President Vladimir Putin might be forgiven for thinking the second Trump administration is a boon to Russia.
In just a few months, President Trump has succeeded in antagonizing allies with his tariff spree and noncommittal statements on NATO — an organization Mr. Putin has derided as an “anachronism.” His administration has dismantled foreign aid and declared war on “gender ideology,” aligning the United States more closely with Russia’s own illiberal policies. And by threatening to gobble up Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump has appeared to license the irredentism that Mr. Putin would argue justifies the force with which Russia has pummeled Ukraine for more than three years.
On Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s inconsistency has been the only constant. He has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, for starting the war; he has blamed Mr. Putin for prolonging it. And he has flip-flopped on U.S. weapons support, making it harder for Ukraine to reliably plan.
Now an impatient Mr. Trump, obsessed with claiming the laurels of peacemaker, has precipitated a showdown in Alaska on Friday without Ukraine or Europeans present — a diplomatic coup for Russia.
But Mr. Putin should be careful what he wishes for. In the world as it is being remade by Mr. Trump — with rules that are fluid, relationships protean and raw power the key currency — Mr. Putin’s Russia, resource constrained and mired in the war in Ukraine, is going to find itself ill equipped to throw its weight around, whatever the outcome of Friday’s summit.
Consider the tariffs. Russia, already facing an economic slowdown, has little reason to gloat over America’s imposition of tariffs on imports from more than 90 countries. A U.S. trade war could slow global growth and dampen demand for Russian commodity exports, forcing the Kremlin to cut nonmilitary spending or draw down its remaining reserves.
But Mr. Putin has a larger problem: Mr. Trump has not handed him Ukraine. Nor is he likely to at a rushed summit that excludes major stakeholders. He has also not — so far — reduced the U.S. military presence in Europe. Mr. Trump may have seemed at times to endorse the Thucydidean idea that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” — on the face of it, validating Mr. Putin’s long-held dream that the great powers, of which he assumes Russia is one, can carve the world into spheres of influence over the heads of smaller countries. But the war in Ukraine essentially remains unwinnable on Mr. Putin’s terms, and Russia, with so many of its resources sunk in it, is being forced into retreat elsewhere.
Russian advances on the battlefield continue, in the main, to come slowly and at enormous cost to the invader. And even if the Russian military were to accomplish another breakthrough, Mr. Putin still could not achieve his real aim: Ukraine’s total subjugation within Russia’s orbit. Ukrainians will resist occupation, and Europe will not abandon Ukraine to its fate.
And as Mr. Putin indulges his illusion of total victory, Russia’s global throw-weight suffers. In September 2023 Russian peacekeepers largely stood by as Azerbaijan took control of the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last December, as rebel forces approached Damascus, Syria’s capital, Mr. Putin abandoned Syria’s brutal dictator, his longtime ally Bashar al-Assad, to his fall. In June, Russia took a back seat as Israeli and U.S. airstrikes hit Iran’s nuclear and military facilities, denouncing the attacks but doing nothing to help materially.
Russia’s decreasing ability to assert itself has emboldened other players. That President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan dared to criticize Mr. Putin and implicate Russia in the downing of a passenger jet, or that Mr. Trump just hosted a peace summit with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to great fanfare — rebranding a regional transit corridor as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity — shows how those powers are acting with a newfound chutzpah in a region Russia considers to be its sphere of influence. And there is little Russia can do about it. The war in Ukraine, a cul-de-sac of enormous proportions, has generated a host of smaller cul-de-sacs for Russia’s foreign policy, laying bare its limitations and even forcing it into occasional retreats.
Countries close to Russia, like Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan, remain vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s appetite for domination. Not because Russia would want to occupy them militarily, but because Mr. Trump’s apparent disinterest in their domestic trajectories (and Europe’s preoccupation with itself) could leave them more susceptible to Russia’s creeping economic, cultural and political coercion over time. But Mr. Putin will have limited bandwidth to ramp up any pressure anywhere unless he ends the war in Ukraine. And there is no indication that he intends to do so.
Mr. Putin has long insisted that Ukraine will be his. But in a world shaped by Mr. Trump’s mercurial temperament and might-is-right principles, his obsession may cost Russia more than he has bargained for.
Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.