Trump and Putin Meeting Ends Without Ukraine Deal, Despite Talk of “Progress”
At Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, a carefully staged handshake, a red carpet, and even a shared ride in the presidential limousine gave Friday’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin the air of thawed relations. Yet when the doors closed and the 2 ½ hour conversation ended, the war in Ukraine remained exactly where it was: brutal, unresolved, and grinding into its fourth year.
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Putin described the talks as having produced an “understanding” and urged European leaders not to “torpedo the nascent progress.” But Trump, standing beside him, quickly hedged. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” he said, insisting that while much ground had been covered, the biggest sticking point remains unresolved.
“We had an extremely productive meeting,” Trump said. “Many points were agreed to. Some are not that significant. That chance, however, did not translate into any concrete ceasefire or roadmap. Instead, Trump promised to brief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders in the coming days an acknowledgment that they had been excluded from the table entirely.
A Carefully Orchestrated Welcome
The optics of the day carried as much weight as the words. Putin was welcomed with honors not usually extended to adversaries of the U.S. A red carpet unfurled at the base, Trump’s limousine “The Beast” opened its doors for him, and photographers captured Putin smiling broadly as the two leaders rode together.
For critics, the stagecraft was striking: warmth extended toward the Russian leader while Ukraine’s president was relegated to releasing a video statement on social media. In it, Zelenskyy stressed his country’s readiness to work “as productively as possible” toward peace, but pointedly noted that the war continues because “there is no order, nor any.
A War Without an End in Sight
The Alaska summit carried both the weight of expectation and the theater of uncertainty. Trump has long boasted even before taking office that he could end the Ukraine war within 24 hours, though he later brushed that claim off as a joke. Still, this meeting represented his clearest opportunity yet to test that theory in person.
The outcome, however, was anticlimactic: no truce, no framework, no binding language. Just optimism and ambiguity, dressed up in the language of “progress.”
For Europe and Ukraine, that vagueness may feel less like momentum and more like a dangerous pause. As one EU diplomat noted privately, “An ‘understanding’ means very little while bombs are still falling.”
What Comes Next
Trump left the door open, suggesting that the unresolved “most significant” point could still be bridged. Yet, history has shown that Kremlin definitions of progress rarely match Washington’s, and the war’s toll already the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II is not waiting for diplomacy to catch up.
In the end, the summit might best be remembered not for what was said, but for what wasn’t: no ceasefire, no commitments, no assurance to the civilians in Ukraine who continue to live under air raid sirens and artillery fire.
