Putin Is About to Outplay Trump Again in Alaska

Ukrainian and European leaders are worried Donald Trump will get played for a second time when he meets his Russian counterpart in Alaska on Friday — and they’re right to be nervous. Indeed, if Trump wants to emerge from the talks a master negotiator rather than a pushover, his smartest move may be to postpone the summit until it’s better prepared.

Trump isn’t wrong to try sitting down with US foes and rivals, even where more conventional leaders would avoid the risk. But hastily arranged encounters rarely result as hoped, and everything about the visit by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow that produced the Alaska invitation last week screams confusion.

With so much fog on the American side, it’s best to understand what Friday’s meeting is about from the point of view of Vladimir Putin. To him, this is a windfall he can use both to defuse Trump’s threat of sanctions and further his war effort.

That’s what happened earlier this year, when the former KGB handler made good use of Trump’s obvious desperation to secure a peace deal in Ukraine and an economic reset with Moscow. No matter how much Trump was willing to give away, including sanctions relief, Putin saw just one thing: a strategic opportunity. With the US no longer willing to help arm Ukraine’s defense, except — as eventually persuaded — when paid, Putin did the only logical thing: He upped the pace of his war effort, both on land and in the air, to take advantage of Kyiv’s weakening position. Eventually, even Trump had to acknowledge he was getting strung along.

Faced with an Aug. 8 deadline before the US imposed financial consequences on Russia for its intransigence, Putin’s task when Witkoff arrived in Moscow was once again to do just enough to stall any US action, while making sure any concrete outcomes would strengthen Russia’s position. So far, that’s going swimmingly. He got something for nothing.

The first priority was to keep Volodymyr Zelenskiy out of the room, rather than have the three-way meeting that Trump — to his credit — was suggesting. The Ukrainian leader’s presence would require actual negotiation, making Russian disinterest hard to hide. By insisting on a bilateral sit down with Trump, Putin can seek to propose terms this US administration might accept, but he knows Ukraine can’t. That would once again make Zelenskiy the person Trump blames for standing in the way of peace, taking the pressure off Putin.

The second goal was to find a location for the meeting that would demonstrate, both to Russians and to leaders around the world, that Putin is no longer a pariah avoiding travel for fear of arrest under a war crimes warrant the International Criminal Court issued against him in 2023. Indeed, this would be Putin’s first visit to the US (outside trips to the United Nations in New York) since 2007, before his invasion of Georgia the following year. A summit in Alaska — a US state that once belonged to the Russian Empire — would send a strong signal of Putin’s rehabilitation, while also pointing to the Kremlin’s long historical reach as a great power.