With Alaska in the rear-view mirror, Donald Trump is walking into a very different situation as he returns to work at the White House this week.
His summit with Vladimir Putin is over, though the fallout continues. On Friday, the U.S. literally rolled out the red carpet for the Russian leader and accused war criminal as he arrived in Anchorage for Ukraine peace talks — though no Ukrainians were invited to the meeting.
Trump flew back to Washington having publicly walked back his own call for a ceasefire and having reportedly endorsed a Russian demand for Ukraine to cede the entirety of the Donbas region, including territory currently controlled by Ukrainian forces.
Having completed one of his characteristically chummy conversations with Putin, Trump now faces the so-called “coalition of the willing”: a group of European leaders united behind the defense of Ukraine and adamant that no agreement can be made without the support of Kyiv.
The president’s guests could strike a very different tone, given how Trump’s last face-to-face meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office devolved into a near-shouting match.
But there are indications that Zelensky’s allies want to avoid that spectacle and instead lean on figures with whom Trump enjoys warmer relations as they seek to perform damage control: including, chiefly, walking back Trump from his support for any agreement that would cede Ukrainian territory not already occupied by Russian forces.
And European leaders are also insistent that Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, be directly involved in peace talks with Russia — something which it had appeared U.S. officials had successfully pushed Putin towards in May, only for Russia to delay and demur.
The sheer size of the delegation heading to Washington on Monday seems to suggest that a show of force is Zelensky’s aim. Besides the Ukrainian leader, joining Trump at the White House will be British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Finnish president Alexander Stubb, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen along with Nato’s secretary-general Mark Rutte.
Though large, the choice of members was not random. Each member of the posse has, in their own dealings with Trump, cultivated friendly relations with the U.S. president — save for Zelensky, who clashed with Trump when he visited in February.
Publicly, those headed to the White House were positive on the effects of Trump’s summit. “President Trump’s efforts have brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine,” Starmer said.
The British prime minister and his counterparts could be relying on Trump’s tendency to rapidly change his position as he and other European leaders launch a charm offensive.
Though none of Trump’s European counterparts will say it, critics of the Republican president in the U.S. called Friday’s summit a “setback” for Ukrainians and Europe at large.
“Vladimir Putin got the red carpet treatment on American soil. But we got no ceasefire, no imminent meeting between Putin and Zelensky,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. He added Trump was “flattered” by the Russian president.
U.S. officials are likely to walk into Monday’s meeting eager to portray news of Putin’s openness to a U.S.-backed security agreement as a win for the Ukrainian side. But there’s a sense that a major gulf still exists between what Putin and Ukraine’s government are willing to accept, and that little progress was made towards bridging it largely as a result of Trump’s hesitance to use any kind of leverage against Putin.
Even that development may be met with skepticism. It’s no secret to European leaders that support among Republicans and even progressives for direct U.S. military intervention in Ukraine is strikingly low. On Saturday, Zelensky himself responded to the news, writing in a post to Twitter/X: “Security must be guaranteed reliably and in the long term, with the involvement of both Europe and the U.S.”
The inclusion of the word “reliably” suggests that Zelensky won’t accept anything short of a concrete regional security agreement in exchange for dropping Ukraine’s ambitions of joining the Nato alliance, which would grant Article 5 protections. Under Article 5 of the Nato charter, member-states must come to the aid of any member-state that is attacked individually. The provision has been activated only once, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“All issues important to Ukraine must be discussed with Ukraine’s participation, and no issue, particularly territorial ones, can be decided without Ukraine,” Zelensky added.
Some had been optimistic that the use of leverage was imminent after Trump’s statements ahead of the summit indicated that he no longer believed Putin’s claims of wanting an end to the conflict. In social media posts and public statements, the U.S. president appeared to be moving closer to levying sanctions against the Russian government.
European leaders hoped they were successful in driving that point home, in talks with Trump ahead of the Anchorage summit, but that progress seems to have evaporated. It may fall on Starmer and others like Stubb, who is known as a “Trump whisperer”, to re-convince the president that Putin’s demand for a full seizure of the Donbas region is a poison pill aimed at driving Ukraine away from the table.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied that Trump’s position on whether Putin was serious had changed “at all”, potentially giving the delegation a reason to hope that the U.S. president could be made to understand that Ukraine wouldn’t consider ceding further territorial gains to Russia.
“I don’t think his mind has changed at all. I think ultimately, if this whole effort doesn’t work out, then there is going to have to be additional consequences to Russia. But we’re trying to avoid that by reaching a peace agreement,” Rubio said.
