LONDON -- Could President Donald Trump's summit this Friday in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin bring a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine?
Right now, most observers have far more doubts than hopes.
What's clear is the meeting could be a golden opportunity for Putin to influence Trump's vision for how to end the war.
Russian media is crowing about the choice of location for the summit -- cheering the idea that Trump and Putin will decide the fate of the war alone and that Alaska's distance from Europe underlines how European countries and Ukraine are being sidelined. Some Russian media commentators also note how Alaska was once Russian territory, sold by Tsar Alexander II to the United States for a pittance in 1867
Many observers, particularly Russian, are dismissing the meeting as a sign Trump has allowed Putin to once again deceive him. They note that Trump threatened Russia with tougher sanctions, but instead Putin now has a summit where he can once more pretend to want peace. They view this as Putin's latest -- and potentially very successful -- gambit to defuse Trump's frustration with him and head off his threat to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.
Some Russian analysts have suggested the surprise summit, in fact, is a graceful way for both Putin and Trump to sidestep the awkward issue of Trump's own deadline last week to impose the new sanctions if Russia didn't end the war. Trump, clearly reluctant to do so and aware they might not work, has been able to put them off.
"For Trump, it's an opportunity to save face in a situation when he actually has few ways of pressuring Moscow," Farida Rustamova and Margarita Lituova, Russian journalists who closely cover the Kremlin, wrote on their Substack. "For Putin, a personal meeting would help him to maintain a relationship with Trump, who is clearly inclined to sympathize with the Russian position."
But there are still some glimmers that perhaps the meeting could move a ceasefire closer.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday said the U.S. has received a signal from Russia that it may be "ready to end the war, or at least to make a first step towards a ceasefire."
"This was the first such signal from them," Zelenskyy told reporters.
There are indications that the gap between Russia and Ukraine's positions has at least slightly narrowed.
The Wall Street Journal and others have reported Putin is now demanding Ukraine hand over the remainder of unoccupied eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in exchange for halting his offensive on two other southeastern regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Russia could also hand back the small slivers of land it occupies in Ukraine's Sumy and Kherson regions. Previously, Putin had insisted on taking Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as well.
But those demands would still be extreme -- Ukraine would be giving up a huge swath of territory, home to hundreds of thousands of people and important defensive strongholds, in exchange for almost nothing. It would also make it far easier for Russia to relaunch its invasion later.
Zelenskyy has already ruled out handing over unoccupied Donbas, noting Ukraine's constitution in any case forbids it. He again on Tuesday also made clear there could be no territorial exchanges without "security guarantees" for Ukraine. European countries have fully backed him.
But Trump has indicated he is unwilling to provide any meaningful security guarantees and even if he did, it's very unlikely Putin would accept that.
It is hard to see how that gap can be bridged. But for the first time, both sides are speaking more about freezing the lines of contact, something that is far more likely to be acceptable.
The summit will be a test to see if something has shifted in the Kremlin and if Putin now truly wants a ceasefire.
Andrii Zahorodniuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, told ABC News he believes Putin will almost certainly propose demands he knows are unacceptable so that Ukraine will alienate Trump by rejecting them. Trump could block military aid to Ukraine if it does not accept.
Russian media has already been laying the ground to blame Europe and Ukraine if the summit fails to produce peace. Trump himself on Monday expressed irritation with Zelenskyy for bringing up the constitutional block on handing over land.
Putin "plays with the desire of the U.S. administration to bring peace to Ukraine," Zahorodniuk said. "Putin wants to get the U.S. on their side to get all Donbas, something they cannot achieve without losing another few hundred thousand people and a year of time."