Trump-Putin Alaska summit looms large in Kremlin’s Ukraine negotiating strategy

LONDON — U.S. President Donald Trump’s August summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, is looming large as the White House presses its latest effort to secure a peace deal ending Moscow’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his country’s European partners have rallied to soften the 28-point American peace proposal presented to Kyiv last month, which prompted a flurry of negotiations spread across five countries.

That 28-point plan was rejected by critics as constituting a Ukrainian capitulation. Weeks of subsequent talks have seen the proposal revised down to 20 points, but Moscow has largely refused to say whether it will explicitly support the plan.

Zelenskyy said this month that Ukraine, its European partners and the U.S. are now working on three documents — the 20-point peace proposal, one detailing security guarantees for Ukraine and one regarding reconstruction. Ukraine handed the revised 20-point plan to the White House last week, a Ukrainian official close to the peace talks told ABC News.

U.S. administration officials signaled on Monday that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine may be closer than ever, telling reporters on the condition of anonymity that “literally 90%” of the issues between the two warring countries had been solved.

Meanwhile, Putin and his top officials have repeatedly referred back to the “spirit and letter” of August’s Alaska summit — in the words of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — a meeting that was widely interpreted as a diplomatic and political coup for Putin. Trump, however, celebrated the summit as “a great and very successful day.”

Following the latest visit of U.S. presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow earlier this month, Putin told The Times of India that the U.S. proposals “were, in one way or another, based on agreements with President Trump in Alaska.”

One week before, the Kremlin issued a statement in which Putin said the latest American offering was “in line with the discussions at the Russian-American summit in Alaska, in principle, could form the basis for a final peace settlement.”

Lavrov and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov have both similarly put the Anchorage summit at the heart of their comments on the latest White House peace push.

So too have Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yuriy Ushakov and Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, both of whom have served as negotiating envoys for Moscow.

Earlier this month, Peskov told a government-affiliated Russian news outlet that Moscow’s position has not changed since the Alaska summit. “The special military operation continues. We’ve positive dynamics for Russian troops on the ground,” the Kremlin spokesperson said when asked what would happen if the current negotiations failed.

Why Anchorage matters

The elaborate August summit was preceded by a visit to Moscow by Witkoff, where — according to later comments from Zelenskyy — a proposal arose by which Ukrainian forces would withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — which together form the Donbas region — in exchange for an end to the fighting.

After Ukraine’s withdrawal, the Donbas would then be considered a demilitarized zone, but one under Russian control — a status Ukrainian officials have said will be little different from full occupation.

Trump said the offer consisted of “swapping of territories,” but the Kremlin has signaled it will only consider potentially handing back small slivers of territory in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions in Ukraine’s northeast. The frontline in the southeastern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be frozen.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Ukraine cannot agree to ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia as part of any peace deal.

There was no indication that Russian forces would be expected to surrender their control of Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014 after the pro-Western Maidan Revolution. Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion built on that round of aggression, which also saw Russian and local proxy forces seize control of significant chunk of the Donbas.

The Alaska meeting saw the Donbas territorial proposal cemented and Trump align himself with Putin’s demand that a full peace settlement come before any ceasefire.

“America changed its approach before Alaska and during Alaska,” Oleg Ignatov, the International Crisis Group think tank’s senior analyst for Russia, told ABC News.

The Donbas question “was the core idea of Alaska,” Ignatov said. “This idea to establish a demilitarized zone in the rest of Donbas, it’s an American idea. That’s why the Russians are pushing this. They say, ‘You offered this to us, so go forward with this.'”

The apparent U.S.-Russia understanding also included several other territorial and political proposals which were deemed sympathetic to the Kremlin by critics. Moscow, Ignatov said, interpreted this as a significant win.

“The ideas about territories, about the status of these territories, about neutrality, ideas about security, about language rights — these ideas were part of the discussion in Alaska,” he said. 

For Moscow, “it was a big change for the U.S., and a big change in the U.S. approach to the conflict,” he added.

Mark Galeotti — a Russia analyst based in the U.K. — said following the summit, “It does look as if Putin has got very much what he wants.”

‘A very successful day’

Both Putin and Trump appeared pleased after the August summit. The Russian president described it as “a very good, substantive and frank meeting.” Trump was more effusive on what he called “a great and very successful day in Alaska!” in a post to social media.

The cheery comments marked a clear shift from the weeks preceding the summit, during which time Trump appeared frustrated with Moscow as it repeatedly dodged U.S.-Ukrainian demands for an immediate ceasefire.

The president even threatened “very significant” sanctions on Russia and its key trading partners if Moscow continued to rebuff a full ceasefire. Trump nonetheless celebrated the Anchorage meeting despite the fact that no formal peace agreement or ceasefire was agreed.

The Alaska summit alarmed Kyiv and its European partners, prompting them to re-assert their demands in any peace deal, seemingly in an effort to head off any momentum leant to the Kremlin by Trump’s warm welcome of Putin.

Zelenskyy called for “a real peace,” and again stressed Ukraine’s demands for a ceasefire that would precede an eventual full peace deal. In the meantime, Zelenskyy said, economic pressure on Russia must be expanded and aid to Ukraine broadened.

European leaders, meanwhile, said in a joint statement that Kyiv “must have ironclad security guarantees” and that it will “be up to Ukraine to make decisions on its territory. International borders must not be changed by force.”

But the concerned European parties were far removed from the action in Anchorage. Excising America’s allies from the top table remains a key Kremlin goal, Pavel Luzin, a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told ABC News.

“They want to talk to America, not to Ukraine,” Luzin said of the decision-makers in the Kremlin. “Alaska was important for Russia because they were talking directly to Americans without Ukraine.”

“The Russians still believe that the Ukrainian leadership are just American and European puppets,” Luzin said.

After Alaska

The months after Alaska saw little apparent progress toward a peace deal in Ukraine, according to the negotiating parties.

Russia has pushed on with a bloody offensive, while escalating it air attacks on Ukrainian cities, the scale of which are now the biggest of the war to date.

Putin himself has publicly been clear that he will not make peace unless Ukraine withdraws from Donbas and has called negotiating with Zelenskyy “pointless.”

The Kremlin has also refused to explicitly give its backing to any new American proposal, even though the initial 28-point blueprint was interpreted as broadly pro-Russian.

Instead, the Kremlin is maintaining maximalist demands — including Ukraine’s withdrawal from eastern territories still partially under Kyiv’s control — which it has suggested were reflected in the understandings reached in Alaska. The White House did not explicitly say whether Trump and Putin were aligned on the matter.

“Russia’s purposes remain the same — they want all of Ukraine, they want dismantlement of NATO and they want to undermine American global leadership,” Luzin said.

John E. Herbst, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was critical of the White House’s apparent alignment with Russia at the Anchorage summit, Trump’s refusal to introduce additional sanctions on Moscow and the exclusion of Zelenskyy from the talks.

“These U.S. concessions only encourage Putin to demand more and give less,” he wrote. “His goal remains to achieve effective political control of Ukraine. The terms he is currently discussing with Trump reflect what Putin is willing to accept and do now. It says nothing about what he will do in the future.”

Putin, meanwhile, is projecting confidence, claiming a “positive dynamic” everywhere on the front despite ever-mounting Russian casualties and slow battlefield progress. Russia, the president said, is “ready in principle” to “fight to the last Ukrainian.”

“Putin was very clear,” Ignatov said. “He said that he has two options. The first option is a deal which addresses Russia’s security concerns — of course, he means a deal in Russia’s interest.”

Putin’s second option, Ignatov continued, is “to fight until the collapse of Ukraine. And I think he really believes in this. He really believes that he has only two options.”

Zelenskyy maintains that Ukraine cannot sign off on any peace deal without legally-binding security guarantees that include the U.S. On Monday, Zelenskyy said the latest round of talks with White House representatives were “not simple” but were “productive.”

“Dignity is what stopped Russia. This is who the people of Ukraine are. We will continue our diplomacy aimed at ending the war,” the Ukrainian president said.

ABC News’ Miriam Khan and Hannah Demissie contributed to this report.