When Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meet in Alaska, the Russian president will set out to woo his US counterpart and dangle financial incentives for siding with Moscow over Ukraine.
The hastily arranged summit, organised at Putin’s request, will be his first invitation to meet a US president on American soil since he visited George W Bush in 2007.
The surprise announcement caught Kyiv and its European allies off guard but for Putin it signals a preliminary diplomatic victory: a face to face with Trump requiring no concessions, and a step towards his goal of deciding Ukraine’s future at the table with Washington.
Key to Putin’s message on Friday will be an appeal to Trump’s business instincts. On Thursday, the Russian president’s adviser Yuri Ushakov said the leaders would discuss the “huge untapped potential” in Russia–US economic relations.
“An exchange of views is expected on further developing bilateral cooperation, including in the trade and economic sphere,” Ushakov said. “This cooperation has huge and, unfortunately so far, untapped potential.”
Notably, alongside a cadre of veteran diplomats, Putin is bringing two prominent economic advisers. The inclusion of the finance minister, Anton Siluanov, is particularly notable: he has led Russia’s response to western sanctions, the removal of which the Kremlin has consistently set as a key condition for any peace deal.
“Putin sees this as a chance to show Trump that he is more than ready to agree to peace if the conditions are right. He wants to portray [President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy as the one prolonging the war,” said a former high-ranking Kremlin official who, like several other sources, spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Putin knows Trump sees the world through a business lens, and will pitch a peace on his terms as the gateway to lucrative opportunities,” the former official added.
If past encounters between the two leaders are any guide, it may be Putin, the former KGB operative, who edges the upper hand in Alaska.
“Trump is exactly the kind of leader Putin believes he can always strike a deal with, an authoritarian in the mould of [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, Xi Jinping or [Narendra] Modi,” said a Russian academic close to the foreign ministry, citing the leaders of Turkey, China and India respectively.
Analysts and insiders say the summit, convened after weeks of largely fruitless talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey, has been organised on too short a timescale to deliver any meaningful outcome. Russia’s foreign ministry reiterated on Wednesday that Putin’s conditions for ending the war remained unchanged: the full withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from key regions and the renunciation of Kyiv’s Nato ambitions. Kyiv has ruled out these demands from the outset.
“This is not a final summit where lasting peace can be achieved,” said a member of the Russian foreign policy establishment who advises Putin. “Not enough groundwork has been laid for that. But it does offer a rare chance to win Trump over to Russia’s side.”
Trump has been unusually careful not to raise expectations on the outcome. On Monday, he described the talks as a “feel-out” to determine whether a peace deal was possible. “I may say ‘lots of luck, keep fighting’ or I may say we can make a deal,” the president said.
The next day, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the meeting as a “listening exercise” and said there was no specific outcome Washington could predict.
What is clear is that for both leaders the summit comes at an opportune moment. In recent weeks, Trump’s rhetoric towards Putin had hardened: he accused the Kremlin leader of feeding Washington “a lot of bullshit” and issued a public ultimatum, warning that continued fighting in Ukraine would spark sanctions. In Moscow, there was a growing sense that sustained European lobbying on behalf of Kyiv was beginning to have an effect.
But Putin brushed off Trump’s outburst, keen to keep channels with the US president open. For Trump, the summit offers a convenient off-ramp from imposing sanctions for which he had little appetite in the first place.
In recent days, Trump has reverted to his more familiar posture of criticising Zelenskyy and striking a milder tone with Putin – an attitude that emerged after his envoy Steve Witkoff met the Russian leader in the Kremlin last Wednesday.
Details of that meeting remain murky and at times contradictory. Witkoff, who often travels to Russia alone and without his own translators, is believed to have floated a proposal for Kyiv to cede full control of two regions in eastern Ukraine – Luhansk and Donetsk – in exchange for a ceasefire. Luhansk is almost completely occupied by Russia but Ukraine still controls a large portion of Donetsk, which it would have to voluntarily give up under this plan.
Witkoff initially told European partners that Russia was prepared to give up the territory it controlled in southern Ukraine. But after further talks with European leaders, it emerged that Moscow had no intention of ceding any land; instead it insisted that Kyiv surrender the areas it holds in the Donbas in return for a ceasefire that would lock in the frontlines elsewhere.
This idea has since coloured much of Trump’s pre-summit rhetoric, with the US leader telling the media he intends to pursue a form of “land swapping” to end the war.
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In Alaska, Putin is likely to push for full control and US recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as Russian territory, two sources in Moscow said.
Kyiv still holds key cities in Donetsk, such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, along with heavily fortified positions of critical strategic importance whose defence has cost tens of thousands of lives.
All sources consulted said Russia was highly unlikely to relinquish territory it held in southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which forms a vital land bridge from the Donbas along the Sea of Azov to Crimea. Russia claims to have annexed all four regions plus the Crimean peninsula, which it captured in 2014. Moscow could offer to relinquish small slivers of Ukrainian land it captured in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions.
While Kyiv is unlikely to renounce its legal claim to the occupied regions, it is generally understood it could accept a freezing of the frontlines. Zelenskyy stressed on Tuesday that Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire because Moscow could use what it gained as a springboard to start a future war.
“We find ourselves at a total dead end,” said the former Kremlin official, summing up the current standoff. “In Moscow, the view is that Trump can pressure Ukraine into giving up its land. But Kyiv has shown independence.”
Even if a provisional agreement could be reached on territory, peace would still appear distant, given Russia’s other maximalist demands.
“Trump seems to be under the illusion that Putin only cares about the land,” said the former official. They argued that the Trump administration had yet to grasp that from the outset, territory was secondary to Ukraine’s independence and Putin’s “root causes” that led him to invade.
Those “root causes” that Putin often refers to include his demands for Ukraine’s formal renunciation of Nato membership as well as its “demilitarisation” and “denazification” – a vague set of demands that in practice amount to the removal of Zelenskyy.
The timing of the summit works in Putin’s favour. This week, Russian forces made a sudden push into eastern Ukraine, a move seen as an attempt to increase pressure on Kyiv to concede territory and to reinforce Putin’s negotiating position.
“Given that the situation is developing in Russia’s favour, there must be some major incentives for Putin to stop the fighting,” said the Russian academic close to the foreign ministry. “Putin believes that if diplomacy fails, he can simply press ahead militarily.”
But even with expectations low, there are risks for Putin. Leaving Trump empty-handed could provoke the unpredictable US leader.
Andrey Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said Trump’s patience may not last indefinitely. “Putin is stalling for time but there comes a point when it is no longer possible to stall,” Kolesnikov said. “At some stage he will have to give something.”
One possibility, sources suggest, is that Putin agrees to a temporary halt on long-range strikes. But the Russian leader is unlikely to accept a full ceasefire unless his conditions are met.
Whatever the outcome, Kolesnikov said, on Friday Putin will find himself exactly where he wants to be. “Putin has a messianic streak in everything he does,” he said. “He wants to carve up the world into spheres of influence with Trump and Xi. A new Yalta is his dream.”