The talks with Putin in Alaska were a very predictable failure. Even the president’s famed deal-making abilities can’t end this war
(Daniel DePetris
16 August 2025 5:00am BST
Daily Telegraph)
Mr Trump said very little during a joint press conference in Alaska
On his way to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, president Trump told Fox News’s Brett Baier that he wouldn’t be happy if he left the summit without a ceasefire in Ukraine. “Now, I say this, and I have said it from the beginning: This is really setting the table today,” Trump said. “We’re going to have another meeting, if things work out, which will be very soon, or we’re not going to have any more meetings at all, maybe ever.” In short, Trump was well aware that anything could have happened in Alaska on Friday.
In the event, after nearly three hours of talks, Trump and Putin stepped up to their lecterns touting unspecified progress and calling their discussions very productive. Putin, in his typical monotone, referred to the meeting with the US president as “long overdue”, cast blame on the Biden administration for allowing US-Russia relations to deteriorate, and credited Trump for at least being willing to meet face-to-face. Putin laid it on thick, going so far as to confirm Trump’s repeated assertions that the war in Ukraine would never have happened if he had still been holding court in the White House in February 2022.
Trump, a man who likes to hear himself talk, was noticeably subdued at the press conference and said very little. He consistently claimed progress on the major topics of discussion without telling us what those topics were. Ever the gracious host (unless your name is Volodymyr Zelensky), Trump returned Putin’s flattery; the Russian leader, he commented, wanted peace in Ukraine as much as he did. Of course, there’s very little evidence supporting that statement.
When all was said and done, there was no peace deal in Ukraine. Nothing on the conflict was settled. The immediate ceasefire that Trump, Zelensky and the Europeans hoped to squeeze out of the Russian strongman was nowhere to be found. On the big items, the summit failed.
Daniel DePetris
Trump has just discovered he isn’t as powerful as he thought he was
The talks with Putin in Alaska were a very predictable failure. Even the president’s famed deal-making abilities can’t end this war
Mr Trump said very little during a joint press conference in Alaska
Mr Trump said very little during a joint press conference in AlaskaCredit: Kevin Lamarque
Daniel DePetris
Daniel DePetris
16 August 2025 5:00am BST
On his way to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, president Trump told Fox News’s Brett Baier that he wouldn’t be happy if he left the summit without a ceasefire in Ukraine. “Now, I say this, and I have said it from the beginning: This is really setting the table today,” Trump said. “We’re going to have another meeting, if things work out, which will be very soon, or we’re not going to have any more meetings at all, maybe ever.” In short, Trump was well aware that anything could have happened in Alaska on Friday.
In the event, after nearly three hours of talks, Trump and Putin stepped up to their lecterns touting unspecified progress and calling their discussions very productive. Putin, in his typical monotone, referred to the meeting with the US president as “long overdue”, cast blame on the Biden administration for allowing US-Russia relations to deteriorate, and credited Trump for at least being willing to meet face-to-face. Putin laid it on thick, going so far as to confirm Trump’s repeated assertions that the war in Ukraine would never have happened if he had still been holding court in the White House in February 2022.
Trump, a man who likes to hear himself talk, was noticeably subdued at the press conference and said very little. He consistently claimed progress on the major topics of discussion without telling us what those topics were. Ever the gracious host (unless your name is Volodymyr Zelensky), Trump returned Putin’s flattery; the Russian leader, he commented, wanted peace in Ukraine as much as he did. Of course, there’s very little evidence supporting that statement.
When all was said and done, there was no peace deal in Ukraine. Nothing on the conflict was settled. The immediate ceasefire that Trump, Zelensky and the Europeans hoped to squeeze out of the Russian strongman was nowhere to be found. On the big items, the summit failed.
Mr Trump said very little during a joint press conference in Alaska
The two leaders say their goodbyes after the press conferenceCredit: Anadolu
But none of this should have been a surprise. Anybody who has been monitoring the three-and-a-half year war will tell you that neither Putin nor Zelensky is prepared to cede their maximum negotiating positions. The differences between Moscow and Kyiv remain unbridgeable at this point in time, so much so that many foreign policy analysts in the West were wondering why Trump even bothered to fly to Alaska in the first place.
Zelensky wants a ceasefire before real negotiations begin; Putin wants to fight and talk simultaneously. Zelensky doesn’t want to cede any Ukrainian territory that Russia doesn’t already occupy, and he most certainly won’t recognise Russia’s territorial gains; Putin wants Ukrainian forces to lay down their arms, withdraw and gift the entire Donbas region, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to him on a silver platter. Zelensky wants Western security guarantees; Putin doesn’t want any Western involvement in Ukraine’s future defence at all. The divergences go on and on, and a single high-level meeting, particularly one to which Zelensky wasn’t invited, was never going to resolve them.
As we await the readouts from the White House and anticipate what agreements, if any, were actually reached, Trump will be returning to Washington with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he can talk solace in the fact that his talks with Putin didn’t break down, like the top-level diplomacy he instigated with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un more than six years before. He may even be able to call this entire endeavour a win if further talks are scheduled in the future.
Meanwhile, the nervous nellies in Europe will be relieved that Trump didn’t negotiate swaths of Ukraine away to the Russians, a concern that nagged Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz to such an extent that an emergency summit with Trump was put in the calendar last Wednesday to talk him out of any moves he may have up his sleeve.
Trump, however, is probably also a bit peeved by the outcome. Although the Trump administration tried to set the bar low, the president himself also outlined his expectations for the summit: a ceasefire and, if all goes well, another meeting, this time with Zelensky in the room. Instead, he’s leaving Alaska without the first item on his list and the second still up in the air. The fighting will go on as fiercely tomorrow as it did today.
The bottom line here is simple: Trump may aggrandise and boast about his remarkable dealmaking abilities, but on the war in Ukraine, he isn’t the most important protagonist in the story. Trump can push, pressure, cajole and sweet-talk, but it’s Zelensky and Putin who will determine when the killing stops. As the US intelligence community wrote in a threat assessment earlier this year, “both leaders for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement.”
Plenty has changed in the months since those words were published. But Trump’s big attempt at peacemaking notwithstanding, that conclusion still holds true.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/08/16/trump-has-just-discovered-he-isnt-as-powerful-as-he-thought/
