a bilateral working lunch with their larger delegation. The White House also expects to hold a joint press conference. Trump and top officials have said they hope to come out of the meeting with immediate steps for another summit, this one including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Some foreign policy experts are just hoping Trump can avoid being manipulated by Putin. Holding a meeting at all is a win for Russia’s leader, they said. And without clear metrics for success, experts said Trump risks fumbling an important chance to make progress toward peace.
“My concern is that Putin will be intractable. Trump will be anxious for a deal, and Ukraine won’t be there,” said Mark Cancian, a top defense budget analyst at the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama.
Bridget Brink, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said she sees “no strategy.”
“It’s a shoot-from-the-hip approach, which, in the case of Russia, but certainly even more broadly, is not one that will help us achieve U.S. interests,” Brink, who left her post in May and is now running for Congress as a Democrat, said.
Experts on the conflict say that Trump will be facing off with a hardened Putin, who believes that he is winning the war and has little reason to back down. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexei Fadeev said Russia’s position on resolving its war against Ukraine remained “unchanged” as the bilateral talks approached.
“It’s a little clearer that we set up the Alaska meeting based on the mistaken premise that Putin wants to deal more seriously,” said Daniel Fried, an ambassador to Poland under President Bill Clinton. “It’s not clear to me that Putin is serious.”
Other experts said they’re worried about the potential for Putin to manipulate the situation. Olga Tokariuk, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told NOTUS that any sort of agreement between the two leaders could be just another Putin delay tactic.
“They would continue this deception game in order to avoid secondary sanctions, in order to avoid the devastating impact they might have on the Russian economy,” Tokariuk said. “But, there are really no indications that I see of Russia actually willing to put an end to the war in Ukraine.”
The Russian economy is struggling to sustain its ballooning war spending. Both the Kremlin and the Trump administration have signaled that economic talks are on the table as Putin tries to avoid sanctions that could significantly affect his war aims.“If Russia loses the streams of revenue from selling its gas and oil to third countries, then it will have a severe impact on the Russian economy,” Tokariuk said. “Putin would like to avoid that at any cost. However, there are a lot of questions about any kind of credibility of agreements with Russia.”
Brink noted that operations on the ground have actually increased since discussions of the meeting became public.
“Putin also wants the recognition and legitimacy that he will receive by just meeting with the U.S. president on U.S. territory,” Brink said, adding that the meeting was in spite of Russia’s various war crimes, atrocities and the “fact that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed.”
Trump has warned of “severe consequences” should his Russian counterpart continue to string him along.
But he acknowledged on Wednesday that Putin has continued the invasion despite what he considered positive talks. When a reporter asked whether he believed he could convince Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump said he could not.
“I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” Trump said. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building, and people are laying dead in the state. So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.”
That’s not to say that Trump has abandoned his promise to end the war, which he regularly says would have never happened had he been in the White House.
“I believe now he’s convinced that he’s going to make a deal,” Trump said Thursday morning on Fox News Radio of Putin. “He’s going to make a deal. I think he’s going to. And we’re going to find out, I’m going to know very quickly.”
The White House official said Trump has held regular national security meetings over the past month, which they described as free-flowing meetings ranging anywhere from half an hour to two hours with a rotating staff including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg.
Trump also routinely consumes a “varied diet” of information, which includes daily briefs, intelligence reports, news and social media to stay up to date on the war, the official said.
John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser turned critic, said he was skeptical Trump read the briefing materials: “I just suspect he looks around at his advisers and says, ‘I know Putin better than all of you put together.’”
Though some experts are concerned about the summit, Trump’s comments about future meetings that would include Ukrainian and European officials were seen as positive by John E. Herbst, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush.
“It means he understands that the look of him and Putin divvying up Ukraine is a very bad look,” Herbst said. “This is one more reason not to expect the worst to happen in Anchorage, albeit we should always be prepared for any outcome.”
The White House has coordinated with European allies and Zelenskyy. On a virtual call on Wednesday, officials shared their red lines with Trump, according to media reports.
The Ukrainian president said the leaders, including Trump, agreed on “five common principles” ahead of the summit that would set the “format of negotiations,” such as a sharp focus on a ceasefire and firm security guarantees.
Trump said Thursday that he hopes another meeting with Putin that includes Zelenskyy happens soon after.
It’s unclear whether Trump is truly prepared to walk away, both diplomatically and financially, if the Friday summit goes bad. The White House official told NOTUS that Trump would make the “appropriate decision,” should that time come.
Foreign policy experts hope it doesn’t come to that.
“The professionals are frustrated because they see what I see: They see an opportunity for the president to succeed in doing what he wants to do,” Fried said. “And they want him to succeed. But some people are fearful that this will be a missed opportunity.”