Trump will try to get closer to Putin in Alaska without making a firm commitment to Ukraine
Friday's meeting comes surrounded by uncertainty: Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski will not intervene and little progress is expected for a ceasefire or peace process.
A summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is expected in Alaska on Friday. It will be the first face-to-face since Russia invaded Ukraine. Uncertainty has prevailed over the lack of precision on how to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The meeting place will be the military base called Elmendorf-Richardson, but according to the White House, this time Putin has taken the first step and will cross the Bering Strait on Friday for the historic meeting in the former Russian colony.
"The president has agreed to hold that meeting at the request of President Putin, and the purpose of the meeting for Trump is to better understand how to end this war," White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday. The spokesman explained that the meeting will be a "listening exercise," so there is little chance of achieving anything, especially since Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky will not be present.
This Wednesday, Trump said that this meeting will serve to "see where we are," and that if the meeting goes well, it will be "a quick second," because there could be clear results on a ceasefire and peace process for Ukraine.
To reach Friday's summit in Alaska (which was Russian territory until 1867), Trump has sent nearly half a dozen times his representative, Steve Witkoff, to meet with Putin. He has spent long hours with him and has shown goodwill, such as the release of American prisoners detained in Russia.
Trump arrives in Alaska confident in his ability to read Putin, a former KGB agent who is viewed favourably in some parts of the MAGA movement. "I will probably know for the first two minutes whether an agreement can be reached," the president said on Monday.
Trump's confidence contrasts with that of his European partners, who held an "emergency" meeting with Zelensky on Wednesday to strengthen positions on defending Ukrainian interests vis-à-vis Putin, such as the need for Ukraine to accept all territorial concessions.
Since coming to power in January, Trump has gone from giving more weight to Putin's word than to that of Zelensky (who had a serious incident in the Oval Office at the end of February and told him he had no "word" in the peace negotiations) to saying that he is losing patience with the Russian word, which says a lot of "nonsense" and faces "very serious consequences" if he does not stop bombing Ukrainian cities.
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