Source: Chatham House –
Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska: Early analysis from Chatham House experts
News release
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Chatham House analysts give their initial reaction and insights after US President Donald Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage on Friday.
US President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday at a summit in Alaska, the first since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The three-hour meeting ended without a ceasefire declaration and the two leaders gave only short statements and left without taking questions from journalists. Putin said the pair had come to an ‘understanding,’ but Trump said ‘There’s no deal until there’s a deal’.
Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are now due to meet in Washington on Monday for follow-up talks. Trump said in a social media post on Saturday that he wanted ‘to go directly to a Peace Agreement’ rather than an urgent ceasefire, which Ukraine has sought. Zelenskyy said on X that any peace must be ‘lasting, not just another pause between Russian invasions.’
Here is early analysis from Chatham House experts who are monitoring developments, and will be following the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting on Monday and its aftermath.
Orysia Lutsevych, Deputy Director of the Russia & Eurasia Programme and Head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House:
‘After six bilateral Trump-Putin phone calls, five trips of Trump’s envoy Witkoff to Moscow, the Alaska summit – watched globally with so much anticipation and anxiety – failed to produce any tangible outcome to stop Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Russia has received a reward for its invasion. Trump called Russia a ‘great country’ and said there is strong mutual understanding between the two parties. This represents a further fissure in the already shaky Transatlantic alliance, the rupture of which is a primary Russian aim. The Alaska Summit represents another step towards this goal.
Trump has lifted the blame from Putin by again calling it ‘Biden’s war’. This is exactly the kind of whitewashing that Putin needs both for his own public and for non-Western parts of the world, where Russia works hard to position this war as the fault of the West.
Putin, in return, offered an endorsement of Trump’s claims of victory in the 2020 election and noted that it was rigged.
Trump walked away empty-handed. The joint dinner was cancelled, so clearly not everything went according to plan – there was no deal to celebrate with the toast. But Putin was brought out of the cold in Alaska. Rather than limiting space to wage war in Europe, Trump offered him the opposite – a delay in imposing secondary sanctions on his oil export customers. He gave Putin more space to manipulate, mislead and buy time. Alaska has emboldened Putin, who is likely to prolong, not end, the war.
Zelenskyy is more cautious in his approach and will meet with Trump upon his invitation to discuss the outlines of the deal. But he also urges President Trump not to be misled by Putin as he shows no signs of seeking peace.’
Follow Orysia’s ongoing coverage here.