Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Alaska on Friday for nearly three hours in the first US-Russia presidential summit since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The symbolism was extraordinary. Putin, who has spent much of the past three years internationally isolated from Western leaders, was received on American soil, greeted personally by Trump and treated publicly as the leader of a great power with whom Washington needed to negotiate. Yet the summit produced no ceasefire and no publicly announced peace agreement. Trump described the talks as productive and said substantial progress had been made, while Putin repeated that any settlement needed to address what Russia calls the “root causes” of the conflict. More consequentially, Trump subsequently shifted away from the immediate ceasefire he had previously demanded and argued that Ukraine and Russia should instead move directly towards a comprehensive peace settlement. He also said that Ukraine now needed to make a deal because Russia is the much larger power. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was not present in Alaska, is travelling to Washington tomorrow to discuss the proposals, while European governments are urgently coordinating with Kyiv. The diplomatic question therefore is no longer simply whether Trump can persuade Putin to stop fighting. It is whether a negotiation between a stronger aggressor and a weaker defender can produce peace without allowing military conquest itself to determine what counts as a reasonable settlement.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Trump meeting Putin. Wars between adversaries usually end through negotiation unless one side is completely defeated, and neither Russia nor Ukraine appears close to achieving that outcome. Refusing to speak with an adversary is not automatically principled; sometimes it simply eliminates information and bargaining opportunities. The problem is not that Putin was invited to Alaska. It is the structure of leverage surrounding the meeting. Russia controls roughly one-fifth of internationally recognised Ukrainian territory and possesses a much larger population, military-industrial base and pool of manpower than Ukraine. Ukraine remains heavily dependent on Western weapons, intelligence and finance. The United States therefore possesses much greater direct leverage over Kyiv than over Moscow because Washington can threaten to withdraw something Ukraine urgently needs. Russia’s dependence on America is much smaller. This creates a dangerous bargaining asymmetry: the party easier for the mediator to pressure is not necessarily the party whose behaviour created the conflict. A mediator interested primarily in reaching an agreement quickly can therefore find it rational to demand more concessions from the weaker dependent actor because those concessions are easier to obtain.
This is one of the central problems of coercive mediation. Imagine two parties are bargaining over an asset worth 100. Party A can survive without the mediator’s support; Party B cannot. Even if A originally seized part of the asset illegally, a mediator attempting to maximise the probability of an immediate deal has incentives to pressure B because B’s reservation point can be changed more easily. That may produce an agreement efficiently. It does not necessarily produce a settlement consistent with the underlying rules. International law attempts to prevent power alone from determining territorial ownership precisely because otherwise conquest becomes a bargaining strategy. A state can invade, occupy territory and then enter negotiations from the improved position created by the invasion. Even if it does not receive everything it captured, violence has changed the bargaining frontier in its favour. The long-term problem is therefore not merely Ukrainian fairness. It is whether the international system makes territorial aggression profitable after accounting for military costs.
The territorial proposals discussed around the Alaska summit make this concrete. Sources briefed on Moscow’s position said Putin’s proposal would involve Ukraine withdrawing from the parts of the eastern Donetsk region that it still controls, while Russia could freeze or adjust its positions elsewhere and relinquish much smaller pockets of occupied territory. This is not simply a proposal to freeze the current front line. It would potentially require Ukraine to surrender territory that Russian forces have not succeeded in conquering militarily. From Moscow’s perspective, this can be presented as compromise because Russia claims the entire Donetsk region as Russian territory. From Kyiv’s perspective, it means being asked diplomatically to provide something Russia has failed to obtain after years of costly warfare. That distinction matters enormously because a ceasefire based on current control and a settlement requiring additional territorial withdrawal create different incentives. The first says military conquest determines the temporary battlefield reality. The second risks saying diplomatic pressure can complete what conquest did not.
Yet Ukraine also needs to confront an uncomfortable reality: insisting indefinitely on restoring every part of its internationally recognised territory through force may be militarily unrealistic at an acceptable cost. Russia has substantially greater manpower reserves and continues grinding forward despite extremely high casualties. Ukraine has already suffered enormous demographic, economic and infrastructural losses. Millions of citizens live abroad. Reconstructing the country will require hundreds of billions of dollars. Every additional year of war consumes soldiers who cannot simply be replaced by foreign financial aid. Territorial justice and national survival therefore can conflict at the margin. A government can possess a completely legitimate legal claim to territory while deciding that recovering it militarily costs more lives and resources than the territory is currently worth fighting for. Recognising this is not the same thing as recognising Russian sovereignty over the land.
This distinction between de facto control and de jure sovereignty may provide one of the most important routes towards settlement. Ukraine could stop attempting to recover some occupied territory militarily without formally recognising it as Russian. The ceasefire line becomes the practical boundary while legal claims remain unresolved, similar to other frozen territorial disputes. Russia receives the immediate security benefit of controlling territory it already occupies. Ukraine avoids legitimising conquest permanently. Final status can be deferred. This is not emotionally satisfying to either side, which is precisely why it may be more realistic than a settlement requiring one side to accept the other’s entire historical narrative. Peace agreements often work by postponing questions that cannot presently be solved rather than pretending disagreement has disappeared.
The harder problem is what prevents Russia from using the resulting pause to rearm and attack again. Trump has moved away from demanding a ceasefire first partly because he argues temporary ceasefires frequently collapse and that a comprehensive settlement would be more durable. The criticism of ceasefires is valid, but calling something a “peace agreement” does not automatically make it more enforceable. A document lasts only when violating it is less attractive than complying. Ukraine therefore needs security guarantees strong enough that Moscow expects another invasion to be prohibitively expensive. Without them, a settlement can become merely a rearmament interval with diplomatic branding.
NATO membership would provide the strongest conventional guarantee because an attack on Ukraine would theoretically trigger collective defence under Article 5. Russia regards Ukrainian NATO membership as unacceptable, and Trump’s administration has indicated that it is not a realistic component of the settlement. That leaves a more complicated alternative: a heavily armed Ukraine supported by long-term Western guarantees outside formal NATO membership. Europe and America could commit to supplying air defence, drones, intelligence, ammunition and other capabilities while helping Ukraine maintain a large reserve force and domestic defence industry. The objective would be deterrence by denial. Russia does not need to believe America will invade Russia after another attack. It needs to believe Ukraine itself will be too difficult and expensive to conquer.
This may actually be more credible than vague political assurances because Ukraine’s history gives it unusually strong reasons to distrust them. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine surrendered the nuclear arsenal left on its territory after the Soviet collapse in exchange for security assurances concerning its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia subsequently annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded on a much larger scale in 2022. The memorandum was not equivalent to a NATO defence guarantee, but that legal distinction does little to change the strategic lesson many Ukrainians draw from it: assurances without automatic enforcement mechanisms failed when they were needed most. Any new agreement therefore needs to answer what physically happens on day one if Russian forces cross the line again.
This is where Europe becomes indispensable. Trump’s approach is forcing European governments to confront the gap between their political preferences and military capabilities. European leaders generally want a settlement more favourable to Ukraine than the one Moscow proposes, but preferences without resources do not determine bargaining outcomes. If Britain, France, Germany, Poland and other states want Ukraine to reject territorial concessions, they need to be willing to provide enough military and economic support that rejection remains viable. Diplomatic sovereignty requires material capability. Europe cannot simultaneously argue that Washington is pressuring Ukraine too heavily and expect Washington to continue providing the decisive resources allowing Ukraine to resist that pressure.
This is why the enormous increase in European defence spending discussed throughout this year matters directly to Ukraine. Germany has loosened its debt constraints, NATO has adopted much higher long-term spending ambitions and Poland is already devoting an extraordinary share of national income to defence. Those changes can eventually create a European security system much less dependent on Washington. But weapons factories and military readiness take years to build. The Ukraine negotiations are occurring now. Europe therefore faces a transition problem: it is becoming more strategically autonomous at exactly the moment its current dependence on America remains obvious.
Putin understands this and therefore has strong incentives to negotiate directly with Trump. Russia benefits when European and Ukrainian preferences are separated from American ones because the United States possesses the greatest capacity to alter Kyiv’s bargaining position. The Alaska summit itself provided another benefit to Putin: normalisation. A Russian president treated as an international pariah by much of the West was welcomed onto American soil and photographed beside the American president without first agreeing to a ceasefire. Reuters noted that the summit produced no ceasefire despite Trump’s previous threats of severe consequences if Putin failed to halt the war. Diplomacy requires meeting adversaries, but diplomatic access is still an asset. Putin received some of that asset before demonstrating a measurable change in Russian military behaviour.
This does not make the summit automatically a Russian victory. Trump gained direct information about Putin’s negotiating position, potentially clarified areas of agreement and created a channel through which a larger settlement could eventually emerge. Leaders sometimes need face-to-face meetings precisely because bureaucratic negotiations become trapped around established positions. The analytical question is additionality: what became possible because the Alaska summit happened? If it leads to enforceable security guarantees and an eventual settlement, the optics will matter little historically. If Russian military operations continue unchanged while Moscow receives renewed international legitimacy and sanctions pressure weakens, the summit will look much more advantageous to Putin.
Trump’s decision to prioritise a final peace agreement over an immediate ceasefire also creates an important sequencing debate. Ukraine and its European supporters prefer a ceasefire first because stopping combat reduces casualties immediately and allows negotiations without Russian forces continuing to improve their battlefield position. Russia prefers negotiating the broader settlement while fighting continues because continued advances increase its leverage. The order of negotiation therefore redistributes bargaining power. Process is not neutral. Whoever benefits from time prefers a slower process; whoever is losing ground prefers freezing conditions first.
Trump appears increasingly persuaded by the Russian argument that a ceasefire could simply postpone resolution. There is logic here: the Korean War demonstrates that armistices can survive for decades, but many other ceasefires collapse because underlying disputes remain unresolved. Yet comprehensive peace agreements can also fail. The correct objective is not choosing the document with the more ambitious title. It is constructing enforcement mechanisms stronger than the incentive to violate them.
Economic incentives could become part of that architecture. Trump has repeatedly emphasised the possibility of restoring economic relations between America and Russia after the war. That creates a potential carrot. Sanctions relief, investment and access to frozen assets can be phased according to Russian compliance. Russia withdraws or respects agreed boundaries; some restrictions ease. Violations trigger automatic reimposition. This is more strategically useful than either maintaining sanctions forever regardless of behaviour or removing them all immediately after signatures appear. Sanctions are most valuable while their future removal remains conditional.
The same principle applies to frozen Russian sovereign assets. Europe controls hundreds of billions of dollars of immobilised Russian central-bank reserves. Ukraine needs enormous reconstruction finance. Simply confiscating every asset immediately would provide resources but eliminate a potentially powerful bargaining instrument. Leaving everything frozen indefinitely produces leverage but no reconstruction funding. A negotiated framework could tie portions of the assets to Ukrainian reconstruction while making other treatment conditional on Russian compliance. Again, economic assets can enforce peace only while their disposition remains connected to behaviour.
Ukraine’s own agency must remain central. Trump can exert enormous pressure because American support matters, but he cannot make an agreement politically durable inside Ukraine if Ukrainians regard it as imposed surrender. Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Ukraine cannot simply give away territory constitutionally, and the country has endured enormous sacrifices defending it. A leader signing away land under foreign pressure could face severe domestic political consequences even if the military logic for compromise is strong. Soldiers, displaced residents and families of the dead all possess stakes in the settlement. Peace therefore needs domestic legitimacy, not merely signatures from presidents.
This is why Zelenskyy’s meeting in Washington tomorrow may matter more than Alaska itself. The relevant negotiation now moves from Trump-Putin to Trump-Zelenskyy, where the United States will discover which Russian proposals Ukraine can actually accept. European leaders are also coordinating closely with Kyiv, having insisted before the summit that Ukraine must participate in decisions concerning its territory and security. A settlement negotiated entirely above Ukraine’s head would have a fundamental implementation problem: the country expected to surrender territory and stop fighting would not own the agreement.
The moral principle and strategic principle therefore align here. Ukraine should participate because sovereignty requires it. It should also participate because agreements imposed on actors responsible for implementing them are less stable. Consent is not merely ethical decoration. It lowers enforcement costs.
Trump’s statement that Ukraine needs to make a deal because Russia is a “very big power” and Ukraine is not captures his realist worldview unusually clearly. Power matters enormously in international politics. Pretending otherwise does not help Ukraine. Russia’s larger population and military capacity affect the feasible settlement. But if size becomes the primary determinant of legitimate outcomes, smaller states receive a dangerous lesson: international law protects you only until a larger neighbour is willing to bear enough military cost.
That lesson encourages arms races.
Alliances.
And ultimately nuclear proliferation.
Small states seek external guarantees precisely because they cannot match larger neighbours individually. The post-1945 order attempted to reduce the extent to which might makes right, not because power disappeared but because predictable rules reduced the incentive for every state to maximise independent military capability. Ukraine therefore is not simply a territorial conflict. It is a test of how much protection those rules provide when enforcement becomes expensive.
The answer cannot realistically be that borders are never altered after war. History contains many negotiated territorial settlements. The stronger principle is that military conquest should not automatically receive legal recognition or additional territorial rewards simply because reversing it is costly. A pragmatic ceasefire can acknowledge battlefield reality without converting it into a universal rule legitimising conquest.
That distinction could allow Trump to reconcile realism with deterrence. Freeze much of the current line where necessary. Do not require Ukraine to recognise Russian sovereignty over occupied territory. Do not require Ukraine to surrender additional strategically important territory Russia has failed to capture merely to satisfy maximal Russian claims. Build strong Ukrainian deterrence. Phase sanctions relief according to compliance. Create international monitoring. Connect economic normalisation to peace. Allow territorial status to remain legally unresolved where agreement is impossible.
None of this produces a satisfying victory.
That may be precisely why it could work.
Durable settlements often emerge when every side dislikes the agreement less than it dislikes continuing the war.
Russia would not receive all the territory it claims.
Ukraine would not recover all the territory it legally owns.
Europe would need to finance enormous defence and reconstruction commitments.
America would need to maintain enough involvement that guarantees remain credible.
Peace would therefore distribute disappointment rather than victory.
The alternative is continuing a war in which hundreds of thousands more people can be killed or wounded while the eventual negotiating positions may change only marginally.
This is the counterfactual every government needs to confront honestly. The relevant comparison is not the Alaska proposal versus an ideal peace. It is the Alaska proposal versus the expected settlement after another year or two of fighting, including the casualties, destruction and territorial changes occurring before that settlement arrives.
Ukraine can rationally reject a bad agreement if continued resistance is expected to improve its future position enough to justify those costs.
It can rationally accept painful compromises if the expected military alternative is worse.
That decision belongs primarily to Ukrainians because they bear the largest share of the cost.
America and Europe can alter the options available by changing the resources they provide.
Russia can alter them through battlefield pressure.
But none should pretend the trade-off disappears.
The Alaska summit therefore has not produced peace. It has clarified the bargaining structure.
Putin wants a settlement recognising much of what Russia has achieved through force and addressing wider Russian security demands.
Trump wants the war ended and increasingly believes a comprehensive bargain is preferable to another temporary ceasefire.
Ukraine wants survival, sovereignty and guarantees strong enough that compromise today does not become invasion tomorrow.
Europe wants to prevent Russian aggression from being rewarded while avoiding an endless war it still lacks the capacity to manage entirely without America.
Those objectives overlap enough that an agreement may exist.
They conflict enough that finding it will be extraordinarily difficult.
The red carpet in Alaska was the easy part.
The difficult part begins when maps appear on the table.
Because every line moved on that map represents villages, infrastructure, strategic terrain and people who may not want to live under the government receiving them.
Peace negotiations compress those realities into territorial percentages.
History eventually expands them again.
Trump’s summit may prove valuable if it begins a process that converts battlefield realities into a stable settlement without legitimising aggression as an efficient route towards territorial expansion.
If it instead produces pressure primarily on Ukraine because Ukraine is easier for America to pressure, it may end one war while weakening the deterrent against another.
That is the distinction worth watching.
A successful peace deal does not merely stop the current war. It changes the incentives so that starting the next war looks less profitable than keeping the peace.
Alaska did not achieve that this week.
It may have begun the negotiation over whether it can be achieved at all.
