Cold Reality Check

Right away: what took place in Alaska on Friday was unorthodox diplomacy, to put it mildly. As a rule, and especially in the always-sensitive field of peace diplomacy, summits between heads of state come as the well-calibrated finale. They are only held once the numerous technical points of contention accrued over the course of a conflict have been resolved in thematic working groups, and a final document is ready for signing.

For good reason, because when a summit fails, it doesn’t just dent the prestige of the rulers involved, but trust and hope will be lost, as will painstakingly pieced-together agreements. Trump, however, staged this summit as an opening act, after just a few days of warm-up and with comparatively little systematic preparation. This was an enormous risk. Under the circumstances, a breakthrough could hardly have been expected.

Key summit outcomes

Even so, the summit has pushed practical constraints that had long been taboo but can no longer be ignored into the foreground: Russia has dominated on the battlefield since late 2023, while Ukraine has steadily weakened, despite receiving unprecedented Western support. In the spring of 2022, Josep Borrell – predecessor of EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Kaja Kallas – was bloviating about how this war must be won on the battlefield. Now, this scenario is becoming a reality, albeit not quite in the way Borrell imagined. Russia is advancing. Therefore, a ceasefire without conditions, as demanded by Ukraine and European governments, is a nonstarter. After all, why should Putin agree to give up his strategic dominance, only to get nothing in return?

Another such practical reality that is now coming to light is that, for Russia, this war was – and still is – about so-called root causes. By this, Moscow means the West’s zero-sum security policy in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. This, too, is a reason why Russia does not want to simply freeze the war, but insists on comprehensive political negotiations to construct a new kind of relationship between Russia and the West alongside talks to end the war.