After Putin’s win in Alaska, Zelensky travels to Washington for his day of excessive stakes talks, how far can he push Trump?

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At what was billed as an “historic” presidential summit, swiftly put collectively in Alaska on Friday afternoon, the optics have been as clear and overshadowing because the huge Chugach mountains glistening over Anchorage in the summertime solar.

US President Donald Trump actually applauded Vladimir Putin as he walked alongside a purple carpet specified by his honor by genuflecting US troops.

After warmly greeting the Russian president, whose full-scale invasion of Ukraine has to this point left greater than one million folks useless and injured, a US B-2 stealth bomber, flanked by fighter jets, roared overhead.

However Putin appeared unintimidated by the spectacle. This was, in any case, his long-awaited popping out of worldwide isolation celebration; a political present bestowed upon the Kremlin strongman, who's indicted for struggle crimes on the Worldwide Legal Court docket, by a US president who referred to as him his pal, “Vladimir.”

Later, within the windowless press room on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson close to Anchorage, the place the White Home and Kremlin press swimming pools had gathered wrongly anticipating a joint information convention, we discovered ourselves positioned alongside an brisk, tight-suited reporter from one of many radically conservative information networks who appear to vie for Trump’s favor.

“Trump is decided to exit Biden’s struggle,” the reporter confided to me between stay pictures, referring to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in 2022 when Joe Biden was US president.

“However the Ukrainians and the Europeans are in his approach,” the reporter added, seemingly pissed off, as Trump, on the reluctance to simply accept any deal at any worth.

The remark factors to an excellent larger, although much less apparent, Putin victory than merely returning to the highest desk of worldwide diplomacy: In pursuit of a fast peace deal in Ukraine, the US president seems to have taken Russia’s aspect on key points within the battle.

A ceasefire, for instance. Ukraine and its European supporters have lengthy argued that halting the violence should be a necessary first step in peace talks. Trump, who had earlier accepted that, has apparently modified his thoughts, posting on his Reality Social platform about going for a full peace deal as an alternative, a long-standing desire of the Kremlin, which sees no profit in halting offensive operations at a time when it believes Russian forces have the higher hand.

As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine heads to Washington, flanked by European leaders, for direct and pressing talks with Trump, this about-face by the White Home might be on the forefront of issues and negotiations – alongside calls for by Putin, and maybe Trump too, for Kyiv to withdrawal from swathes of strategic territory within the Donbas area of Ukraine that has been annexed by Russia however not but conquered.

Which will in the end be a purple line neither Ukraine nor Europe is keen to cross, and their leaders are prone to push again arduous in Washington on these territorial calls for. However saying no to a fast deal that Trump helps, maybe ideas of a Nobel Peace Prize inside his grasp, Ukraine and Europe danger casting themselves on the White Home – not the Kremlin – as the actual obstacles to peace.

The very fact main territorial concession is being mentioned in any respect is itself, from the Kremlin’s perspective, one more necessary win. Whereas Ukraine and its Western backers haggle over how way more of Donbas Kyiv ought to give up, the territory Russia has already captured by brute drive is barely talked about in any respect.

Within the days and the weeks forward, because the success or failure of peace talks inevitably dominate the information agenda, it’s price contemplating not simply what Putin can get, however what Trump desires.

The anticlimactic Alaskan summit was, maybe, a clue.

Watching it firsthand, it was putting how deferential a often domineering Trump appeared, even permitting Putin – a overseas visitor on American soil – to talk first within the joint statements to the press. The US president stood listening quietly at his podium for a number of minutes because the Kremlin chief held forth on Alaska’s Russian and American historical past earlier than delivering his personal impressions of the day’s conferences.

It was nearly as if Putin, who confidently recommended Trump go to Moscow – in a uncommon English-language comment from the Russian president – was accepting Trump again into the fold, not the opposite approach round; reintroducing him to the world from Alaska as a fellow strongman, with immense energy, many hundreds of miles away from the petty issues of Ukraine and Europe.