ANCHORAGE, Alaska — President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from a nearly three-hour meeting on the Ukraine war and gave public statements, but left without announcing any agreement or ceasefire.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said.
The White House had said there would be a news conference after the closed-door meeting, but both men walked off stage without taking any questions.
Trump hosted the summit at a military base in Alaska in an audacious bid to broker a peace deal and stop a three-year war with Ukraine and its ever-rising body count. It was not immediately clear what was agreed upon in the talks.
“We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said.
Turning to Putin, he said: “We’ll probably see you again very soon.”
After warmly shaking hands on the tarmac with Putin upon his arrival here Friday, Trump was subdued and unsmiling in the joint appearance before the U.S. and Russian press, though he did look over with an approving look to Putin after the Russian president said the war with Ukraine would not have happened if he had been in office. The two leaders left after about 12 minutes without taking questions.
Trump was joined in the meeting by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a special U.S. envoy, Steve Witkoff — a departure from what was originally described as a one-on-one between the two leaders.
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Putin was accompanied at the meeting by two Russian officials, Foreign Affairs Aide Yuri Ushakov and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Ahead of the summit, Lavrov was spotted in Alaska wearing a shirt with the Cyrillic letters “CCCP,” a reference to the old Soviet Union. Before declaring its independence in 1991, Ukraine was part of the old Soviet empire.
Trump arrived in Alaska first and waited aboard Air Force One for Putin’s plane to land. He then disembarked and greeted Putin on the tarmac, applauding as the Russian leader approached.
The men walked off side-by-side on a red carpet before getting into Trump’s limousine together for the drive to their meeting. They rode alone, with no aides present. A B-2 bomber and four F-35 jets took part in a flyover after the greeting.
Before the talks formally began around 3:30 p.m. ET, the two leaders sat in a room at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson and posed for pictures with their respective delegations. A sign behind them read, “Pursuing Peace.”
Trump spent the run-up to the summit tempering expectations that it would produce a breakthrough, casting it instead as a prelude to an as-yet-unscheduled meeting that would include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I want to see a ceasefire rapidly,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today. Everyone said it can’t be today, but I’m just saying I want the killing to stop.”
Normally bullish about his negotiating skills, Trump told Fox News Radio earlier in the week that the odds are 1 in 4 that his sit-down with Putin would be a failure. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likened the summit to a “listening exercise” given that Zelenskyy wouldn’t be present.
“The president is realistic that this is likely a multistep process and he’s ready and positive about this step forward,” a senior Trump administration official told NBC News on Friday morning, when asked about the president’s mindset.
Still, the sit-down between the two leaders stands as one of the few hopeful moments in a grinding conflict that started in February 2022 when Russia sent tanks rolling across the border into Ukraine with the goal of swallowing up its democratic neighbor.
Trump has pushed for the two nations to end the fighting as he makes an increasingly public campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
After boarding Air Force One on Friday morning for his flight, Trump said of his face-to-face visit with Putin: “Something’s going to come of it.”
Russia’s early attempt to march into Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, sputtered and the conflict has since devolved into a war of attrition, with casualties totaling about 1.5 million. At present, Putin holds a slight edge on the battlefield.
Trump enjoys considerable leverage over both combatants. If he chooses, he could slap stiffer sanctions on countries such as India that buy oil from Russia. Or he could withhold much-needed money and military hardware that have kept Ukraine in the fight against its bigger adversary. For those reasons alone, the warring countries need to take seriously Trump’s insistence that the conflict end.
“Putin is clearly in a weaker position,” William Taylor, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. “This invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be a disaster for him. Trump has the cards this time.”
The summit location is itself rich in symbolism. For one, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin stemming from his conduct in the war, meaning he could have been apprehended if the site had been in a host of other nations. (The U.S. is not a signatory to the court.)
What’s more, Alaska used to belong to Putin’s country, a fact that Russian commentators and political elite have seized on as a positive signal for the talks. The U.S. purchased the territory in 1867 for $7.2 million, an acquisition that, ironically, strengthened America’s military position on the Pacific rim in a rivalry with Russia that has waxed and waned for decades.
“Putin has agreed to come to Trump, to come to America,” Robert O’Brien, White House national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “That’s critical because Alaska is a former Russian colony and Putin’s whole policy is about recovering what he believes to be former Russian Empire territory. Putin wants all of Russia’s territory back and yet he’s coming to a place that was a former Russian colony to meet with the president of the United States — when he has no chance of getting Alaska back.”
A subplot of the meeting is the personal chemistry between the American and Russian presidents. Trump took office in 2017 wanting a good relationship with Putin, who has become a pariah over his assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty. Upon his return to the White House in January, Trump at one point suggested he had a certain kinship with Putin over investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during a televised meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February.
More recently, Trump has voiced irritation with Putin over continued Russian attacks on Ukraine. Though Putin has sounded accommodating in phone calls, Trump has said, Russia hasn’t let up its military assault.
“We get a lot of bulls— thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said last month. “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday that the summit carries risks in legitimizing Putin. “My worry is that, well, the photo-op in and of itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, telegraphs to other autocrats or evil men around the world that they can get away with murdering civilians and still get a photo-op with the president of the United States,” he said.
Trump was initially optimistic he could end the war quickly. Lately, he’s conceded that the war has proved a more stubborn problem than he anticipated.
A central point of contention is land. Zelenskyy insisted last week that Ukraine would not cede territory to Russia.
“Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” he said.
Trump has suggested that some mutual “swapping” of territories would be part of a ceasefire. In his remarks Friday on Air Force One, he said that he would discuss divisions of territory in his meeting with Putin, though he added, “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.”
In a post on X Friday morning, Zelenskyy wrote in English: “The key thing is that this meeting should open up a real path toward a just peace and a substantive discussion between leaders in a trilateral format — Ukraine, the United States, and the Russian side. It is time to end the war, and the necessary steps must be taken by Russia. We are counting on America. We are ready, as always, to work as productively as possible.”
Trump was scheduled to have a working lunch with Putin and a number of top U.S. officials but, after nearly three hours of talks, the two presidents headed directly to a news conference instead.
If the two sides made progress, Trump had said he might prolong the trip and invite Zelenskyy to fly in and take part in further talks.
Once a TV showman, Trump seemed well aware of the drama and intrigue surrounding a summit that is drawing worldwide attention.
“High stakes!!!” he wrote in all-caps on his Truth Social platform before departing for Alaska.