Aug. 16, 2025 |
No deal in Alaska. Updated: Saturday, August 16, 14:30 GMT. U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for nearly three hours in Anchorage on Friday, emerging without any agreement to end the war in Ukraine. Standing alongside Putin at a joint press conference, Trump said, “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.” He also said they’d made “great progress” and agreed on “many, many points.”
Putin thanked Trump for the bilateral summit, saying Trump was correct that the war wouldn’t have begun if he’d been president in 2022. As the two concluded their brief remarks, Putin said in English, “Next time, in Moscow”—prompting Trump to respond, “Oh, that’s an interesting one. I don’t know. I’ll get a little heat on that one. But I can see it possibly happening.” Both refused to take questions from reporters before walking off the stage together, leaving the substance of their discussions—and the path forward on Ukraine—shrouded in (it seems deliberate) ambiguity.
But Saturday brought the first concrete result: Trump abandoned his demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine, aligning himself with Putin’s preference to skip straight to final peace negotiations. “It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement,” Trump announced on Truth Social—a dramatic reversal that European leaders, who’d backed the ceasefire-first approach, learned about after the fact. This was hours after Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which Trump reportedly told him that Putin wants Ukraine to cede all of Donbas in exchange for a “promise” to end the war.
What was that?