President Trump took an aggressive stance ahead of his high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin by threatening “very serious consequences” if Russia doesn’t move toward ending its war in Ukraine.
However, Mr. Putin has a long history of toying with peace deals.
He has weathered waves of economic sanctions and tough talk from world leaders since the Ukraine conflict began in 2014 and Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022.
Mr. Trump didn’t elaborate Wednesday on what punishments he had in mind for Russia if Mr. Putin doesn’t budge at the summit.
Mr. Trump views the meeting Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, as a crucial first step. Still, he said he needs to see a genuine commitment to peace from Mr. Putin before arranging a follow-up meeting to hash out a ceasefire deal.
If the summit goes well, Mr. Trump said, a second meeting should begin “almost immediately” among himself, Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting, which will be more productive than the first, because the first is [where] I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference at the Kennedy Center.
He also cautioned that there may not be a second meeting at all.
“There may be no second meeting, because if I feel that it’s not appropriate to have it, because I didn’t get the answers that we have to have, then we’re not going to have a second,” Mr. Trump said.
He has plenty of reasons to tamp down expectations.
Russia and Ukraine have agreed to numerous ceasefire deals that immediately collapsed, with each side blaming the other.
In early May, Russia and Ukraine reported attacks on each other’s forces on the first day of a 72-hour ceasefire called by Mr. Putin.
By Mr. Zelenskyy’s count, Russia has broken 25 ceasefire agreements since 2014, when Russia first attacked its neighbor.
In a video conference call Wednesday between Mr. Trump and European leaders, Mr. Zelenskyy warned that Mr. Putin wouldn’t give up the land grab.
He said Mr. Putin is “trying to apply pressure … on all sectors of the Ukrainian front” in an attempt to show that Russia is “capable of occupying all of Ukraine.”
After the video meeting, Mr. Zelenskyy said that “there should be a ceasefire first, then security guarantees — real security guarantees” and that Mr. Trump “expressed his support,” CNN reported.
On Monday, Mr. Trump said a peace settlement would require “land swapping” by Ukraine and Russia. Mr. Zelenskyy and some European leaders said that smacked of a dangerous appeasement of Mr. Putin.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, Florida Republican, said he expects Mr. Putin will demand that Ukraine formally surrender territory, which he described as a deal-breaker.
“Putin wants a truce to get land that he has not been able to secure by military force, and the Ukrainians do not want to see a loss of their people, but they are happy to continue fighting. So, if they want to continue fighting, why give them something that Russia hasn’t been able to take?” Mr. Mast said.
Despite negotiations and deals for prisoner swaps and some pauses in the conflict, Russia and Ukraine have not had a significant pause in warfare that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.
The failure of ceasefires between the two Eastern European neighbors goes back to February 2014, when Russia took Crimea, violating the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership that the two countries signed in 1997.
By Sept. 5, 2014, Ukraine and Russia signed the first major ceasefire agreement. It fell apart within hours as Russian proxy forces attacked Donetsk airport and other places in Ukraine, Ukrainian sources reported.
The Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement on Feb. 15, 2015, collapsed even faster. Just minutes after its adoption, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported an attack in Donetsk.
Although the organization went to the war zone to identify ceasefire violations by either side, it could not determine any.
Other subsequent ceasefire efforts were intended to allow for respites during major holidays, academic periods and key agricultural cycles.
Those include Easter, Christmas and New Year’s Eve lulls in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.