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The dueling summits over the fate of Ukraine held in Anchorage and then Washington over the last few days yielded dramatically contrasting results for Russian President Vladimir Putin, indicating - at least for now - he overplayed his hand in attempting to woo the United States to his view of the conflict.
Despite the opportunity for a peace deal, Putin's resistance to compromise and his potentially misplaced confidence in a military victory over Ukraine risked missing the chance to capitalize on his warm vibe with President Donald Trump, while dragging out a war that is killing thousands every week and undermining Russia's economy and its global strategic position.
Since the summits, Russia has continued to throw obstacles in the way of any measures recommended to advance the process, suggesting Putin is not willing to move at the same pace as Trump. On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made clear that Russia expects to have a veto over any security arrangements Europe and the U.S. come up with to defend Ukraine from future attacks.
The risks are still growing over Putin's recalcitrance. "Putin knows that in the last weeks he's been facing a crisis. He sensed the danger, the red alarm went off," a Kremlin insider said before the summit, when Trump was still threatening tougher sanctions and Putin realized he needed to mend ties. "He really wants to stop the war, but he needs to stop it in a way that looks like a victory," he added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Putin did buy time and stave off sanctions after he persuaded Trump on Friday to abandon his pressure for a ceasefire and instead pursue the Russian preference for a comprehensive peace deal that could take years to negotiate - allowing Russia to fight on without the risk of tough new U.S. sanctions.
But Trump's subsequent genial White House meeting Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Europeans showed the perils for Putin facing determined European backing for Ukraine's fight to remain independent with a strong army. The summit marked a setback in Putin's decades-long goal to gain dominion over Ukraine and in his efforts to peel the U.S. away from Europe.
The Washington meeting shifted the onus back onto Putin to take the next step in the peace process and meet with Zelensky, disappointing nationalist Russian commentators who were convinced that Putin had persuaded Trump at the Anchorage summit to force a disadvantageous deal onto Zelensky.
"I don't know what the thinking is inside the Kremlin. If the goal was to manipulate Trump at Anchorage, I think they didn't do a very good job of it," said Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior director for Russia on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.
Putin also did not appear to succeed in luring Trump into a broader conversation about the benefits of economic cooperation between Russia and the U.S. - a card he'd hoped to use to sway Trump into accepting Moscow's view of the conflict, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. "A lot didn't work out."
The White House now expects an imminent summit between Putin and Zelensky, but Russia has sent out very different signals in a dynamic that characterized the pattern of misunderstandings in the discussions between Washington and Moscow over the war.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that Putin and Zelensky had both shown "a willingness to sit down with each other" and that preparations for the meeting were underway. But that same day, Lavrov played down the meeting, saying that "any contacts between top officials would have to be prepared very thoroughly," an argument that Russia has used for years to deflect any meeting with Zelensky.
Putin is unlikely to accept an imminent meeting, according to a Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats, because it would confer "a certain legitimization of the Ukrainian political regime by Moscow, which would present problems." The Russian position maintains that a meeting can only come once the terms of a deal have been worked out - which for Russia involves Ukraine's capitulation.
Lavrov, meanwhile, referred to Zelensky on Tuesday as an untrustworthy "character." Putin has previously called Zelensky illegitimate and depicted his administration as "drug addicts and neo-Nazis."
With such views on Zelensky and insistence on addressing "root causes" of the conflict - which means turning Ukraine back into a client state - Russia is sticking to maximalist goals in the conflict and has not been open to the compromises needed for a Trump-led peace agreement.
"Part of the reason that Russia is unwilling to bend reflects the fact that Ukraine is basically Putin's white whale. This is what he wants, and he's not going to stop until he gets it, or until he's convinced that he can't get it," said Nate Reynolds, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Russia director at the National Security Council.
At times, he said, Russia seemed to struggle to get its message through to the Trump administration.
"The Russians, to some extent, probably have been surprised by a couple of things. One, that they can't get the U.S. to understand what they're asking for, and two, that they can't get the United States to accept it," he said. "Putin and his advisers keep coming out of these meetings with U.S. interlocutors, who then highlight what seem to be misunderstandings, frankly, about what the Russian demands are."
Lavrov said Tuesday that Trump and his team increasingly showed an "understanding that it is necessary to eliminate the root causes." But when Trump was asked the day before about his understanding of the "root causes of the crisis," he avoided answering.
Moscow's demands that Ukraine cede territory not yet captured by Russia and that it be permanently shut out of other alliances and groupings have been dismissed by senior U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance in May and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in recent days.
Russia's conditions for peace were spelled out in a June 2 memorandum and there is no indication that it has backed down from them, including curbing Ukraine's sovereignty, drastically downsizing its military and dictating what international organizations it can join. The demands are designed to force Ukraine into a close, unwanted economic and political partnership with Russia.
Putin sees Russians and Ukrainians as "one people" and Ukraine not as a real country, making any kind of peace deal difficult. "The true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia," he wrote in a 2021 essay.
While Trump has compared the conflict to a struggle over prime oceanfront property, analysts say Russia sees it as more than a conflict between two countries but as a chance to relitigate the Soviet Union's humiliating loss of the Cold War and to transform Europe's security architecture.
"There is no war between Russia and Ukraine. There is a war of the united globalist West against Russia at the hands of its Ukrainian neocolonial regime. It is impossible to negotiate peace with Zelensky, a puppet of the neocolonial regime," wrote Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst. "Peace can only be achieved through negotiations with the master of this neocolonial regime."
There was probably a misunderstanding even over the matter of security guarantees that Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said Moscow had agreed to. According to Graham, Putin's understanding of security guarantees and Witkoff's are "very different things." According to a 2022 draft peace agreement with Ukraine, Russia would be a co-guarantor to any security arrangement, giving it an effective veto over any response, "which is not quite what Ukrainians would have in mind, and not what Witkoff understood."
On Wednesday, Lavrov said that any security arrangement had to include Russia: "Discussing security issues without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere."
Putin's goal in power has been to rebuild Russia as a great global power, which to him entails the subjugation of Ukraine. His emotional investment highlights the perils of failure in a highly charged peace process that Graham says could take months or even years.
"The idea that you are going to get a comprehensive peace deal anytime soon - that's delusional. The issues are too complex," he said.
Meanwhile, Russia is confident that it will win on the battlefield and doesn't really need a peace process, said Reynolds, a position that is not likely to endear it to the U.S. administration hoping for a foreign policy win.
"They basically have two theories," he said. "One is that the West gives up and walks away. And the other is that the political center in Kiev collapses under pressure. But neither one of those things is fully under Russia's control."
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