Angela Stent, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers her analysis of the Trump-Putin summit and what Putin gained from the meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his European allies arrive in Washington on Monday anxious to find out what Donald Trump committed to at his summit with Vladimir Putin and apprehensive that he’ll force Kyiv into making unpalatable concessions.
Trump will host Zelenskiy and several European leaders to set out terms for a potential peace deal he discussed with Putin at last Friday’s meeting in Alaska. While the US is expected to focus on territorial concessions demanded by Russia, Kyiv will seek to pin down possible security guarantees.
Unease hangs over the allies, who have few options for pushing back on demands from Trump that Ukraine may oppose, and are skeptical that Putin really wants peace. Another challenge is Trump himself: he wants a quick peace deal but has offered little clarity on how to get there.
Trump told leaders in a weekend call that he’s open to US involvement in guarantees for Ukraine’s security, other people familiar with the matter said. All asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.
He also told allies he wanted to reach a deal quickly and would urge Ukraine to agree to one, with the goal of holding a Putin-Zelenskiy meeting within a week. That’s a timeline that many of the Europeans regard as too aggressive, given how many issues remain unresolved.
The people said Trump revealed elements of his conversations with Putin in calls with allied leaders, though without much detail. Senior European diplomats privately vented frustration at the outcome, noting Putin appeared to have gained most from the summit.
Zelenskiy “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. He suggested that the Crimean peninsula wouldn’t be returned and said Ukraine wouldn’t be allowed to join NATO, without providing further details.
The Ukrainian president responded in a post on X as he arrived in Washington that Putin used Crimea and the part of eastern Donbas region he had seized in 2014 “as a springboard for a new attack” in February 2022.
“Russia must end this war, which it itself started,” he wrote. “And I hope that our joint strength with America, with our European friends, will force Russia into a real peace.”
Zelenskiy will meet Trump for a bilateral meeting first on Monday, before being joined by European leaders, according to the White House.
Leaders were also weighing the fact that Trump’s own team sought to tamp down expectations for a quick solution.
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