President Donald Trump wants to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to accept a ceasefire and serious negotiations toward ending the war in Ukraine. As a first step, Trump should publicly gift Putin a FIFA 2026 World Cup soccer ball at their meeting in Alaska on Friday. Putin will get the message.
The White House said the meeting will be a “listening exercise” for Trump. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump wants to see if a face-to-face meeting, instead of another failed phone call, can make progress toward Ukraine peace. As Rubio put it, Trump wants “to look this guy in the eye … I think we’re going to know very early in that meeting whether this thing has any chance of success or not.”
This diplomatic strategy sounds sensible and pragmatic. The pursuit of a just peace in Ukraine is a noble one. The problem is that Trump has traditionally failed to understand what Putin is actually doing beneath the veil of his skillful rhetoric and political theatrics. Trump’s susceptibility to Putin’s gamesmanship was most recently underlined by Trump’s failure to enforce his own deadline, which expired last Friday, for Putin to accept an unconditional 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine or face new U.S. sanctions. Instead, Putin avoided those sanctions by suggesting an in-person meeting with Trump.
That said, the best example of Trump’s struggle to understand Putin was in the summer of 2018. Following a meeting in Helsinki, Putin gifted Trump a FIFA 2018 World Cup soccer ball. Trump accepted the “very nice” gift as a symbol of friendship. In doing so, he failed to recognize that Putin used the ball to portray Trump as a childish pretender. As with Shakespeare’s “tennis balls, my liege” gift from the French king to King Henry in his play Henry V, Putin sought to show his Russian domestic audience and international leaders that Trump was his malleable pawn.
Unfortunately, Trump then agreed with Putin’s suggestion that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That claim remains an absurd one. While recent disclosures underline malfeasance by intelligence community leaders in assessments related to Russia’s 2016 activities, Russia absolutely interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. Putin directed that effort with a primary objective of degrading trust in the U.S. political system.
Trust should thus be the watchword of Trump’s meeting with Putin. As he listens to Putin on Friday, Trump must constantly remind himself that the Russian president cannot be trusted at his word. As I’ve noted previously, “The problem is that Trump sees Putin for who he wishes Putin to be, a hardened but practical interlocutor, rather than for who he is, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who revels in the dark art of ruthless manipulation. Trump was shaped by the wheeler-dealer New York City real-estate scene. Putin was shaped by the brutal maximalism of the KGB’s Red Banner Institute.”
Fortunately, Trump has been judging Putin more accurately of late. In recent weeks, Trump has lamented how positive phone calls with Putin are followed by new rounds of bloody missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
Still, the stakes on Friday are high. Putin wants to persuade Trump not to impose new sanctions on Russia’s banking system and energy export industry. Putin will come to the meeting alarmed by the new tariffs Trump has just imposed on India for its continued importation of Russian oil. Those tariffs cost India valuable U.S. export opportunities. And Putin knows that, its current tough talk notwithstanding, India will eventually have to find alternate energy supplies to gain U.S. tariff relief. In turn, if Trump leaves the Alaska meeting and imposes tariffs on other major importers of Russian energy, such as China and Turkey, Putin will face a major financial crisis. If Russia’s energy export base collapses, it will lose critical revenue to fund its war and provide basic domestic services.
That leads us into Putin’s probable strategy for this meeting. He will attempt to placate Trump with a mixture of personal flattery, insistence that Russia must control Ukraine’s southeastern provinces, and openness to disingenuous diplomatic offers that avoid real concessions.
Putin sees Trump’s ego as his biggest opportunity. He has exploited Trump’s perception of him as the world’s preeminent strongman leader to make Trump feel that Putin shares that perspective of him. He has used this mirage of mutual respect as a foundation for Trump’s misplaced trust. To mitigate Putin’s manipulation strategy, Trump must hold him to specifics. But how?
For one, allowing Putin time to save face and make his announcement back on Russian soil, Trump could insist in Alaska that Putin agree to a 30-day ceasefire within 48 hours or suffer new sanctions. It is also vitally important that Trump not be fooled by any deceptive offers from Putin, such as 72-hour ceasefires, agreements to suspend offensive operations if the West ends arms supplies to Ukraine, or offers of international summits on Ukraine. Such pledges would only buy Putin time. Putin cannot be trusted unless he knows he will be held accountable for any breach of his word.
Nor should Trump be tempted by Putin’s offer of major economic deals inside Russia, or cooperation on concerns related to Iran and North Korea. Putin will never help Trump on Iran and North Korea because his central strategic objective is to undermine U.S. global influence and security to create space for his own agenda. And the most valuable sectors of the Russian economy are wholly defined by systemic corruption. Any U.S. investors who accepted Putin’s investment opportunities would always need to be cautious of their proximity to second-floor windows and other areas where accidental death is possible.
Similarly, when Putin shifts the conversation to the need for Russia to control southeastern Ukraine, Trump will have to stand strong. While it is true that any credible peace deal will need to involve a de facto recognition of Russian control over the Ukrainian territory it has already seized, Ukraine cannot be expected to withdraw from major settlements or key territory that it currently controls. Putin will employ inventive history and emotive security concerns in an attempt to persuade Trump here. But Ukraine and the vast majority of the international community recognize that accepting Russia’s maximalist demands in southeastern Ukraine would be a catastrophic mistake.
First, it would signal Trump’s weak dismissal of his own greater power. Again, the U.S. economy and the levers of relevant power afforded to Trump as the United States’s chief executive officer allow him to impose devastating pain on Putin’s regime if he so desires. The supremacy of the U.S. military across the full range of warfare also provides effective deterrence against Russian military threats. Put simply, if Putin is unwilling to be serious about peace on Friday, Trump can introduce new sanctions to make Putin far more serious about peace once he lands back in Moscow.
There’s more at stake here than just Ukraine’s future.
ESCALATING CHINA-PHILIPPINES TENSIONS CRYSTALLIZED BY CHINA WARSHIP COLLISION
Trump’s excess deference to Putin’s maximalist demands would also represent an unparalleled betrayal of the U.S.’s founding principles and the defining principle of the post-WWII international order: the expectation that free peoples should be able to live free of invading tyrants and that the borders of free countries should not be changed by acts of imperial aggression.
The path to a just peace in Ukraine may well run through Alaska. However, that will only be the case if Trump directs Friday’s conversation and keeps it tight. Trump must tell Putin that he has two choices: Russia can either match Ukraine’s acceptance of an immediate and unconditional 30-day ceasefire or suffer decisive U.S. economic pressure.