Diary of Resilience/ Mridula Ghosh/Kyiv
Trump-Putin summit in Alaska was deemed futile by many, yet it triggered a meeting of European leaders and Ukraine’s president in Washington, signalling the beginning of a peace process
Ne-LaskAva Alaska!”, which means “unwelcoming Alaska”, has become a meme that describes the summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many in Ukraine also recalled a Russian proverb, “there is but a single step from love to hate”, pointing to the swing of US–Russia relations along the love–hate pendulum. To cap it all, a Russian tank in the occupied zone of Zaporizhzhia was seen flying both the US and Russian flags until they were shot down.
For decades, Russia poured hatred towards America, threatening to reduce it to radioactive ash. Watching the red-carpet welcome for Putin at a US military base in Anchorage, while fighter planes circled above, it was clear that Putin fears neither NATO nor the US. Rather, he lies awake at night because of Ukraine and the Ukrainians.
Digging into history, no analogy could be found. It was not a new Yalta, where Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill to carve out the future map of Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany, although the USSR had first signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and started the war by attacking Poland in 1939. Nor was it totally similar to the 1938 Munich Conference, where the fate of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, with its strategic fortifications, was decided without Czechoslovakia being present.
Beyond protocol and procedure, the Alaska summit was unlike the Geneva or Reykjavik meetings of the mid-1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan met and the Cold War began to thaw. There were no clear results and the media corps were visibly upset, as neither Trump nor Putin entertained their questions. Their statements were loud and promising but without detail. So why was this summit needed at all? Certainly not just to discuss Ukraine without Ukraine.
Both the US and Russia had their benefits. For Putin, it was a way to break isolation and gain acceptance by none other than the US, despite the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For Trump, it was a chance to show genuine readiness to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. He threatened Russia with fresh sanctions while insisting on a ceasefire, with a deadline that kept shifting. The Russian economy could not withstand further sanctions.
This was precisely what brought Putin to Alaska. He managed to secure a postponement of both ceasefire and sanctions that hung in the air. He repeated his familiar narrative about the root causes of the Ukrainian conflict, avoided the word “war” and demanded that Ukraine cede four regions, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, even though none are fully occupied by Russia.
As details of the August 15 Alaska summit emerged, it became clear that instead of six or seven hours as planned, there were only two and a half hours of talks. A luncheon and wider discussions were cancelled. One may conclude that there were still points of disagreement. On the same day, Russian law was changed to allow US company ExxonMobil to re-enter the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project, which it had quit in March 2022. Sakhalin-1 had never been directly targeted by US sanctions.
One of the striking elements of the summit was a letter given to Putin by US First Lady Melania Trump, appealing for the return of abducted children to Ukraine. This was a masterstroke of US public diplomacy, showing that the deal was not about territory swaps or rare earth minerals, but about human values.
Three days later, on August 18, a historic summit in Washington gathered leaders of the EU, NATO, France, Germany, Finland, Italy, the UK and Ukraine to discuss peace prospects. While all agreed that Trump had made this breakthrough possible and that the killings must stop, a central issue which was discussed was the need for unambiguous security guarantees for Ukraine, to avoid a repeat of the failed Budapest Memorandum (1994). Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed collective defence modalities similar to Article 5 of the NATO charter, but without Ukraine becoming a NATO member.
The issue of abducted children was raised by all leaders, particularly Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer all said that peace could not begin without a ceasefire. Finnish President Alexander Stubb recalled Finland’s war with the USSR in 1944, referring to Ukraine’s possible decisions regarding territories. At the same time, leaders stressed that borders cannot be changed by force.
If Ukraine were to sacrifice Donbas, it would lose a fortified area that Russia has failed to capture in 13 years. Fresh estimates from UK Defence Intelligence suggest that, at the current pace of fighting, Russia would need about 4.4 more years to seize full control and would likely suffer around 1.9 million casualties.
Crimea remains another bone of contention. Trump said Ukraine was not “getting back Obama-given Crimea in 2014, without a shot being fired”. Any formal recognition of Crimea as part of Russia would contradict the US Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017, which Trump himself signed in his first term, barring recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Trump was also the first US president to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine in 2017, during a war that began in 2014, so it was never really “Biden’s war”.
A further meeting in trilateral or multilateral format between Russia, the US and Ukraine will be organised by Trump, although details are awaited. Meanwhile, China’s role is crucial. Many assumed that Trump might have tried in Alaska to wean Russia away from China, but in reality, ties have deepened. When the Chinese foreign minister said while visiting Europe that China was not interested in Russia’s defeat, it was a signal that Beijing would continue to support Moscow. Whether China will be invited to any future summit is unclear. India, as a non-aligned state, is welcome, as Zelensky said in his Independence Day message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Overall, apart from the discontent over territorial concessions, human rights activists and ordinary Ukrainians are disappointed that there was no mention of Russia’s genocide against Ukrainians, no discussion of punishment for crimes against humanity and no plan for reparations to Ukraine as the victim of aggression. Many are shocked that the aggressor and the victim are put on equal level.
As the summits took place, Ukraine continued to bleed. Massive missile and drone attacks killed and injured people in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kremenchuk, Pavlohrad and Kherson and destroyed the university campus in Sumy. Ordinary people in Ukraine want the killings to stop. They want abducted children and adults to come home. The question remains: will summits help?
Mridula Ghosh, formerly with the UN, is based in Kyiv, and teaches at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.