Truce Process

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 11, 2025

 

What’s the realistic best-case scenario for Friday’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin?

 

The best-case scenario is the president insisting on guarantees for Ukraine’s security and warning Putin that, if Russia rejects that demand, America will send another $50 billion in weapons to Kyiv. Then, when the czar refuses, Trump walks out.

 

But I said “realistic,” didn’t I?

 

To be fair, the worst-case scenario also doesn’t look very realistic right now. Trump has sounded more hostile to Moscow lately than at any point since 2015, having awakened at some point to the reality that Russia is the true obstacle to peace in Ukraine. It took him long enough: Putin’s been beating him over the head with that fact every day since January 20.

 

A Munich-scale betrayal by the White House now seems less likely than it did three months ago. If you’re worried about the president declaring the Ukrainian Sudetenland part of Russia and vowing to cut off weapons sales to Europe—and some of us are—you probably shouldn’t be.

 

In all likelihood, there won’t be a proper “outcome” to the summit at all. I assume Trump will hear Putin out, chatter as usual about the limitless potential of friendly relations between the U.S. and Russia, pledge to keep talking with both sides, then promise to reconnoiter with Volodymyr Zelensky to feel him out about Moscow’s terms.

 

But if you came here looking for a more Eeyore-ish take, look no further than the fact that this meeting will be held in Alaska.

 

Bad enough that the White House would welcome a war criminal onto U.S. territory, undoing three years of diplomatic work by Ukraine and its allies to make Putin a pariah across the West. Worse is the expansionist symbolism: Team Trump may not have been mindful of Alaska’s history when it agreed to this location, but Russian nationalists surely were.

 

It’s the perfect place for Putin to justify absorbing another country’s territory. America expanded its borders by purchasing Alaska from Russia, now Russia is expanding its borders by pulverizing Ukraine. Nations gain territory at another’s expense all the time. We can dislike the means Putin has chosen, but by what right does the United States criticize his ends?

 

The only location that would have suited the Russians better is Greenland. I wonder if they proposed it.

 

Forget the question I asked about the best-case scenario, though. Here’s a simpler one: What is the point of this summit? What are each of the two parties hoping to achieve?

 

It’s easy to understand what Putin wants out of it but less easy to understand what Trump does. “Peace,” the president would presumably say—but there’s no possibility of negotiations leading to something that might reasonably be described as peace. This isn’t a peace process.

 

At best, it’s a “truce process.” And a truce process isn’t going to solve anything.

 

Goals.

 

For Putin, this is an opportunity to get Trump back on his side in the war.

 

It can’t be a coincidence that the summit was announced on the very day that new U.S. sanctions on Russia were supposed to take effect. Presidential diplomacy was a modest last-minute concession from Moscow to avoid further alienating Trump by blowing off his latest threat. Putin has been “tapping him along” for months in negotiations, feigning interest in peace to humor the president’s diplomatic ambitions, and now he’s doing it again.

 

Flattering Trump by agreeing to meet him face to face (on his home turf, no less) will reassure him that his on-again-off-again “situationship” with Putin is on again. Vladimir still respects him. The White House will be back to blaming Zelensky for the war in no time.

 

It was also important to Moscow that this summit be bilateral rather than trilateral, I suspect. The U.S. has allegedly lobbied the Russians for a three-way meeting sometime soon but Zelensky isn’t invited to this one.

 

A bilateral meeting suits Putin’s purposes in two ways. Obviously, it gives him the chance to sell Trump on Russia’s war demands without any pushback from the Ukrainians. “I get all of eastern Ukraine and Zelensky gets nothing” sounds more convincing when Zelensky isn’t present to point out that it’s insane. Less obviously, it will appeal to the president’s native belief that the world is divided into great powers and lesser powers and that the latter needn’t be taken seriously.

 

Trump is a square peg in a round hole, a rapacious predator by nature who’s charged by virtue of his job with leading the Western liberal order of international laws and norms. The Western view of the current war is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation to which Russia has no right; the predatory authoritarian view is that the strong do what they can in their “spheres of influence” while the weak suffer what they must. Insisting on a bilateral summit is Putin’s way of underlining that, reminding the president that “weak” powers like Ukraine should be made to suffer whatever “strong” ones like the U.S. and Russia decide among themselves is appropriate.

 

If Trump comes away from this meeting believing that Putin’s demands are reasonable enough to relay them to Zelensky, I suspect Moscow will consider the summit a success. That would effectively ally the U.S. with Russia’s position in negotiations. And if the Ukrainians end up saying no, not only will that put the onus on them as an impediment to peace, it’ll effectively pit them against Trump.

 

What about the president, though? What does he get out of this meeting?

 

He gets a big made-for-TV production showing how serious he is about peace, for one thing, the same as he got when he met Kim Jong Un during his first term. And he gets to indulge his conviction that he’s such a skilled negotiator, so persuasive and charismatic at the bargaining table, that he alone might be able to charm and/or bully Putin into making concessions. If Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff have failed so far to broker peace, that’s only because they’re not Donald Trump. Let the, ahem, master have a crack at it.

 

Then again, perhaps the president has come to understand that this entire exercise is futile and the Alaska summit is his last half-hearted attempt to bring the two sides together before he washes his hands of it. Putin’s relentless attacks on Ukraine have humiliated Trump after he promised repeatedly as a candidate to end the war quickly; maybe he’s ready to end America’s role in the so-called peace process and Friday is his way of giving it the ol’ college try before he pulls the plug officially.

 

Which is fine. As long as the U.S. continues to arm Ukraine after Trump walks away, albeit on Europe’s dime from now on, that’s an acceptable outcome. Whereas if the president walks away and decides that “peace” requires America to try to end the war abruptly by cutting off weapons, that’s not only unacceptable, it’s potentially the end of Ukraine.

 

But I confess, after listening to him talk on Friday about the “swapping of territories” between the two sides, I’m not sure that even he knows what he wants. Or that he understands what Russia wants on the most basic level.

 

Peace or truce?

 

According to the Wall Street Journal, European leaders needed no fewer than three phone calls with the White House to clarify what the Russians are demanding from Ukraine.

 

On the first call Trump told them that Putin was willing to withdraw from the partially occupied southern provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson if Ukraine agreed to forfeit the remaining part of Donetsk in the northeast that it still holds—a territorial “swap,” just as he said. That would be shocking if true, though, as Russia controls most of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and has already formally annexed both. Without those two provinces, it would no longer possess contiguous territory spanning from Luhansk in the far north to Crimea in the south.

 

On the second call Witkoff, the president’s liaison to Russia, told the Europeans that Moscow is willing to “both withdraw and freeze the front line,” which meant … what, exactly? A third call was then convened, at which point Witkoff claimed that “the only offer on the table was for Ukraine to withdraw unilaterally from Donetsk in exchange for a ceasefire,” a total nonstarter. (Europeans on the call allegedly came away believing he was “overwhelmed and incompetent.”) Maybe that’s why Trump felt obliged to meet with Putin: At this point, the only way he’s going to get a clear answer is by cutting Witkoff out of the process and hearing it from the Russians himself.

 

The fact that he believes any territory might be “swapped” is a bad omen for Friday, though. There was a chance of that happening last year after the Ukrainian military invaded Kursk province in Russia, gaining a potential bargaining chip that might have been traded for Luhansk and Donetsk, but the Russians have since retaken Kursk. The only “swaps” that can happen now would involve Ukrainian territory that Russia holds and Ukrainian territory that Ukraine holds. And that’s not the sort of deal that either side will agree to.

 

Putin won’t relinquish any Ukrainian land that he’s gained. For him, the point of the war is to absorb as much of Ukraine as possible; he’s paid too dearly to give any of it back. Zelensky won’t agree to relinquish land either. He’s said many times that the national constitution forbids it (Trump doesn’t care about that, go figure), and even if he wanted to do it, Ukrainians don’t. They’re understandably weary of war but one recent poll found more than three-quarters of them oppose ceding land. When asked specifically about land that’s already occupied by Russia, more than half still oppose relinquishing it.

 

Differences as irreconcilable as that suffice to make the “peace process” in Alaska absurd, but there’s a more basic absurdity underlying it. Russia simply doesn’t want peace and isn’t pretending otherwise.

 

“Peace” refers to a durable settlement of differences. Ukraine might agree to give up territory for a genuinely durable settlement, which in this case can only mean formal pledges from Western powers that it won’t fight alone the next time the Russians cross the border. Moscow opposes any Western military alliance with Ukraine for just that reason: It fully intends to attack again in the future and doesn’t want to end up fighting the U.S. and/or EU when the time comes.

 

Russia won’t give up its casus belli and there can’t be peace with an enemy like that. Ask the Israelis, who’ve been offering the other side peace deals off and on for decades and have been rebuffed every time because the terms would extinguish any Palestinian right of return. There have been many truces between the two but nothing like peace because the casus belli persists.

 

So too with Russia and Ukraine, which is what makes this a “truce process.” Putin is willing to agree to a temporary ceasefire that grants him a beachhead in eastern Ukraine, where his forces can regroup and plot their conquest of the rest of the country. How long that ceasefire lasts (months? years?) is a matter of circumstance, but there’s no outcome here where the Kremlin recognizes Ukraine’s sovereignty and acquiesces to a Western troop presence there, as one might expect in a true “peace” deal.

 

It’s a truce deal. Is Trump okay with that?

 

Truce in his time.

 

My guess is that he is.

 

The reason to worry that he’ll sell out the Ukrainians on Friday is that a truce serves his political interests better than a peace deal would. He doesn’t care about Ukraine or the Western liberal order in principle; what he cares about is being seen as a peacemaker. If he can get the Russians to agree to stop shooting, that’ll motivate him to lean hard on the Ukrainians to accept Russia’s terms—even if that leaves Kyiv vulnerable to a future invasion.

 

An America First-er simply isn’t going to drive a hard bargain about making Ukraine part of NATO or some NATO-esque security arrangement that might put European peacekeepers on the ground. Trump doesn’t want to raise the risk of the U.S. being entangled in a wider European war with Russia, even for the sake of trying to deter a reinvasion of Ukraine. On that crucial point, he and Putin are entirely aligned.

 

But he also doesn’t want Russia to make a fool of him by reneging on a deal he brokers and invading again before he leaves office, as that really would dial up the Munich comparisons. If Putin assures him that nothing will happen before 2029, I think Trump will latch onto the prospect of a ceasefire with both hands and press Zelensky to agree to Moscow’s demands. He’s a man who likes quick “wins.” And a truce, not peace, is the only quick win that’s realistically in the offing.

 

If Zelensky refuses, that’s a “win” for the president too insofar as it’s an excuse for him to walk away from Kyiv entirely. His conscience, such as it is, will be clear: He got the Russians to agree to stop bombing and the damned Ukrainians didn’t even say thank you.

 

Should things go really well for Putin on Friday we might even end up with Helsinki redux, with Trump calling Barack Obama a traitor or whatever while the czar stands next to him grinning delightedly. The odds that the president will emerge from their conversation convinced that Ukraine really does belong to Russia can’t be lower than 25 percent.

 

Heck, they can’t be lower than 10 percent that he’ll decide Alaska belongs to Russia. Anything for him to be rid of Lisa Murkowski.