I wrote about the Alaska Summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at Anchorage on 15 August in last week’s edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
Hopes were raised that maybe after the first US-Russian summit in Trump’s second term, the war in Ukraine might be coming to an end. Even if this did not happen soon, it was thought that the face-to-face meeting between the two presidents might launch a process for winding down the war, one that has cost the two warring parties hundreds of thousands of human lives.
This is in addition to the destruction it has wreaked on Ukraine, and more recently on Russia as well, to the extent that it will take decades to rebuild what this senseless war has damaged or destroyed.
Aside from the human losses and the material destruction, something just as valuable in the long run has also been lost in the form of the foundations for good neighbourly relations between two peoples and two nations that share a common history and that geography should push, by sheer necessity if not good will, to entertain friendly relations with each other in the context of mutual security and respect for each other’s territorial integrity.
In order to build upon the momentum started by the Anchorage Summit, the US administration organised another important meeting on 18 August, this time at the White House in Washington and bringing together seven European leaders in addition to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte.
The world followed the scenes of Trump receiving Zelensky at the Oval Office for the second time this year and then of a larger meeting with European leaders that included President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen. The other leaders in attendance were British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb.
The purpose of this unprecedented US-European summit was to try to formulate a joint approach to building on the results of the Alaska Summit three days earlier. For a brief moment, history seemed to be in the making, and it seemed that the war in Ukraine, with the consent of the warring parties and their respective allies and partners, might end before its third anniversary in February next year.
The main items on the agenda were security guarantees for Ukraine to dissuade Russia from launching another war against Ukraine in the future and the intractable issue of “land swaps” between Ukraine and Russia. The first item was to be discussed and agreed upon between the militaries of Europe and Ukraine, and these discussions in fact started last week. For the first time since Trump was sworn into office in January, the US agreed to cooperate by providing air cover and intelligence-sharing with Europe, though not the deployment of American boots on the ground in Ukraine.
As far as the second item is concerned, namely land swaps, it was agreed that this would be left to a possible second summit meeting between the Russian and the Ukrainian presidents. If these two men agreed to this in principle, Trump could then join the meeting, making it a trilateral summit or “trilat” meeting.
However, the Russians, maybe for tactical reasons, threw cold water on the results of the US-European summit. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for the thorough preparation of a summit between the Russian and the Ukrainian presidents and then reiterated Russia’s rejection of the deployment of European troops in Ukraine as part of security guarantees to the Ukrainians.
He also insisted in the meantime that Russia should also take part in this respect, a point that should not be dismissed outright. Any talk or ultimately any agreement on security guarantees should be based on the principle of reciprocal guarantees, he said. In other words, the security guarantees should be a two-way street to be sustainable.
Trump said this week that he would wait for two weeks to see whether Russia would be cooperative or not in moving forward with the possible further summit meeting. If it is not, he will take a tougher position vis-à-vis Russia, he said, without elaborating on the nature of his “reprisals.”
Are we thus back to square one and the pre-Anchorage situation? Or should we expect more encouraging news on the war in Ukraine? One thing is certain. The longer the war lasts, the more difficult it will be to end without a victor, unless there is a change of leadership in either Moscow or Kyiv.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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