US and Russian delegations travel to Alaska for austerity negotiations

U.S. and Russian officials will converge in Alaska states ahead of a highly anticipated Friday meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

The two will meet for the first time in six years when Trump tries to create a significant campaign promise to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The U.S. president portrays himself as a global peacemaker, hoping to use his personal relationship with Putin to achieve a failed ceasefire breakthrough for others.

On Thursday, he evaluated “25% chance” and the meeting will not be successful.

Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky was excluded from the negotiations and warned that any resolution made in his absence would make no sense.

In Anchorage, there are few signs of an upcoming high-risk meeting except for the international media that has declined in the region.

Journalists were rubbing their elbows with holidaymakers in the “low 48” states while visiting the Alaska wilderness during the peak of the tourist season.

A meeting between the two leaders will be held entirely at a nearby U.S. military base on Friday – reflecting security issues and the planned relative simplicity of sitting down, which is currently scheduled to last for several hours.

The summit happened to be a week after Trump awarded a deadline for Russia to be faced with tough new sanctions.

It is always impossible that Kiev and Moscow have been locked in a bloody war in a bloody war since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The threat of whether Trump will threaten to impose sanctions on countries that operate with Russia will lead to a disturbing trade war with China. But, he has said he will buy secondary tariffs on Russian oil in India later this month.

Last week, Trump and Putin will encounter it under the influence of a default sanction countdown and send more time to think about their next move.

Throughout the week, the United States has varied approaches to the summit’s goals and hopes—from positive and cautious to sinister.

In the latter extreme case, if Trump does not agree to end the war, Trump threatens “very serious consequences.” It seems his approach was to call on Wednesday with a group of European leaders including Zelensky.

On the other hand, Kiev will be shocked when Trump makes comments on “territories exchange,” and the White House said the president will passively by treating the meeting as “listening exercises.”

The Russians have been silent all the time – rumors of refusing to participate in the frozen frontlines, territorial exchanges or mineral transactions between Moscow and Washington.

This silence is consistent. Whenever Kremlin officials speak this week, Putin’s seemingly tricky position on the conflict is reiterated.

They reiterated that once Russia gains full sovereignty over the Ukrainian region, its part takes up a portion – Donetsk and Luhansk, known as Donbas, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and promised that Kyiv would cancel deprofessionalization and not join NATO, and join NATO along with the military alliance of the Westerners.

But Trump seems to be convinced that the usual joyful relationship he has established with Putin can help him unravel a deal to end the conflict and further develop his image as a global peacemaker.

This question has become the core of the issues Trump has provided on the world stage since he returned to the presidency. He had domestic audiences to stay happy, and many of his supporters supported him to end the war quickly and avoid the U.S.’s high-priced foreign conflict more generally.

Before the summit – his first meeting with Putin for six years – the United States hoped his style of negotiation would bring dividends, while other efforts to end the war failed.

His senior officials stressed the importance of meeting Putin in person, and Trump himself had spoken to his business-like intuition, saying he might know that “the deal was reached in the first two minutes…exactly.”

Europe finds itself in an enviable position of being caught and being excluded from Friday’s discussion.

On Wednesday’s last-minute call with Trump, European leaders were temporarily optimistic that the U.S. president would fight their corners once in Alaska.

Like Ukraine itself, they have experienced several turbulent months, during which Trump had a memorable White House bankruptcy with Zelensky and later temporarily suspended Kyofu’s military supplies, which is notably different from his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Ukraine was also eliminated before Friday.

While protests from Ukrainian leaders show that any agreement Trump and Putin reached without Kiev’s opinion equals a “dead decision,” the U.S.-Russian meeting will only remain bilateral as the week goes on.

Zelensky cautiously kept Trump present, but he had to intervene after the U.S. president’s comment on “swap in some exchange, land change” between Russia and Ukraine.

“We are not going to withdraw from Donbas,” the Ukrainian president said when speculation about potential territorial concessions peaked on Tuesday. “We can’t do that. ”

“Everyone has forgotten the first part: our territory is illegally occupied. For the Russians, Donbas is the bridgehead for a new attack in the future,” he said.

Like many of his fellow countrymen, Zelensky firmly believed Putin wanted to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty and people and believed that any concessions to Russia would cause a renewal in the near future, perhaps a fatal aggression.

That’s why he’s been trying to invite him into the room with Trump and Putin.

While that wasn’t the case at Friday’s summit, the U.S. president has subsequently promised to update Zelensky – and said he is attending a “fast” three-way conference in the near future.

The benefits Putin will get from such a meeting are unclear. The Kremlin always says that Putin and Zelensky have no reason to meet until further negotiation routes.

But this may still be out of reach. Ultimately, Putin’s “core goal is to obtain… Ukraine’s geopolitical “neutralization”.”

“It’s hard to convey the real risk… because people often can’t accept that Putin might want too much – and be very serious about it. Unfortunately, he can.”

Crazy proposals at the Alaska summit revealed that if Trump’s position on potential solutions to the conflict still changes, Putin would not.

Alaska will provide them with a gathering place; a common basis for negotiations may be difficult to find.