By Tom Fowdy
Later this week, US President Donald Trump will meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska for a one-on-one summit aimed at attempting to end the war in Ukraine.
The choice of Alaska, a "middle ground" location of peripheral American territory that once belonged to Russia, is a classic trope of Trumpian diplomacy. Alaska is a US state, but it is distant from the "48 contiguous states" homeland which consists the core of the country, thus it is "at arm's length" to prevent a full endorsement, hence Putin is not coming to Washington, yet it is still enough of a political statement to have the President of the Russian Federation on American soil that will make Europe uncomfortable.
Donald Trump has made it his foreign policy priority to end the war in Ukraine. Although I have argued repeatedly that Trump's affinity to Moscow is exaggerated by partisan drama in the United States, and is exaggerated liberal hyperbole, it is nonetheless true that he does not have the relentless Anti-Russian stance of the Democrats and those in his administration see a degree of renormalisation with Moscow as being geopolitically prudent to American interests, namely in preventing the consolidation of a hostile block between both Russia and China respectively.
Still, for all intents and purposes the administration's primary goal is merely to freeze the war with a ceasefire, and ultimately will not stake out a peace settlement. We should understand immediately that the prospect of an actual peace treaty to end this conflict is impossible, that is because neither Moscow, Kyiv, nor its other backers in Europe are prepared to accept one. Ukraine's ultranationalist leadership prevents it politically conceding formally on any territorial losses, a position which is being actively supported by European states, while Russia's strategic interests require nothing less than Ukraine's total capitulation, understanding that a freeze in the conflict is just going to allow Kyiv to further integrate into NATO regardless, a fact that countries such as Britain know fine well and are exploiting this.
Thus, because of this, the appetite for fighting persists on all sides, except for the United States itself, which sees it as a strategic distraction. Trump, of course, has laid out a series of threats against Russia should it not cooperate, including steeper tariffs and removing limits on military aid and targeting to Ukraine. This is enough to pull Putin to the table, not of course to commit to peace directly, but to attempt to diplomatically play the United States. Those who understand Donald Trump know this can be done all too easily, especially if you lock on a tactic of playing to his ego and telling him what he "wants to hear" without delivering substantive results. Trump's summits with Kim Jong-un in 2018 and 2019 run on a similar theme, where actual results were minimal, yet the fanfare was enough to stop the President pursuing North Korea anyway (and the DPRK is now a fully-fledged nuclear state).
Thus, we should understand that the primary goal of Putin here is to game Donald Trump, not to genuinely change course diplomatically. First, he will want to steer the President away from more punitive action by feigning a commitment to peace. Second, he will do this by seeking to make Ukraine appear as the unreasonable party by making his proposed demands conditional on peace, which he knows they cannot accept, which is, of course, demanding that at a minimum, Kyiv hands over the full Donbass region. Of course, this is a non-starter for them, and Europe will also double down on that too. So when Putin rolls up, makes his peace offer to Trump, and then Kyiv says "no way!", who is placed on the back foot diplomatically here? It is unfair in the sense that Ukraine are the country that got invaded, yet at the same time, we must acknowledge that Zelensky has been operating his entire defence effort premised on a delusion, a dangerous delusion that has been astroturfed by the mainstream media aggressively, that Ukraine is capable of defeating Russia, therefore it should adapt a zero-sum approach to dialogue on the expectation that all of its territory will be eventually be liberated.
As such, Ukraine's war effort has revolved around ridiculous PR stunts (such as invading Kursk) or ridiculously exaggerated counts of Russian losses, all premised on selling the western public a lie in order to shun peace and keep backing it indefinitely in terms of arms and money because, eventually, so it goes, Russia will militarily collapse. This hasn't happened, and it doesn't reflect the realities on the battlefield. It could have accepted a very early peace in 2022, but this peace was actively sabotaged by Western enablement, again claiming that Russia could be crippled. I warned about this outcome for years, but the scale of propaganda was so great that people would not listen.
In conclusion, it's never been about rewarding aggression; it's about military realities. Russia is in a position to make demands; Ukraine is not. Putin will attempt to manipulate Donald Trump by attaching conditions for a ceasefire to territorial gain, hoping that if it fails, the pressure falls on Kyiv to agree. It is, nonetheless, impossible to see which way Trump will act; thus, the man himself remains the wildcard.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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