Russian President Vladimir Putin may already feel like a winner when he sits down Friday in Alaska with President Donald Trump.
Putin, who has ruthlessly secured unprecedented power at home, has seen his army finally eke out a slight advantage on the battlefield in Ukraine after years of brutal back-and-forth fighting.
Now, invited in from the diplomatic cold, the Russian leader headed for Anchorage full of praise for his American counterpart’s “energetic and sincere efforts” ahead of the talks, which will see him set foot on U.S. soil for the first time in a decade.
For his part Trump warned en route to Alaska that Putin would face “very severe” economic consequences unless he agreed to stop the war.
Asked about overnight attacks on Ukraine, Trump told reporters Friday aboard Air Force One that this ongoing aggression actually hurts his Russian counterpart. “He thinks that makes him — gives him strength in negotiating. I think it hurts him, but I’ll be talking to him about it later,” Trump said.
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But many observers see Putin as likely to enter the talks feeling emboldened.
“Putin has scored a success already by being invited to meet Trump on U.S. soil,” said Keir Giles, a senior fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
“Trump has facilitated Putin’s acceptance back into international diplomacy, despite the fact that he ought to be finding it difficult to travel, given his status as an internationally wanted war criminal,” Giles told NBC News in a telephone interview Thursday, pointing to the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in March 2023.
On the streets of Moscow, there was also a sense of positivity about the meeting and confidence in their leader, who has continually served as president or prime minister of Russia since 1999.
Pavel Grebenyuk, 45, told NBC News the summit with Trump was important because “there should be a connection between Russia and America, two of the most leading powers,” and “there should remain a dialogue.”
But Grebenyuk, who said he worked at a window manufacturing factory, added that he thought it was “unlikely anything will change dramatically,” after the talks to end the war, which entered its fourth year in February.
“I don’t expect anything,” he said.
Elena Ionova, a soloist with Moscow’s Operetta Theatre, also said that it was “good that this meeting is happening,” but that she didn’t “trust people on the other side.” She added that she was “worried about Putin’s fate.”
“Of course, we would all like for all of this to end and end, at least, without any major catastrophes,” she said.
It is hard to get an accurate sense of the weight of public opinion in Russia as a result of Putin’s yearslong crackdown on dissent, which has stifled political opposition and free speech.
A recent survey by the independent pollster Levada Center showed that the level of support for Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine remained high at 75% in Russia, but that nearly two-thirds of respondents supported peace talks.
The venue for those talks is itself significant.
Trump and Putin will meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a military base that was crucial to U.S. efforts to counter the then-Soviet Union during the Cold War.
It sits just outside Anchorage, the largest city in the territory, which the U.S. bought from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867 — a sale that has since been viewed as naïve by Russians after Alaska was found to contain vast natural resources.
Putin aide Yuri Ushakov signaled Thursday that while the primary focus of the summit would be Ukraine, economic ties between the two nations would also be on the agenda. Putin hinted that a nuclear arms control treaty may also be discussed.
Ukraine and its allies may fear Putin offering Trump other incentives to distract from his hard-line position on the war he launched by invading his neighbor.
“Stripped of political narratives and competing interests, and based on Putin’s own statements and actions, his core demands have not changed,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a Berlin-based think tank.
Those demands have previously included Ukraine ceding all the land that Putin claims to have annexed and accepting permanent neutrality, with a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO. Putin claims four Ukrainian regions — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014, although Russian forces do not fully control all of the territory in each region.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have long said they would not concede any territory that Russia illegally annexed. Ukraine has also insisted that any agreement must include “security guarantees” from its allies so that Moscow is not able to launch future aggression.
Stanovaya added that she thought Putin intended to “propose to Trump that the war be brought to an end, and will press the point that he genuinely wishes it to stop.”
“His main objective is to persuade Trump that Europe and the current Ukrainian leadership are the obstacles to ending the conflict, and that a cessation of hostilities is possible if there are guarantees that Ukraine will not use any pause to rearm,” she said on X, adding that the Russian president “will strongly promote the idea that the U.S. and Russia are two great nations that should maintain good relations regardless of local conflicts.”
In Moscow, Ionova, the opera singer, said she hoped “everything will be fine,” adding, “We wish that this summit will be successful for us, for Russia.”