U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
A dud, followed by a date.
The dud was the nearly three-hour meeting between two combative presidents seeking to convince each other, and the world, that they want peace in Ukraine. The date is the Monday meeting now scheduled between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
And while there was no swift agreement at the Alaska summit, there’s the potential for a second date — a possible additional meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — which might wipe away the notion the session at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson was anti-climatical.
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What emerged early Saturday was the sentiment, shared by the Russian and American presidents but not by the Ukrainians and European leaders, that, as Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.”
That revealed a clear advantage to Mr. Putin and a clear rebuke to Mr. Zelensky.
One of the other few discernible signals emerging from the session that began with a red-carpet greeting and military flyover salute was yet another split between Mr. Trump and longtime American allies.
The leaders of Great Britain, France, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, the European Union, and the European Council issued a threat to increase economic pressure on Russia “as long as the killing in Ukraine continues,” adding, “We will continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia’s war economy until there is a just and lasting peace.” Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovile Sakaliene accused Mr. Putin of “more gaslighting and veiled threats.”
All this, especially the prospect of further meetings, gives 21st century meaning to the 20th century term “shuttle diplomacy,” the effort that Henry Kissinger pioneered more than a half-century ago when — like the old Eastern Airlines air travel in the northeast corridor of the United States between Washington and New York, itself a metaphor from the way a needle carries yarn in a weaving loom — the American envoy shuttled between Middle East capitals in his effort to end hostilities growing out of the Yom Kippur War.
And like the Kissinger episode — starring a figure known for dark intrigue and quiet, informal assurances made, warped, broken, and reshaped — what is occurring on the surface in the effort to bring the Ukraine combat to a close almost certainly represents only a fraction of what is occurring in hushed meetings, back-channel communications, and fevered private negotiations.
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But amid all the confidences and code, the clearest indications may have come from the master of obfuscation himself, Mr. Putin.
It came at the end of what appeared to be — continual warning: surface appearances in moments like these almost always obscure real developments, though not necessarily progress — a bland meet-and-greet in a faraway venue that, over the decades, has been controlled by both countries.
It does not require the tools and cynical eye of the veteran Kremlinologist to understand the meaning behind this Putin remark: “We are convinced that in order to make the settlement lasting and long-term, we need to eliminate all the root causes of the conflict.”
It is a contemporary example of the phrase (“riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”) that Winston Churchill employed to describe Russia’s unpredictable, often inscrutable, conduct in the early years of the Second World War.
The riddle/mystery/enigma quote is often employed by journalists and historians examining Russia. But what is almost never quoted from that Churchill broadcast from London on Oct. 1, 1939, are the dozen words that follow, a more prosaic but continually relevant insight from Great Britain’s wartime leader: “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
In Mr. Putin’s reckoning, Russian national interest is both historical (the role of Ukraine in various incarnations of Russia, including the Soviet Union) and geopolitical (the desire of Kyiv for association with the European Union and NATO and to stand separate from Moscow).
There remain many obstacles to peace and transforming the world order, regardless of Mr. Trump’s lightning-fast experience in transforming American domestic life and his impatience to broker a settlement as part of his thinly veiled attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
One is a vital part of the “historic life-interests of Russia” that Churchill went on to set out in his “enigma” remarks 86 years ago: control of, or at least the establishment of, a sphere of influence within the broad plain of Eastern Europe.
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Another is the notion, seldom expressed but widely acknowledged, that Putin understands that the very act of continuing the fighting is an element of his leverage. And a third is Ukraine’s reluctance — in a way an historic life-interest of its own — to swap land for peace.
Relinquishing what Ukrainian military personnel have fought and died to hold onto, and what more than 13,580 civilians have died for, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, would be harsh medicine and not a cure in Kyiv.
On the other hand — more obscurantism from the master — Mr. Putin is the only principal in these negotiations who knows fully the cost of the nearly three-and-a-half-year war against Ukraine in terms of military casualties, economic distress and public support in Russia.
It is, of course, conceivable there might be a surprise.
Mr. Trump loves surprises. Perhaps he will broker a deal — he loves deals, too — for Kyiv to trade Ukrainian membership in the European Union (but not NATO) for minor geographical losses that will save face for Mr. Putin and save deaths for Ukrainians. Maybe something else is in the works.
Who knows? The smart betting is that right now the troika of Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky don’t know either — but that the Ukrainian, as the American president put it in his contentious February Oval Office meeting, doesn’t hold the strongest cards.
The wisdom in cases like these often comes from the Chicago sportswriter and satirist Ring Lardner (1885-1933). As he put it in his short story “The Constant Jay,” published in The New Yorker exactly a century ago, “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong — but that’s the way to bet.”