Trump-Putin summit: Land-for-ceasefire deal will be terrible for everyone – except Russia

Hours before meeting Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump said he wanted to see a ceasefire in Ukraine and was “not going to be happy” if it wasn’t agreed today. The US president appears to have left Alaska with no such agreement in place.

“We didn’t get there”, Trump told reporters, before later vaguely asserting that he and Putin had “made great progress”. Trump is likely to return to the idea of engaging Putin in the coming weeks and months, with the Russian leader jokingly suggesting their next meeting could be held in Moscow.

A land-for-ceasefire arrangement, an idea Trump has repeatedly raised as an almost inevitable part of a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine, could still reemerge as a possible outcome. In fact, in an interview with Fox News after the summit where Trump was asked how the war in Ukraine might end and if there will be a land swap, Trump said: “those are points that we largely agreed on”.

Securing territorial concessions from Ukraine has long been one of Moscow’s preconditions for any negotiations on a peace deal. Putin is likely betting that insisting on these concessions, while keeping Ukraine under sustained military pressure, plays to his advantage.

Public fatigue over the war is growing in Ukraine, and Putin will...

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