Carl P. Leubsdorf
It’s been nearly six weeks since President Donald Trump declared that his Alaska summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin made “great progress” toward ending the bloody war in Ukraine.
“We had a very productive meeting,” Trump told reporters afterward, though his somber visage betrayed his optimistic words. Subsequent events have shown his appearance was the better indicator.
Meanwhile, things in Ukraine have only gotten worse. Trump continues to resist steps to pressure Russia, though Putin has stepped up the war, unleashing attacks from hundreds of drones on Ukrainian civilians and even sending drones across a portion of neighboring Poland and jets over Estonia.
“Putin has acted like he has a free hand since the Alaska summit,” former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a former Trump aide turned severe critic, wrote recently on social media.
That’s because he apparently does.
The Russians abruptly dismissed Trump’s talk of a second meeting with Putin and said there was no reason yet for a three-way meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, despite widespread agreement that only the Russian and Ukrainian presidents can settle the war.
“Putin doesn’t want to meet with me,” Zelenskyy told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. He said Putin got what he wanted in Alaska, which was “to meet with the president of the United States, to show everybody video and images that he is there.”
Meanwhile, not only has Putin stepped up the attacks on Ukraine, but he also made what European leaders saw as several threats to widen it, starting with flying drones over the territory of NATO member Poland.
Trump said, “It could have been a mistake,” a conclusion echoed by the Russians. But the Poles disagreed.
“We would also wish that the drone attack on Poland was a mistake,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk posted on social media. “But it wasn’t. And we know it.”
The Poles invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, which allows a member to request consultations with others when it feels its territorial integrity has been threatened. Trump showed his apparent unconcern by sending a second-level official to the meeting of NATO nations.
Later, in a second provocation, Russia flew three jets over Estonia; Italian NATO jets escorted them away. That’s been the only NATO response, though Michael Waltz, the new U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said Monday, “the United States and our allies will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
Without a firmer response, veteran Washington Post diplomatic columnist David Ignatius warned Monday, “We are on the slippery slope to a wider war in Europe, day by day.”
Meanwhile, Trump continues to threaten – and then ignore – the possibility of invoking stricter economic sanctions on Russia, such as increasing tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. He still opposes a pending Senate sanctions bill.
Now, he says, he’ll consider more sanctions if European nations stop buying oil and gas from Russia (their purchases have been sharply cut but not totally stopped).
It’s no wonder Putin doesn’t take Trump’s verbal threats seriously.
For months, Trump has threatened harsher sanctions to pressure Putin to halt the war, often setting a two-week deadline for action. But he backed off one deadline after their face-to-face meeting, citing the Alaska talks’ alleged progress.
“I think I don’t have to think about that now,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity afterward. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”
But those two weeks – and three more – have passed without any Russian action – or U.S. response. Indeed, Vice President JD Vance said recently that the United States looks forward to a closer economic relationship with Russia, once the war is over.
“I think the president is absolutely right that once we get this peace settled, we could have a very productive economic relationship with both Russia and Ukraine in the future,” Vance told Matt Gaetz on One America News, adding that closer ties “might actually be the best guarantee of a long-term peace.”
But that seems far off. All signs are that Trump, who promised as a candidate to settle the war within 24 hours of becoming president, has no idea how to do it. Besides, he still seems more interested in befriending Putin than confronting him.
Indeed, despite the deal-maker reputation he brought to the White House, Trump should have learned from his first-term flirtation with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that, in the world of international diplomacy, flashy, ill-prepared meetings produce nothing except nice pictures.
Ironically, it was Russia’s longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who pointed out the folly of that kind of meeting when Trump was pressing for another one with Putin just days after the first one – and for the three-way summit.
“Putin is ready to meet with Zelenskyy when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all,” Lavrov told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at [email protected].
