How Trump’s Meeting With Putin Could Unfold, as Trump Seeks Cease-Fire in Ukraine

All wars end eventually, and usually they end at the negotiating table. And, as in any negotiation, disagreements over goals, bitterness, betrayal and recriminations often arise.

Each of those could manifest in Anchorage when President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the first face-to-face discussion between American and Russian leaders since the invasion of Ukraine three and a half years ago. And the scenarios that could unfurl are as unpredictable as the leaders themselves, both brimming with confidence that in a personal encounter, they can manipulate events, and each other.

It could be a failure from the start. Mr. Trump said before leaving Washington that if he showed up for a joint news conference alone, the world would know that no deal was forthcoming with Mr. Putin, with whom Mr. Trump once predicted he could solve the intractable war in 24 hours.

Or, Mr. Trump said on Thursday, if there was real progress, he might remain in Alaska and ask President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to fly in, which he said “would be by far the easiest way” to mediate.

But it is hard to imagine that the issues as complex as those swirling around the biggest war in Europe since 1945 can be resolved in one session at an air base in Alaska.

The fault lines simply run too deep, even beyond the question of where to draw the boundaries between Russia and Ukraine, 11 years after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea and began to seize parts of southern and eastern Ukraine. They go to the core disagreement over whether Ukraine has a right to exist within its current borders. Mr. Putin has been clear that eastern Ukraine belongs to Russia, forming the basis of his justification for a war that has already brought well over a million casualties.

And so Mr. Trump may have to make a fundamental choice: whether he is a “neutral arbiter” in this conflict, or a partner in Ukraine’s defense, a role he has consistently walked back.

“This is the most pivotal U.S.-Russian summit in a generation, and is for all the marbles,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the American ambassador to NATO from 2001 to 2005, a period that included the expansion of NATO to the Balkans and four other states under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Putin, the former ambassador said, is seeking to divide the United States from its NATO allies “by convincing President Trump to force Ukraine to make territorial concessions, limits on its military and perhaps even a rollback of NATO military positions in Eastern Europe.” Mr. Burns was mostly recently ambassador to China, which he noted is looking closely at the outcome of the summit to divine whether Mr. Trump would also come to the aid of Taiwan.

“Such a result would consign Ukraine to be a dependency of Mother Russia and would let Putin get away with his criminal invasion,” he added. “It would also create an enormous rupture in NATO between the U.S. and its European and Canadian allies and even lead to its potential unraveling.”

Rarely has a presidential summit meeting occurred where the outcome seems, at least from the outside, to be less scripted, less predictable. Here are some key issues that could emerge as bellwethers in the proceedings.

An early test on seeking a cease-fire

Ukraine and Europe say there can be no negotiation without the parties’ first agreeing to a cease-fire — though one of indeterminate length, or breadth. And it is unclear whether Mr. Putin is willing to sign up to one, especially because his troops have been making major gains lately.

So it seems likely that a cease-fire is the first issue on the agenda, at least for President Trump, who has said his No. 1 priority is to stop the killing. (His No. 2 may be winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has suggested many times in recent days he richly deserves.) That will be an early test for Mr. Putin, who may simply feign interest.

Then there is the question of boundaries — and whether Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump will try to redraw the map of Europe, much as Stalin, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt did at the Yalta conference in 1945.

Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who as a State Department official played a key role in managing the breakup of the Soviet Union, notes that Mr. Trump has described “two different versions of what’s going to happen.” In one, “he’ll be in listening mode,” simply hearing out Mr. Putin. That seems unlikely given the fact that he already knows Mr. Putin’s views after lengthy phone calls — and because Mr. Trump is, constitutionally, rarely in listening mode.

The thorny question of ‘land swaps’

Mr. Trump has floated another version of the talks, in which he and Mr. Putin begin to negotiate “land swaps.”

The phrase makes Mr. Zelensky and European officials nervous, because it suggests that Mr. Trump may try to give away territory that Russia has not gained militarily, in return for other territory, perhaps including control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest. It is currently under the control of the Russians.

Mr. Sestanovich notes that the European allies and the Ukrainians “don’t want either land swaps or listening mode.”

“They don’t want the president to find out what’s on Putin’s mind,” he said. “They want him to try to change it,” and that means credibly threatening to step up arming of Ukraine and giving it more intelligence help, along with sanctions on Russian oil shipments.

Mr. Trump has been reluctant to do either; his vice president, JD Vance, said on Sunday that “we’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.” He said the United States would happily sell Europe arms, which could then be given to Ukraine.

It is a fundamental weakness in the U.S. position that Mr. Putin will doubtless try to exploit.

Debate over NATO and its future

In the first month of the new Trump administration, the president gave Mr. Putin a gift: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced there was no way Ukraine would be invited to join NATO in coming years. Mr. Trump was also clear: “NATO, you can forget about,” he said in February. “I think that’s probably the reason the whole thing started.”

Of course, that position is in direct contradiction to a series of proclamations by NATO — which the United States signed on to during the Biden administration — declaring that Ukraine would eventually be a NATO member, but avoiding ever setting a date.

Is a grand bargain possible?

For his part, Mr. Putin will be trying to expand the conversation, making it clear to Mr. Trump that American interests with Russia are far broader than Ukraine. He is bringing a business delegation, suggesting that past conversations with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, about American access to rare earths, critical minerals and other Russian assets would all be on the table.

Conveniently for Mr. Putin, many of those underground reserves are in the region of Ukraine Russia has claimed belongs to it.

Clearly, Mr. Putin has studied how talk of commercial opportunities provokes Mr. Trump’s developer instincts — and most likely are far more important, to Mr. Trump’s mind, than the fate of parts of Ukraine.

And there are many resources in the United States that appeal to the Russian leader, especially in Alaska, a former Russian territory, as Mr. Putin is likely to note at the summit. Mr. Trump said Thursday that he was considering “incentives and disincentives” for Russia, but he insisted, “I don’t want to play my hand in public.”

On Thursday, Mr. Putin dangled one more incentive of his own: a nuclear agreement that could replace New START, the last arms accord between Washington and Moscow, which expires in February. Mr. Putin was elliptical, saying that any kind of agreement on Ukraine “would create long-term conditions of peace between our countries, in Europe, and in the world as a whole, if we reach agreements in the next stages in the field of strategic offensive arms control.”

It is a savvy move — no one wants to see an unconstrained arms race resume between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. But such an accord would be complex; the current New START does not cover a range of exotic nuclear weapons that Russia has developed in recent years, or its large arsenal of short-range, battlefield weapons, like the kind Mr. Putin has at times hinted could be used against Ukraine.

Still, the appeal to Mr. Trump is clear: A nuclear agreement would let him argue that, whatever he left on the table on Ukraine, he focused on America first.