http://archive.today/2025.08.15-004902/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/world/europe/trump-putin-alaska-summit.html

President Trump has spent the week setting the bar extremely low for his high-stakes U.S.-Russian summit on Friday in Alaska. Hardly anyone expects him to make much progress in halting the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, given how far apart their views of the conflict are.

But those two warring countries do seem to agree on at least one thing. Merely meeting with Mr. Trump is a big win for President Vladimir V. Putin, bringing the Russian leader out of a diplomatic deep freeze and giving him a chance to cajole the American president face to face.

But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia’s pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Mr. Trump’s threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Mr. Putin did not commit to a cease-fire by last Friday, he would punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia’s war effort by buying its oil and gas.

Before Alaska, only two Western leaders — the prime ministers of tiny Slovakia and Hungary — had met with Mr. Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and was placed under an international arrest warrant for war crimes in March 2023.

On the eve of the summit on Thursday, the Kremlin signaled that it planned to inject other issues beyond Ukraine into the talks, including a potential restoration of economic ties with the United States and discussions on a new nuclear weapons deal. The arms idea plays into Russia’s longstanding efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as just part of bigger East-West conflict.

Mr. Zelensky has rejected any land swap, insisting he has no authority under the Ukrainian Constitution to bargain away parts of the country. Agreeing to do so would be likely to trigger a serious political crisis in Kyiv and advance one of Mr. Putin’s longstanding objectives: toppling Mr. Zelensky.

Ukraine’s surrender of its eastern regions would also torpedo Mr. Trump’s hopes that the United States will one day benefit from Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals, most of which are in territory that Russia claims as its own.

Russia, too, has in recent days slapped down the idea of a land swap in which its troops would pull out of some of the territory seized during the war.

Mr. Putin, a veteran master of manipulation, will no doubt work hard in Alaska to cast Mr. Zelensky as an intransigent obstacle to peace.

Mr. Trump’s last summit meeting with his Russian counterpart, held in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, during his first term, showcased his propensity to accept Mr. Putin’s version of reality. He said then that he saw no reason to doubt the Russian president’s denials of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.