Aaron Mate: Trump-Putin summit to address Ukraine as new arms race looms

Russia is winning, Zelenskyy is on the outside looking in, Ukraine will have to cede territory, and “as Graham and his fellow neoconservatives have long admitted, the US “investment” in Ukraine was never about preventing Russian control of the Donbas, but about using the conflict over that territory to kill Russians and weaken their government.”

With his surprise announcement of an upcoming summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump may finally be preparing to fulfill his pledge to end the Ukraine war.

The news of a Russian-US presidential summit coincided with the end of Trump’s self-imposed deadline on Russia, wherein Moscow was told to accept a ceasefire or face crushing new US sanctions. Instead of following through on his threat, Trump only had warm words for Putin, who “I believe wants to see peace.” Trump even suggested that they have agreed on what peace would look like. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” Trump claimed. “We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched.”

What exactly Trump means by “swapping” is unconfirmed.

After US envoy Steve Witkoff’s latest visit to Moscow, the emerging picture is that Russia would accept a ceasefire in exchange for recognition of its annexation of Crimea and the two provinces that make up the Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk. Because Ukrainian forces still control close to one-third of Donetsk, this would require a Ukrainian withdrawal. With Russia advancing on Pokrovsk and prioritizing Donbas, a Ukrainian withdrawal seems likely, if not inevitable. Meanwhile, Russia would agree to freeze the frontlines in the two southern regions it has also laid claim to, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, where Ukrainian forces also hold territory. Putin has even signaled that he “does not exclude” Ukrainian sovereignty over Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions provided that Russia can still access Crimea through them.

Kyiv and its European allies have already rejected the terms of the reported proposal, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowing to never cede Ukrainian territory. “Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are simultaneously solutions against peace,” Zelensky said. “…These are dead solutions.” Yet Zelensky’s non-invitation to Alaska underscores that his demands are secondary in a proxy conflict between Washington and Moscow. With the US no longer supplying tens of billions of dollars to continue the war, Zelensky has lost his key insulation from domestic unrest, growing criticism of authoritarian actions, and polls showing majority support for a negotiated solution. As for European states, despite their tough talk toward Moscow, their impotence was recently cemented by the humiliating spectacle of NATO chief Mark Rutte referring to Trump as “daddy.”

Above all, Trump’s abandonment of his sanctions-threatening deadline for a Russian ceasefire, and the US-Russia talks announced in its place, simply reflect battlefield conditions. Behind the threats and bravado, Russia has “the upper hand in the fight, U.S. and European officials quietly admit,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Because of this quietly acknowledged reality, the White House faction that has championed winding down the proxy war is emboldened. “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Sunday. “We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing.”

By contrast, Trump allies and aides who have loudly promoted confrontation with Moscow are sounding newly conciliatory. Earlier this week, Trump’s Ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, declared that Putin, despite having a “sick and twisted” mind, “does not want to take on the most powerful military in the world, which is the United States of America.” After Trump’s announcement of a summit with Putin, Whitaker now sees Russian conquest of Ukrainian territory as inevitable. “No big chunks or sections are going to be just given that haven’t been fought for or earned on the battlefield,” he told CNN on Sunday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who last month vowed a “turning point” in the Ukraine war and invoked the US bombing of Iran in a public taunt of Putin to “call the Ayatollah”, all but admitted defeat in a Sunday interview with NBC News. “I want to be honest with you, Ukraine is not going to evict every Russian, and Russia is not going to take Kyiv, so there will be some land swaps at the end.” A “good deal,” Graham added, is simply to “make sure that 2022 doesn’t happen again.” Graham did not mention, and no major US media outlet has bothered to acknowledge, that the Russian invasion of 2022 could have been prevented and then ended had Ukraine and its US patron accepted the terms of the 2015 Minsk accords or the April 2022 peace talks in Istanbul.

Graham’s endorsement of land swaps is another direct contradiction of his longstanding position that “you don’t end wars by giving territory to the aggressor,” as he told CBS News in September 2023. For that reason, he explained at the time, “you’ll never convince me this is not a good investment for America.” But as Graham and his fellow neoconservatives have long admitted, the US “investment” in Ukraine was never about preventing Russian control of the Donbas, but about using the conflict over that territory to kill Russians and weaken their government.

While Trump does not share the same zeal for continuing that investment in Ukraine, this does not mean that he will muster the will to reach a broader peace deal with Russia. Before it invaded in February 2022, Russia attempted to address a host of grievances with the US and NATO that do not run through Kyiv. This includes confrontational policies that have come directly from Trump. Earlier this month, Trump announced that he had repositioned two US nuclear submarines in response to “foolish and inflammatory statements” from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who had provocatively warned the US about the dangers of nuclear war. It is unclear if the submarines actually changed positions, but Trump’s comments were enough to stoke global alarm.

More ominous developments followed. In his first term, at John Bolton’s urging, Trump ended US participation in the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which had eliminated an entire class of ground-launched nuclear and conventional weapons with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (311 to 3,418 miles) – more than 2,600 missiles combined. Trump’s nixing of the INF prompted what Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s leading think tank, described as the “the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s.”

Even after the US left the treaty, Russia maintained a self-imposed policy of abiding by its provisions. But this week, Moscow announced that it “no longer considers itself bound” by those “previously adopted self restrictions.” Russia cited US plans for the deployment of intermediate-range missiles, most ominously in Germany under a plan announced by the Biden administration. The scuttling of the INF leaves only one remaining US-Russia nuclear arms treaty in place, New START, which is set to expire next year. With that looming deadline comes the threat of a renewed arms race between the US and Russia.

If both Trump and Putin are serious about making peace, in Ukraine and beyond, their meeting in Alaska could not be more timely.