Wars do not have to be won. Total victories loom largest in the popular imagination because those are the stories nations always tell to sustain patriotic feeling. The fuller version of history is written in stalemates.
That is worth remembering when Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. Both leaders have incentives to pretend that Ukraine’s fate can be settled decisively without any Ukrainians at the negotiating table. That doesn’t make it so.
For the US president, this is a project of personal vanity. He promised to end the war within days of returning to the White House. The persistence of hostilities seven months after his inauguration is a rebuke to his self-image as the world’s master dealmaker.
Putin also once thought the war could be concluded swiftly. He launched his all-out invasion in February 2022 expecting Kyiv to fall within weeks. When Ukrainian resistance thwarted that plan, the Russian president switched to a long game of attrition, relying on superior troop numbers and aerial bombardment to degrade Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state. Russia’s industrial base and public opinion have been fired up for perpetual war. Kremlin propagandists boast of the nation’s limitless military stamina, while Russian commanders keep promising to break through enemy lines and initiate the long-awaited capitulation.
Putin has to believe in the inevitability of Ukrainian defeat because any other scenario – even a ceasefire that allows him to hold territory captured so far – leaves the historic mission he set himself unfulfilled. He will harbour a vengeful grievance for as long as Volodymyr Zelenskyy is president of a country that is free to arm itself and pursue an independent policy of integration with other European democracies.
Any border or treaty that prevents the Kremlin dictating Ukraine’s strategic orientation is illegitimate in Putin’s eyes. That won’t prevent him signing bits of paper as a tactical expedient. The Russian president recognises that he has tested his American counterpart’s patience. He has lost ground to Zelenskyy in the competition to shape Trump’s explanation for why the war persists when he has called for peace.
The Ukrainian president has bounced back from his televised humiliation in the White House in February, when he was harangued for ingratitude and blamed for inciting the invasion of his own country. Deft diplomacy, underwritten by Nato leaders pledging to pay Kyiv’s military bills, bought a sliver of recognition from Trump that maybe things were more complicated than previously thought; that Putin was prone to “bullshit”; that his professed interest in peace was contradicted by the volume of bombs he kept dropping on Ukrainian civilians.
The Alaska powwow is happening because Trump started setting ceasefire deadlines and threatening Moscow with sanctions. Putin needed to offer some affectation of willingness to compromise. He calculated that the spectacle of a summit, combined with some artfully ambiguous signals around “land swaps”, would appeal to Trump’s confidence in his own charisma and his belief that a deal is there for the doing.
Putin will use the encounter to frame the conflict in terms that chime with Trump’s warped and historically illiterate reading of the story. It is the version in which a devious, criminal Zelenskyy bamboozles a senescent Joe Biden into throwing away heaps of US treasure on a crazy, losing bet. The war is nearly won anyway, Putin will say. Ukraine cannot prevail, but can sucker its allies into throwing good money after bad. He will outline a future of lucrative commercial relations between two great powers whose potential friendship has been sabotaged by a roguish European province that hardly even counts as a proper country. He will make grotesque territorial claims, covering places not yet conquered by Russian troops, and present this as the bare minimum of a reasonable allocation of land to Moscow. He will insist on Ukrainian “demilitarisation” – in effect guaranteeing the country’s vulnerability to some future incursion – and call it essential for the sake of Russian security. We know these are the demands because Putin has been making them for months. He restated them earlier this month.
Trump doesn’t have to fall in a bromantic swoon at Putin’s feet to make the summit a success for Russia. The damage will be done if he emerges from negotiations parroting talking points from the Kremlin script. The fear among Ukraine’s European allies is that he will proudly outline a ceasefire proposal on terms that Zelenskyy cannot possibly accept – an unjust, unworkable partition of his country along lines drawn by the tyrant who invaded it. Putin will then claim that he tried to talk peace and only Ukrainian intransigence prolongs the war.
Less bleak scenarios are conceivable. Trump’s newfound scepticism about Putin might withstand corrosion by flattery. The Russian leader’s confidence in an imminent battlefield breakthrough might prove misplaced – a symptom of the brittle, authoritarian ego that only gives audience to sycophants bearing good tidings. He might be overestimating Russia’s economic resilience against sanctions. He might one day find ordinary Russians losing the will to sacrifice a generation of young men for a goal of national redemption that keeps receding over the horizon.
When the domestic economic and political incentives change, Putin will get serious about a ceasefire. The task of Ukraine’s allies is to hasten that moment by sustaining maximum military aid to Kyiv and financial pressure on Moscow. Even then, a settlement would realistically leave some Ukrainian land under de facto permanent Russian occupation, behind heavily fortified lines. It will be a stalemate backed with sufficient deterrents to turn a hot war cold. It could end up looking something like the demilitarised zone on the Korean peninsula, separating two sides that are technically still at war, although the armistice was signed in 1953
For now, the challenge for Zelenskyy and his allies is handling a US president who talks about war and peace in terms detached from any moral, historical or strategic context. Trump draws no meaningful distinction between a settlement that allows Ukraine to thrive as an independent state and one that satisfies the appetite of a Russian president bent on conquest. He values two kinds of deal – those that make him richer, and those that allow him to luxuriate in the status of a great dealmaker. If he thinks such benefits are available by abandoning American allies and interests there is no reason to think he wouldn’t do it.
That will be Putin’s aim in Alaska. He has no intention of ending the war just because the White House demands it, but he knows he must pretend to want peace. And he knows his best hope of defeating Ukraine is to manipulate Trump into bullying Kyiv towards capitulation, while imagining that his own humiliation at Kremlin hands is some kind of personal victory.