Putin’s victory, Trump’s illusion: Alaska summit shows how peace slips further away

By Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra* 

The much-hyped Alaska Summit, touted by US President Donald Trump as a diplomatic breakthrough and a step toward peace between Russia and Ukraine, has fizzled out into yet another round of military confrontation. Trump arrived at the meeting without a concrete proposal or a clear pathway to peace, leaving Russian President Vladimir Putin to set both the tone and the contours of the dialogue.

Putin’s appearance in the United States after years of diplomatic estrangement following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was itself a symbolic victory. He was able to turn the stage to his advantage by evoking Alaska’s Russian past, casting the US-Russia relationship as one rooted in shared geography and history. For Trump, the event served more as a face-saving gesture than as an actual peace initiative, while Putin emerged as the true beneficiary—able to sidestep sanctions pressure, avoid immediate commitments to a ceasefire, and even coax a softer US stance on Moscow’s oil trade.

What could have been an opportunity to secure a temporary ceasefire instead turned into a platform for Putin’s calibrated but unrealistic vision of peace. His proposal of permanently absorbing occupied Ukrainian territories in exchange for limited concessions was presented as a pragmatic solution, but it is one Ukraine will never accept. Trump, in tacit agreement, floated the idea of a land swap, further alienating Kyiv.

With Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders absent from the table, the summit essentially became a bilateral negotiation over Ukraine’s future without Ukraine itself. Trump even went so far as to treat Putin more as a guarantor of Ukraine’s security than as its primary threat. Putin’s dominance of the diplomatic stage was evident in his post-summit warnings to Ukraine and its European allies not to disrupt the “progress” emerging from Alaska. In effect, he shifted the burden of prolonging the war onto Kyiv and its Western partners.

Humanitarian concerns barely surfaced. The fate of thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians held by Russia was ignored. So too was the plight of deported Ukrainian children, some of whom have been placed for adoption in Russia. Instead, the only tangible outcome was talk of a possible three-way summit involving Trump, Putin, and Zelensky—something Europe has cautiously supported but Russia has flatly denied.

The hollowness of the Alaska meeting was underlined almost immediately afterward when Russia launched 85 attack drones and a ballistic missile at Ukraine, followed by further territorial gains in the east. Ukraine retaliated by targeting Russian nuclear facilities, underscoring that the war remains far from any peaceful resolution.

The United States’ inability to shape outcomes on matters of war and peace is becoming more visible. The Alaska Summit’s failure was preordained by the absence of Ukraine itself, reducing Zelensky to an afterthought even as he tried to project optimism by claiming to have had a “long and substantive” conversation with Trump.

For Trump, the summit was more about burnishing his image as a peacemaker than about serious diplomacy. But the reality is starker: Washington’s leverage in global peace and security has waned. Trump’s hardline trade wars, particularly against China, eventually gave way to retreat and accommodation, and his Russia policy is following a similar trajectory.

Sanctions have not weakened Moscow’s resolve, and the summit only allowed Putin to cloak aggression in the guise of diplomacy. What remains is an illusion of progress, with future summits dangled as promises even as bombs continue to fall.

The Alaska meeting revealed not the path to peace, but the widening gap between American rhetoric and geopolitical realities. Russia has managed to project itself as the partner willing to talk, while the United States struggles to maintain credibility as a power capable of brokering peace. If anything, the war looks increasingly irreversible, while peace remains as elusive as ever.

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*Senior Lecturer in Political Science, SVM Autonomous College, Jagatsinghpur, Odisha