ANALYSIS — President Donald Trump and some top aides have spent the week downplaying expectations for his Friday summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, even as he on Wednesday called the session a “very important meeting” that must produce “great things.”
The administration’s often-shifting objectives for the meeting were summed up by Trump on Wednesday, when he said a final agreement would not come Friday but then also warned Russia of “very severe consequences” if he returns to Washington without a deal.
During a Thursday morning interview on “The Brian Kilmeade Show” on Fox News Radio, Trump predicted Putin would “make a deal.” But moments later, he said of the summit: “I don’t know if we’re going to get an immediate ceasefire,” before forecasting there is a “25 percent chance” the meeting could be a strategic failure.
With those sets of comments, as he often does, Trump appeared to ratchet up expectations amid an effort to temper them — then tried to hedge.
Administration officials noticeably spent the first part of the week downplaying expectations for the face-to-face meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a U.S. military facility. They stopped short of setting an objective that Trump would like to emerge with at least the framework of a ceasefire or peace pact that Ukraine also would embrace.
“I think this is a listening exercise for the president. Look, only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. “And, so, this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a Tuesday interview with WABC radio, sent mixed messages on expectations for the closed-door meeting: “A meeting is what you do to kind of figure out and make your decision. ‘I want to have all the facts. I want to look this guy in the eye.’ And that’s what the president wants to do.”
But he also talked about Trump closing a deal to pause or end the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, even without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy participating in the talks.
The former Florida GOP senator and 2016 Republican primary opponent to Trump said his boss “has a tremendous instinct for deciphering human nature,” adding: “I’ve seen it be very successful in these trade deals when he comes in and closes them, and they’re always in person. It’s hard to do that on the phone.”
During a Monday press conference at the White House, Trump also appeared to play the expectation game when he talked of making the long flight to simply hear out Putin in person. But by Wednesday morning, during an event at the Kennedy Center, Trump raised his own expectations just slightly — telling reporters what he hears from the Russian leader would determine whether he would even bother trying to arrange a summit including Zelenskyy aimed at inking a war-ending agreement.
‘Setting the table’
“If the first one goes OK, we’ll have a quick second one — I would like to do it almost immediately. And we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskyy and myself, if they’d like to have me there,” Trump said. “And that would be a meeting where maybe it could be absolutely worked [out] — but the first meeting will not work that out.
“Certain great things can be gained in the first [meeting]. It’s going to be a very important meeting, but it’s setting the table for the second meeting,” the diplomat-in-chief said. “I think the second meeting, if the second meeting takes place, now, there may be no second meeting because if I feel that it’s not appropriate to have it, because I didn’t get the answers that we have to have, then we’re not going to have a second meeting.”
Zelenskyy, during a joint news conference Wednesday with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said he warned Trump during a call with European leaders that Putin was “bluffing” about being open to peace. Zelenskyy and Merz also raised new doubts about potential “land swaps,” which Trump has endorsed.
Trump on Thursday afternoon again claimed he had ended “six wars” since returning to power — which has been called “mostly false” by one fact-checking organization — and said he thought the Russia-Ukraine conflict would be the “easiest” to wrap up. That assumption has proven incorrect, he acknowledged to reporters in the Oval Office.
Former officials and analysts set a low bar on expectations for the Elmendorf encounter.
Konstantin Sonin, a University of Chicago public policy professor and a Russian citizen, said in an email that the “summit is not likely to produce any tangible result,” adding: “Putin is delusional and will not reduce his demands, and Zelensky has his back against the brick wall.”
One former senior Ukrainian official noted Zelenskyy’s absence Friday would be a major hurdle.
“Issues crucial to Ukraine are being decided without its direct participation, exactly as it was devised by Putin,” said Eurasia Center analyst Oleh Shamshur, a former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States. “In spite of his recent criticism of Putin, Trump seems to still be clinging to the idea that he can talk with Putin as a partner rather than as an adversary.”
To that end, Putin told Kremlin aides during a Thursday meeting that he believes Trump is making “quite energetic and sincere efforts to stop the fighting,” according to a Russian government readout obtained and translated by NBC News. That could be the former KGB officer’s way of buttering up his American counterpart before they meet.
Maria Snegovaya, a Russia and European analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Trump would have to avoid a trap into which Putin has lured previous U.S. presidents. Trump’s first summit with Putin, in Helsinki in 2018, was widely considered a low moment in his first term.
“His ability to shape his interlocutors’ perceptions in person, a hallmark of his KGB background, remains a potent tool,” Snegovaya said. “At this stage, optics suggest a potential diplomatic win for Putin.”
But if Trump boards Air Force One Friday frustrated with Putin and having ruled out a three-way meeting, Shamshur said European and Western officials would have to come to grips that “the war in Europe has already begun.”
One sometimes-Trump adviser who will not be joining Trump on Air Force One is Senate State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham.
As a group of reporters waited Wednesday in the White House briefing room to accompany Trump to the Kennedy Center event, the South Carolina Republican and longtime Putin critic walked by. Graham was asked if he would be joining Trump on the Alaska trip.
“No,” he replied, quipping: “I’d be afraid Putin would take me back to Russia.”
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