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The attempt to isolate Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has never been a smashing success. Nevertheless, it has been a key component of the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it’s proved out of touch and unaligned with the emerging multipolar reality. Outside the West, America’s arrogant attempt to enforce its hegemony did the opposite of isolating Russia, pushing it into closer and firmer relations with China, India, Africa, and the broader BRICS+ community. Within the West, the isolation of Putin and Russia was much more successful.
But on August 15, that isolation was shattered. Putin’s plane landed on American soil for the first in-person talks between the leaders of Russia and the U.S.—indeed, the first major talks between Putin and any Western leader—since the war in Ukraine began.
The summit, held in Alaska, seems to have been a success, assuming realistic expectations of a first “feel-out meeting,” as Trump called it. Going into the summit, Trump offered some metrics for evaluating whether it was going well. The president said he would know how it would go in the first minutes. After Putin arrived, Trump looked him in the eye, laughed, warmly shook Putin’s hand, and invited him to ride in his presidential limousine. Trump also said that if the summit went well, he would talk to the press with Putin; if it went badly, he would address them alone. The leaders spoke together. Trump added that if it wasn’t a success, there would be severe consequences for Russia. After the summit, the threatened sanctions were off, for now (though secondary tariffs targeting India remained).
Putin, for his part, said they had reached an understanding that he hoped could help bring about peace. Trump insisted the meeting was “extremely productive” and that “many points were agreed upon with only a very few left unresolved.” One unnamed point of disagreement, Trump said, was significant, but there was “a very good chance of getting there.”
Putin seems to have won an important diplomatic victory on the structure of negotiations. Trump came out of the summit saying that the best course of action was “to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement” and that now “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”
Russia has consistently refused the unconventional idea, pushed by the U.S. and Europe, of a ceasefire coming before negotiating the war’s underlying disputes. Years after Ukraine and Europe had used the Minsk accords with Russia as a deception to buy time to build an army for a military solution instead of the diplomatic solution the accord purported to guarantee, Russia resolved to put the ceasefire after the agreements. Before the Russians gave Ukraine time to restock weapons and raise troops, they were going to settle the issues that led to the war, whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table.
There were other important points that Trump and Putin agreed upon, too. The one significant point that remained unsolved may have been the complicated question of security guarantees for Ukraine.
Trump’s reversal on an immediate ceasefire was a major takeaway for Putin, but the U.S. president is not the only one who made concessions. Though largely ignored by the western media, Putin also seems to have made significant concessions to keep diplomacy alive. A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that “Putin is ready for peace—for compromise. That is the message that was conveyed to Trump.” Any compromises that Putin has made pertain to Western demands that, though approaching Moscow’s red lines, do not cross them. Conversely, he has not compromised on the fundamental issues that cross the very red lines over which Russia went to war.
The most significant concession by Putin regards territorial demands. Back in 2022, Putin redrew the map of Russia to include the Crimean peninsula, the eastern Donbas region, and the southern provinces Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Moscow has insisted that this new reality be recognized. In the summit with Trump, Putin offered the compromise that Russia would agree to freeze the current lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for Ukraine giving up the Donbas, including parts it still hangs on to. Moreover, in return for the parts of the Donbas that Kiev still holds, Moscow would return small areas of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk provinces.
This compromise is consistent with Moscow’s red lines because the Donbas provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, matter more to the Kremlin than the other provinces it has occupied, due to the threat to ethnic Russians’ lives and rights there beginning in 2014 and the military threat to the Donbas since the days before Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Plus, completing the capture of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would require either a very long, difficult war or significantly escalating the current one.
Putin has not, and will not, abandon Moscow’s reddest of red lines. He will not compromise on the demand that NATO never expand to Ukraine. And, after the broken promise of no NATO expansion eastward at the end of the Cold War, Russia will not settle for a gentleman’s agreement. This time, the guarantee that Ukraine can never join NATO will have to be delivered in a legally binding form.
Though Putin cannot compromise on NATO, he seems to have compromised on Ukrainian–Western relations by greenlighting Kiev’s joining the European Union. Though this concession is a compromise by Putin on Russia’s original position, it is not a recently won compromise: Moscow was open to EU membership for Ukraine at the Istanbul talks in the weeks following the invasion.
The third compromise is less certain. While some sources report that Putin is holding to his original position that Ukraine must agree to limits on its armed forces, other sources report that Putin has allowed this demand to slip away. This point may be one that Moscow is willing to negotiate. As long as there is a prohibition against long-range weapons that are capable of reaching Russia, Putin could feel that Moscow’s red lines can accommodate this concession. First, such limits would be nearly impossible to enforce, especially with Ukraine producing some of its own simpler weapons. Second, with Ukraine not in NATO and NATO not in Ukraine and the Donbas safely protected within Russia, Moscow may feel it can compromise on the size and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces.
This thorny question of post-war security for Ukraine—and for Russia—may be the significant one to which Trump was referring when he talked about issues that have not yet yielded agreement. Still, the Trump administration has signaled that some progress was made on the issue. After the Alaska summit, Trump said that Putin had “agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine” and said that this concession was a “very significant step.” The White House even said that Putin was open to “Article 5-style” security guarantees for Ukraine, referring to the collective defense provision of the NATO charter.
If this is true, this would be a very significant compromise by Putin. But there is a caveat. Moscow and European capitals differ critically on who would provide that Article 5-like guarantee. Europe and Ukraine insist that the security guarantee would be backed by Europe. In one proposal, if Russia attacked Ukraine again, European leaders would have 24 hours to decide if they would provide military support to Ukraine. In Russia’s version, that security guarantee must come, not only from the UK, France, and the United States, but also from China and even Russia itself.
Kiev and Europe object that this is an absurd proposal designed to give Moscow an effective veto over whether the guarantors would come to Ukraine’s defense and is intended to kill the negotiations. They also see it as a poison pill intended to doom negotiations.
But there may be a more charitable way of reading Moscow’s demand. The five countries that Moscow included are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Moscow seems to prefer that the UN, and not the anti-Russian Western bloc, oversee the security guarantee.
Russia insists that it not be excluded from decisions on how a security guarantee for Ukraine would be enacted and enforced. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that security cannot be “unilateral,” that Russia cannot be excluded from the security arrangement, and that the final arrangement must be based “on the principles of indivisible security.” That means the West cannot advance its own security at the expense of Russia’s, which Putin argues the West has been doing since the end of the Cold War with NATO’s encroachment to its very borders.
Though Trump originally suggested that the U.S. was prepared to send troops to Ukraine, he seems to have gone back on that decision, to the great disappointment of Europe and Ukraine. The U.S. increasingly has little appetite for challenging this Russian red line. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, told European military leaders that the U.S. will play only a minimal role in any security guarantee for Ukraine.
Vice President J.D. Vance has been clear on the subject. “I think that we should expect, and the president certainly expects, Europe to play the leading role here,” Vance told Fox News last week. The vice president explained that Europe would “carry the burden” and take the “lion’s share” of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine’s security.
The White House has been emphatic that the U.S. will not put boots on the ground. Trump has said that “European nations are going to take a lot of the burden” and provide the “first line of defence,” while the U.S. was “going to help them.” Trump said this help will come not from NATO and that it will come “by air,” leaving vague whether that means fighter jets, surveillance drones, intelligence, or air-defense systems.
Though the Western media consistently reports that Putin has been uncompromising and is not truly interested in a diplomatic end to the war, he has made some compromises, including a significant concession on Russia’s territorial demands. He has also made concessions on EU membership for Ukraine and thus its ability to reorient itself to the West. And perhaps he has made, or is willing to make, concessions on the strength of the Ukrainian armed forces. Crucially, Moscow also seems to have agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine, so long as those guarantees are not just NATO in disguise. The Kremlin insists: There can be no European or American troops on Ukrainian soil. But there are lots of non-European countries, including in BRICS+ and elsewhere in the Global South, who have an interest in a fair diplomatic conclusion to the war and who could act as peacekeepers. Russia wants those peacekeepers to be keeping a peace that is part of a broader security arrangement that embraces all of Europe, including Russia. The U.S., too, should seek to replace the security arrangement that has isolated and threatened Russia since the missed opportunity provided by the end of the Cold War.