There is an old saying in the 49th state: nobody is accidentally in Alaska. For a few illusory hours on Friday – afternoon or midnight, depending on the time zone – it seemed as if the entire world had converged on the wildest and most mysterious of the United States. All eyes were on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, brought together by the American president’s quixotic promise of a peace deal to end Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The entire charade lasted about five hours. There was no breakthrough. There was no deal. There wasn’t even lunch.
“There’s no deal without a deal,” Trump conceded while venturing that they had made “great progress.”
Instead, the two leaders of the old-century superpowers held a formal joint press conference on a stage adorned with the ill-chosen slogan “Pursuing Peace”, exchanged courtesies and went their separate ways.
“I’ll probably see you very soon,” Trump said as they parted – an ambivalent salute which made it clear that for all the talk of progress made, there is no clear pathway as to what will happen after this.
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“Next time in Moscow,” Putin flashed back in his nimble, halting English.
“Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump returned.
“I will get a little heat on that one. But I can see it possibly happening.”
Trump will also take global “heat” in the analysis of this hastily-arranged summit during which Putin yielded nothing while enjoying the trappings of international statesmanship. Trump’s election-campaign boast, that he would end the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “on day one” seems further away than ever. The benign interpretation was that while Putin remained as intransigent as ever, at least Trump conceded nothing in his bid to end Putin’s war.
From the very start, the entire event made for a queasy and compelling sight: Putin out of international purgatory and on the red carpet laid out across the barren concrete, moving quickly towards his host with his distinctive choppy stride and inscrutable smirk. Trump was already in situ; hand extended in his alpha come-hither stance. Difficult to imagine how nauseating the symbolism of the red carpet and that handshake must have been for the millions of Ukrainians watching those images.
But there was no turning back. Luxury trappings are part of any Trump show. Having invited Putin to Alaska, he was going to give his guest the full treatment. As the men shook hands, a disturbance overhead: Putin looked up to see a fly-by B-52 stealth bomber flanked by four F-35 fighter jets. For the first time in years, he was submitted to open questions from a free press.
“President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” came hurtling across towards the two men. The Russian put his hand to his ear and shrugged. As it turned out, that moment was as close as he would come to appearing outside his zone of complete control. Then Trump clasped him in a bearish greeting and invited him to walk towards the US presidential limousine, “The Beast”.
“I have said I think it sends a mixed message,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowsi, who was at the airbase, said in a television interview when the two men retreated for talks.
“What Putin has done in Ukraine with the deaths and atrocities we have seen, it is not acceptable on any level at all. Russia has been appropriately sanctioned and needs to be sanctioned even further. Putin has been labelled a war criminal. And so, to invite him to the United States, to invite him to a strategic military base, it is fair to question what that message is. Are we being too conciliatory? I will tell you though: standing there on the tarmac as Putin’s plane came in not on its own but flanked by our fighter jet escorts; bringing them into our air space and for them to peel off and then to have the fly-over as Putin was walking below that: it sent a pretty powerful signal.”
Even if the Alaskan summit had ended there, decoding the exchanges between the two men might have taken days. In the event, they were ushered to the meeting room at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Minutes and then hours passed. Trump’s worst fear warnings, that he would walk out of there after two minutes if he sensed that Putin would stonewall him, did not materialise.
The outside world, from president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and EU heads of state to foreign relations boffins, watched on, clueless as to how the meeting would play out. All was guess work. On the four-hour flight from Washington to the northernmost state, Trump had spoken of his wishes from the meeting.
“I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today. But I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today,” he said.
If Trump believed that he could actually effect an immediate ceasefire acceptable to Ukraine, then it is probable that he was the only person on the planet who held that conviction. Speaking from Ukraine, Zelenskiy offered a brief comment which avoided explicit criticism of the principal of the Alaska summit while reminding the world that Putin has paused nothing in his onslaught against Russia’s neighbours.
“The war continues and it continues precisely because there is no order nor any signals from Moscow that it is preparing to end this war. On the day of the negotiations, they are still killing people and that speaks volumes. Russia must end this war it started and has dragged on for years. A meeting of leaders is needed. At the very least, Ukraine, the US and Russia must meet for effective decisions to be made. Security guarantees are needed. Lasting peace is urgently needed,” Zelenskiy said.
The spectre of a rolling, live-reality television show is an integral element of the Trump presidency. At 2pm Anchorage time, the press was told to assemble in the conference room, some two hours in advance of the tentatively scheduled live event. Whether this meant good or bad news was subject to urgent deciphering.
The speculation was that Trump had decided all that could be achieved had been achieved: lunch could be skipped and he could hightail it back to the White House. In Ukraine, ruined cities, ruined families and besieged communities kept their eyes on this stage, with the twin podiums, the flags of the US and Russia and the summit banner headline “Pursuing Peace”. The slogan was blandly corporate on the surface and offered a none-too-subtle nod to Trump’s designs on the Nobel Peace Prize. But the thought of Putin standing beneath those words was truly terrible given the barbarisms of the past three years.
Yet there he was. The least surprising outcome played itself out. Nothing was achieved apart from the opportunity for Putin to lecture the world on Russia’s moral right in its invasion, as president Trump stood silently on the stage beside him. Putin spoke, once again, of Ukraine as a “brotherly nation” and said flatly, emotionlessly, that the “root causes” of the war must be eliminated. For one of the first times since he took office, Trump, looked worn to the point of exhaustion. Putin rattled through his minor history lesson, reinforcing the fact that he remains a dismally uninspired public performer. He has never quite shaken off the unfathomable blankness of his KGB training.
Trump would make his calls to allies, including Zelenskiy. It was hard to see how he could have conveyed good news – or any news at all, apart from the fact that at least he hadn’t agreed to carve up Ukraine’s sovereign territory. So Putin’s onslaught will continue; he is free to prosecute his late-summer territorial gains near Donetsk, with no sanctions or repercussions – let alone the promised “severe consequences” from Washington, and no end in sight.
