President Trump is scheduled to meet Friday with Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss the Russo-Ukrainian War and possible ways of ending it.
Trump, who was supposed to impose ruinous secondary sanctions on Aug. 8 but did not (shades of TACO?), apparently has hopes of coming to some sort of agreement. He will be sorely disappointed, as Putin’s openly and persistently declared war aims and views of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky preclude compromise.
Putin has accused Zelensky of being an illegitimate president, even though Zelensky won a fair and free election in 2019, and Ukraine’s constitution expressly permits elections to be suspended at a time of war. The truly illegitimate president is of course Putin, who has been elected in rigged ballots several times, most recently in 2024.
This matters only because Putin has indicated that he won’t sign any official documents with Zelensky, inasmuch as the Ukrainian leader is supposedly not a real president. If Zelensky attends the Alaska summit, any agreement that is reached — however unlikely such an eventuality — will remain without Putin’s signature and thus have no importance.
Seen in this light, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s Aug. 4 comment that “Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky after preparatory work at the expert level,” while sounding at first glance like a concession, must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Equally important, Peskov’s reference to preparatory work is meaningless if Putin continues to demand Ukraine’s capitulation, dismemberment and transformation into a Russian colony.
A recent article by a Russian propagandist suggests that the Kremlin may even have Ukraine’s total annihilation in mind. The headline reads, “There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine.” A clearer statement of genocidal intent could not possibly be made. Just as clearly, this maximalist demand brooks no compromise and dooms all “preparatory work” to meaningless verbiage masking the Kremlin’s “final solution” to the Ukrainian “problem.”
The bottom line is that Putin will not and cannot negotiate in good faith, whether in Alaska or elsewhere. Which means that he will be willing to seek something resembling an end to the fighting only if he is forced to do so. Trump could bring about such a result by arming Ukraine and enabling it to stop and push back Russia’s incremental territorial advances.
Russian elites who know that Putin has led his country — and their own fortunes — to disaster could also follow in the historical footsteps of many Russian leaders and stage a coup. This scenario seems unlikely, but the reality is that a coup may be the only thing keeping Russia from disintegration.
The choice facing Russian elites is simple: Russia or Putin? If they opt for Russia, then Putin must go. If they opt for Putin, then Russia will go down the toilet.
Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, convincingly argues that Russia may be facing an imminent demise. “Russian officials are sounding increasingly alarmed and even paranoid in their public statements about the future of their country,” he writes. “What may appear to be political paranoia or an attempt to mobilize citizens behind the regime is not necessarily based on imagined enemies. It reveals the official realization that numerous negative trends are converging on Russia and that the current regime, and even the state itself, may be running out of time.”
“Three overarching fears preoccupy Russian officialdom: losing the war, economic collapse, and state fracture,” writes Bugajski. “The prospect of all three occurring soon looms on the horizon.”
Putin, Peskov and the Kremlin’s propagandists would dispute Bugajski’s analysis and insist that all is well with the war, economy and state. One expects nothing less from them, but the reality is markedly different.
Russia has lost over a million soldiers and is largely dependent on North Korea for ammunition and manpower. The militarized Russian economy is crushing the consumer economy, which is headed for stagflation. And elite discontent with Putin and rising ethno-regionalism bodes ill for the integrity of the state.
Indeed, Putin’s Russia looks more and more like Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. And we know how that ended.
If Zelensky, Trump and Putin do in fact meet, the Ukrainian and American presidents should remember that, as long as Ukraine enjoys the support of the U.S., they and not Putin have the far better cards.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”