TLE DESK: Pressure mounted ahead of a landmark summit in Alaska between the United States and Russia, as Donald Trump warned that Vladimir Putin had only one chance, but Moscow pressed ahead with major battlefield gains in Ukraine.
Putin and Trump will meet on Friday at an air base in the far-northern US state, the first time the Russian leader has been permitted on Western soil since his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has killed tens of thousands of people.
With such high stakes, all sides were pushing hard in the hours before the meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has refused to surrender territory to Russia, spoke by telephone Wednesday with Trump, as did European leaders who voiced confidence afterwards that the US leader would seek a ceasefire rather than concessions by Kyiv.
Trump himself sent mixed messages, saying that he could quickly organise a three-way summit afterwards with both Zelensky and Putin, but also warning of his impatience with Putin.
“There may be no second meeting because, if I feel that it’s not appropriate to have it because I didn’t get the answers that we have to have, then we are not going to have a second meeting,” Trump told reporters.
Russia, Trump said, would face “severe consequences” if it did not halt its offensive.
But Trump said, “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” involving both Putin and Zelensky.
Putin pitched the meeting after Trump threatened sanctions on Russia. Trump has already ramped up tariffs on India, which has become a key buyer of Russian energy.
Zelensky, after being berated by Trump at a February meeting in the White House, has publicly supported US diplomacy but made clear his deep scepticism.
“I have told my colleagues — the US president and our European friends — that Putin does not want peace,” Zelensky said.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who welcomed Zelensky in Berlin, said Ukraine is ready to negotiate “on territorial issues” but stressed that legal recognition of Russian occupations “would not be up for debate.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte declared: “The ball is now in Putin’s court.”
– Talks at Cold War base –
Trump will meet Putin on Friday at Elmendorf Air Force Base, a major US military hub in Alaska’s most populous city of Anchorage that played a key role in monitoring the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Off the base, on the rainy streets of Anchorage, there were few signs that the world’s eyes would soon be on the city, other than an influx of media who had booked up virtually all rooms.
The US Treasury Department announced that it would temporarily ease sanctions on the visiting senior Russian officials, who normally would struggle to carry out simple transactions, such as withdrawing cash in Western countries.
The most visible sign of the impending summit was in Ukraine itself.
According to an AFP analysis of battlefield data from the US-based Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces made their biggest 24-hour advance into Ukraine in more than a year on Tuesday.
The Russian army took or claimed 110 square kilometres (42.5 square miles) on August 12 compared with the previous day.
Ukrainian soldiers in Kramatorsk, an eastern city about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the front, said they had low expectations for Trump’s meeting with Putin.
Artem, a 30-year-old serviceman, said the war would likely continue for “a long time.”
“Putin is massing an army, his army is growing, he is stockpiling weapons, he is pulling the wool over our eyes.”
Trump has long voiced admiration for Putin and had vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of returning to the White House.
But he has since voiced frustration as Putin ignores his pleas for a ceasefire and presses ahead with attacks on Ukraine.
