At Trump’s Summit, No Deal on Ukraine, and No Consequence for Putin

In ordinary times, the failure of the leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear powers to reach agreement on ending a brutal, three-year conflict at the heart of Europe might be cause for despair.

But to the Ukrainians and their European neighbors, the breakup of talks between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin after less than three and a half hours contained an element of relief.

Desperate as they are to end the death and destruction, their deepest fear was that Mr. Trump would give in to the Russian president’s territorial demands, and force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into a painful choice between giving up more than 20 percent of his country or rejecting a peace accord that he fears is a poison chalice.

Mr. Zelensky may yet have to make that choice. But Mr. Trump lifted off from Alaska, ahead of schedule, without having achieved the most basic first step: a temporary cease-fire that would allow further negotiations to take place. It was exactly the outcome, he told reporters earlier on Friday, with which he would not “be happy.”

As Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump boarded their planes and flew off in different directions, it was unclear whether they were putting the best face on failure, or just being coy about some kind of agreement on a way forward. Mr. Putin insisted that “moving along this path we can reach — and the sooner the better — an end to the conflict in Ukraine.” But he did not detail the path.

Mr. Trump was no more specific. He said in an interview afterward with Sean Hannity of Fox News that the onus was now on Mr. Zelensky to get a cease-fire deal. If there was a framework for achieving that goal, no one was discussing it.

But even if Mr. Trump made no concessions about Ukrainian territory, he no doubt left Mr. Zelensky concerned about how he handled the Russian leader. Mr. Trump spoke glowingly of Mr. Putin, calling him “Vladimir” and commiserating that both of them had been distracted by the U.S. investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.

“We would have done a lot of good things, but we had the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” Mr. Trump said. He was referring to the investigations into whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia and the findings of a special counsel and a bipartisan Senate committee that Russia had meddled in the election in the hopes of helping him win.

Mr. Trump said he and Mr. Putin “didn’t get there” but sought to sell their conversation as another step in a process and talked about another meeting soon — prompting Mr. Putin to suggest that Mr. Trump come to Moscow. But the fact that the two men were not willing to take a single question from reporters — a rarity for the loquacious Mr. Trump, always eager to describe his latest deal, or near-deal — made clear that there was little to talk about, at least for now.

It could hardly have been chummier, at least in public. “The meeting was a 10 in the sense that we got along great,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Hannity afterward, changing the metric from whether he got a cease-fire to whether he rekindled warmer relations with a nation that has been shunned by the West since the invasion of Ukraine and nurtured a personal relationship that he often seems to view as a friendship.

He went on to inflate Russia’s position in the global pecking order. “We are No. 1 and they are No. 2 in the world,” he said, a view that might be disputed by the Chinese leadership along with most economists and global strategists.

Absent was any public discussion of secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil. Gone were the deadlines previously set by Mr. Trump — including one that passed last week — for Russia to enter a lasting cease-fire. With smiles, handshakes and a personal meeting, Mr. Putin had washed away Mr. Trump’s talk of “serious consequences” if the meeting ended without a cessation of hostilities.

Most of all, gone was any hint of Mr. Putin’s status as an international pariah, a leader who could not land in most European countries for fear that he might be detained by officials acting on the arrest warrant issued against him for how the war in Ukraine was conducted.

To those who have followed Mr. Trump’s diplomacy, this meeting seemed to have a natural comparison: Mr. Trump’s first encounter seven years ago with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, which was marked by embraces, handshakes, letters testifying to their mutual admiration — and a continued buildup of the North’s nuclear arsenal.

“Just like the Kim summits,” said Robert Litwak of George Washington University, who studies superpower relations, “this was high on atmospherics, low on substance.”

“There was scant preparation,” he added, “and the moral hazard of legitimizing, in this case, a war criminal.”

In fact, Mr. Putin emerged with the greatest gift of all: readmission to the society of world leaders. From the start of the day, after his plane descended over former Russian territory and landed at a major American air base where F-22 fighters were lined up wingtip to wingtip, he seemed in command.

He trotted off his plane, smiling as he stepped foot in the United States for the first time in a decade. He popped into Mr. Trump’s own limousine for a short drive to their meeting venue at an office on the base. And when the session was over, Mr. Trump ceded his traditional privilege as the host to frame the conversation with opening remarks.

Instead, Mr. Putin made the first comments, reflecting on his difficulties working with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and reaffirming Mr. Trump’s claim that had he been president in 2022, there would have been no Ukraine war.

It may be days before there is word of what steps toward some kind of agreement — if any — were reached. Mr. Trump said he would brief European allies, and Mr. Zelensky.

But in the meantime, Mr. Putin has accomplished a major war goal: He has gotten out of the box of sanctioned autocrat, and was greeted by the president of the United States as a peacemaker. He has bought time. He has defused all that talk of sanctions on his oil sector. And he gave up nothing.

It’s unclear how long any of that will work. But it was impressive diplomacy for less than four hours on American ground.