Ukrainians are used to sleepless nights after nearly three-and-a-half years of all-out war with Russia, but in the early hours of Saturday many will be waiting nervously for news from Alaska as well as the usual alerts warning of incoming missiles and drones.
US president Donald Trump has said he thinks Russian president Vladimir Putin is ready to commit to ending the war in Ukraine at their summit in Anchorage. If he does, then Mr Trump said he would “be calling up” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to “get him over to wherever we’re going to meet.”
“This [Alaska] meeting sets up the second meeting. The second meeting is going to be very, very important, because that’s going to be a meeting where they make a deal,” Trump added.
It will be a nervous night for Zelenskiy, and for all Ukrainians who fear Trump and Putin will decide on their country’s future and then present it to their leader as a done deal – and if he demurs, Trump will accuse him of not wanting to make peace and use it as an excuse to end military and other support for Kyiv.
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Trump has not offered details on what he is willing to offer Putin in exchange for peace, but has talked about some “divvying up” of what Ukraine and Russia want and “some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both.”
Given that the only occupied territory in question is the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine now held by Russia’s military, Trump’s framing of the negotiations has alarmed Kyiv and European capitals that say borders cannot be changed by force.
“The dictator’s attempts to impose a discussion on ‘territory swaps’ will only harm the peace process. This is Putin’s scenario, and we must not allow it to be implemented,” said former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
He negotiated the so-called Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015 which aimed to end fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-led militants in eastern Ukraine. Those deals, agreed with Putin and brokered by Germany and France, never had much effect on the conflict, which Russia escalated into full-scale war in February 2022.
“Ukraine does not trade or sell its territories. This would be a gross violation of the entire post-war security system. Our goal is to preserve and protect internationally recognised borders and prevent Putin from dragging the process into endless and fruitless negotiations,” Poroshenko wrote on social media.
“I remember well the experience of 2015, when we held talks in Minsk for 19 hours in a row. That is why I am convinced: we need to start with an unconditional ceasefire,” he added “The second principle condition: ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ is a principle that we introduced back in 2014. This means that the United States, the European Union, and Ukraine must be at the negotiating table.”
Putin piled huge pressure on Poroshenko during the Minsk talks by pouring regular Russian troops into eastern Ukraine to surround and destroy large groups of government forces at Ilovaisk and then Debaltseve.
Russia appears to have tried to repeat the tactic this month, surging troops into the Pokrovsk area to try to provoke a collapse in Ukrainian defences, which would have allowed Moscow to portray the summit as chance for Trump to rescue Ukraine from a bloody and humiliating defeat.
Kyiv and military analysts say small groups of Russian troops breached the front line near the mining town of Dobropillia and pushed on about 10 kilometres into the rear – but no major breakthrough has occurred and reinforcements have helped stabilise the situation, at least for now.
“Despite an upcoming meeting with Trump, Moscow has failed to engineer a major setback for Ukrainian forces – through encirclement or otherwise. And despite massed forces, Russia’s capacity to exploit penetrations or deliver breakthroughs remains visibly limited,” said a respected military analyst and former Ukrainian soldier who uses the name Tatarigami_UA on social media.
“Even without such radical advances, Putin could still frame the situation to President Trump as the encirclement of the entire Ukrainian army – something Trump might well believe,” he added.
Russia’s invasion force has been advancing slowly in the east for at least 18 months, however, and continues to have a big quantitative advantage over Kyiv in personnel, weapons systems and ammunition. Ukraine’s army is struggling to attract new recruits, European states have been slow to deliver on pledges of increased arms production and a severe cut – or halt – in US military aid could be disastrous over time.
Recent polls show that a strong majority of Ukrainians support negotiations to end the war. But – echoing Zelenskiy’s call for “peace through strength” – most people also firmly reject Russian terms for a settlement, which would include handing over swathes of territory and abandoning the nation’s bid to join Nato.
“Behind all this white noise, it is worth remembering the most important thing – words will never stop Putin, only pressure,” said Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, the chairwoman of the committee for integration with the EU in Ukraine’s parliament.
“Until now, only we have been pressured ... Instead of the whip, [Russia] has suddenly received a reward for nothing, in the form of an exit from international isolation in the West,” she wrote on social media.
“The Russians have also managed to impose a discourse on revising borders, pushing the world further into chaos. Because exchanging territories of sovereign Ukraine ... is the path to the defeat, not only of sovereign Ukraine but also of the entire world, including the USA.”
Some politicians in Kyiv publicly acknowledge that there is no prospect of Ukraine having sufficient military might to push Russian forces out of all occupied territory, including the Crimean peninsula that it seized in 2014.
Consequently, they argue that Ukraine might have to live with Russia’s de facto control over some of its territory, while never accepting it in law – just as western powers never formally acknowledged the Soviet Union’s 1940-91 occupation of the Baltic countries.
But Ukrainians fear Trump’s desire for a fast deal that he could proclaim as a historic triumph while washing his hands of their country and its fight for survival.
“Putin will simply use this meeting to his advantage. On one hand, Putin is absolutely not interested in an unconditional ceasefire, and on the other hand, he will try to shift the blame to Ukraine,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of Ukraine’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee.
“That is, to make Trump accuse Ukraine of not wanting to ‘compromise,’ which, Putin hopes, may give Trump a reason to leave the negotiating process altogether.”
The venue for the summit has only sharpened Ukrainian fears that their country will be on the chopping board: the US bought Alaska from a cash-strapped Russia in 1867, a decade after its defeat in the Crimean war – a reminder that territories can indeed be traded away.
Early signs from Alaska did nothing to soothe fears in Ukraine and Europe that Moscow wants to use the summit to turn back the clock – Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov arrived wearing a top emblazoned with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP”.
As Olena Halushka, a board member at Ukraine’s anti-corruption action centre, wrote: “Lavrov wearing the USSR T-shirt is such a strong and reassuring message that Russians are open for real and lasting peace.”
