At the start of a week that could be pivotal to its future, Ukraine feels like it is back at square one with Donald Trump.
Since he began his second stint as US president in January, Kyiv has tried to win over Trump through flattery – lauding him as the only leader who can make Russia end its invasion – and the promise of profit from preferential access to Ukraine’s rare earths and other commodities, joint arms production and other economic schemes.
Regardless, the scenario that Ukraine and Europe feared is now scheduled for Friday in Alaska: a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin at which their future security will be discussed without them being at the table.
Trump’s boast that he would need just one day to end Europe’s biggest war in 80 years made clear that he had no interest in the complexities of a war that is Ukraine’s latest attempt to escape the repressive Russian rule that has bound it for centuries.
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His 90-minute call with Putin in February was the first contact between US and Russian leaders since the Kremlin launched its full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and underlined Trump’s conviction that he could get a deal without any help from Ukrainian and European leaders who were not even told in advance about the talk.
That conversation led swiftly to a meeting in Saudi Arabia between senior US and Russian officials. To Ukraine’s insistence that it should be invited to talks on how to end the war, Trump said: “You should have never started it, you could have made a deal.”
When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Trump seemed to be living in a Russian “disinformation bubble”, the US president lashed out at him as “a dictator” who had “better move fast” or he “won’t have a country left”.
Their meeting in the White House a week later was a disaster. Talks that were supposed to soothe tempers became a shouting match, as Zelenskiy pressed the US to give Ukraine security guarantees and take a tougher line on Russia, and Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, accused their guest of being ungrateful, disrespectful and of “gambling with world war three”.
“You’re either going to make a deal or we are out and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out,” Trump told him. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
It was a brutal reality check for Zelenskiy and Ukraine. He had started the meeting by showing his host photographs of Ukrainian soldiers emerging emaciated from Russian captivity. But Trump didn’t want to see that. Nor did he want to talk about who really started the war, or about the atrocities committed by Russia in places such as Bucha, or the devastation of eastern Ukraine or the millions driven from their homes.
He wanted to talk about “the cards” and who held them.
So Ukraine set about strengthening its hand. In mid-March it agreed immediately to adhere to a US call for a 30-day ceasefire if Russia did the same. At the end of April, Kyiv and Washington signed a landmark deal to give the US preferential access to Ukraine’s natural resources and fund investment in its reconstruction.
At the same time, Europe was also trying to speak Trump’s language. If with Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, European leaders had spoken of US support for Ukraine and its continued leadership of Nato in terms of shared values, historical ties and cherished alliances, now they framed them in terms of profit.
Trump agreed last month to keep supplying weapons for Ukraine as long as they were paid for by Nato states. The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have already pledged more than $1 billion (€860 million) to the scheme, which works to counter Trump’s frequent complaint that the US is routinely “ripped off” by European countries.
Trump was getting his way with Ukraine and Europe – but not with Russia.
Putin rejected a ceasefire and only intensified his air strikes on Ukrainian cities, as his invasion force continued to make slow but steady progress in eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin said there could be no compromise on certain issues: Ukraine must accept the permanent occupation of five regions that Russian troops now fully or partly control; abandon its hopes of joining Nato; and bow to other constraints on its sovereignty, including on the future size of its armed forces.
Finally, Trump’s patience with Putin seemed to be wearing thin. He said he was “very disappointed” with the Russian leader, called his military’s bombing of civilian targets “disgusting” and gave Moscow a deadline of August 8th to agree a ceasefire or face “severe” US tariffs on its goods and on imports from countries – including China – that buy huge quantities of the discounted oil that helps replenish Moscow’s war chest.
The day before the deadline, the Kremlin said Putin was ready to meet Trump. Last Friday’s deadline passed without any punitive tariffs being announced. A doubling of tariffs on India unveiled last Wednesday – in part for its continued purchases of Russian fuel – does not take effect until August 27th, allowing plenty of time for it to be revoked if this Friday’s summit brings results.
The arrangement is a clear victory for Putin. Simply by agreeing to meet Trump – without offering a single concession – he defused the tariff threat, brushed off the White House’s “ultimatum”, and secured his first summit with a US leader on American soil since 2007. Trump was also quick to dismiss reports that he had insisted on Zelenskiy also being part of the Alaska summit.
Trump’s invitation also makes a mockery of the warrant issued for Putin’s arrest by the International Criminal Court over Russia’s forced deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children; neither Russia nor the US recognise the court.
Just as Trump’s surprise call to Putin back in February panicked Ukraine and Europe into closer co-operation, so the announcement of the Alaska summit triggered a weekend of somewhat frantic diplomacy.
British foreign secretary David Lammy hosted a meeting of top European and Ukrainian security advisers on Saturday that was also attended by Vance, who claimed, without offering evidence, that the summit was “a major breakthrough for American diplomacy”.
He also repeated the kind of rhetoric that so strained US relations with its erstwhile allies six months ago – almost blaming Ukraine and European countries for Russia’s continued war of invasion and occupation: “If you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a more direct and more substantial way in funding this war yourself.”
Zelenskiy still hopes for a late invitation to Alaska, and says Ukraine wants peace but will never sign away territory to the invader. European leaders, meanwhile, demand a say in any talks on ending the war and reshaping continental security.
But do they have “the cards”? Putin can offer Trump a deal on Ukraine, vast investment opportunities in Russia, far more rare earths and other commodities than Kyiv could provide, and the kind of grand geopolitical pacts on issues such as nuclear disarmament that would appeal to Trump’s belief that he is one of history’s great leaders.
Ukraine fears the price it might have to pay for the overweening ambition of Trump, America’s self-declared “president of peace”.
