A summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will take place “in the next few days”, according to the Kremlin. The exact timing – and the venue, rumoured to be Istanbul or the United Arab Emirates – are still to be determined. Volodymyr Zelensky is not currently invited, but there will be intense pressure from the White House to have Ukraine’s president around, even if only on the sidelines.
News of this meeting came on the eve of a White House deadline for Moscow to show progress toward ending the war in Ukraine or suffer additional economic sanctions.
Hopes are up, but most successful summit meetings start from a better place than this…
Why are they meeting?
It’s odd. Most summits are pure theatre. Decisions of substance are mostly made beforehand, and any agreements, vague or otherwise, are meticulously prepared for by the diplomats, and the final communique is pretty much pre-written. They normally take weeks, if not months. EU summits and international climate conferences are unusual in that they can genuinely be chaotic and overrun, and decisions are reached messily at the last minute. But superpower meetings are, at least pre-Trump, orderly and pre-ordained.
This one covers familiar territory, but seems rushed.
What are the chances of success?
Trump has expressed huge frustration and disappointment about Putin, and has been building up pressure on the Russian war machine by threatening more sanctions and imposing them on third parties such as India, who have been buying Russian oil. On the other side, Putin has consistently talked a good game but placed unrealistic pre-conditions around talks, and shown little interest in a ceasefire – the last partial one, covering air attacks, collapsed within hours.
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It could be that Trump and Putin are perversely both using a “failed” summit to provide cover – an alibi for their own failures, thus blaming one another for the breakdown, which is actually mutual failure. There is certainly no sign, diplomatically or on the battlefield, that the Russians have anything to gain by peace and giving up the battles now. Their strategy depends on leveraging their superiority in manpower and missiles/drones to grind Ukrainian morale and resistance down. Russia is making incremental slow territorial gains at enormous human cost, and sees that as success.
How is Zelensky involved?
Well, it is his country. The choreography, if Putin and Trump actually agree on a plan, would be for this to be presented to Zelensky, who would then be invited to accept the fait accompli. Unfortunately, it would then be hard for him to object without seeming to be uncooperative.
What does Trump want?
An end to the war, and some sort of de facto settlement based on the current front lines, rather like the way the Korean War ended, with that country divided indefinitely. He doesn’t want any military involvement or cost to the US taxpayer. He may still hanker after a grand bargain with Russia and future lucrative trading relationships, both for America and the Trump family. That’s about it, and it doesn't look likely.
What does Putin want?
Trump reportedly told Emmanuel Macron that Putin indicated Russia would settle for the remaining parts of the four regions of Ukraine he presently partially occupies, plus the formal annexation of territory it took in 2014, principally Crimea. Putin’s long-term ambition to absorb Ukraine and extinguish its sovereignty and statehood completely is undimmed.
What’s the history of ‘summits’?
Very long; one early example was in 1520, between Henry VIII and Francis I of France, held on the Field of the (literal) Cloth of Gold at Hampton Court Palace. In succeeding centuries national leaders met to draw borders and end wars in a series of congresses and conferences, culminating in the famous ones during the Second World War. The Yalta Conference in 1945 led to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.
The popular term “summit” was coined soon after by Winston Churchill who had a romantic idea that if great leaders of great powers could, like ancient gods, meet at the top of a mountain and survey the landscape below them, they could forge friendships, treaties and peace. He had a wistful idea that the Cold War could be thawed swiftly if only he and, say, Stalin plus Truman or Eisenhower could meet. As he put it in 1950: “It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit”. The Americans were sceptical about that, an early warning signal about the durability of the special relationship in an era of British decline.
Can they work?
Yes, and spectacularly. Churchill would have been delighted by the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that established their personal rapport, and signalled the beginning of the end of the Cold War. He’d also have been impressed by the previous wave of detente era summits between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, and Nixon’s epoch-making trip to China to meet Chairman Mao in 1972. Nixon and Henry Kissinger were the masters of summitry.
What can go wrong?
The most catastrophic was the summit that never was – a meeting in Paris in 1960 between President Eisenhower and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. It was held soon after the Russians shot down an American U2 spying on the then Soviet Union. When Eisenhower arrived expecting some tough but lengthy exchanges, Khrushchev demanded an apology for the violation of Russian/Soviet airspace. Eisenhower refused; Khrushchev walked out.
Summits rarely do any harm and can do some good; and that could probably be said about the last one between Trump and Putin in 2018, albeit sadly memorable for the American president trashing his own intelligence services and showing a distressing naivety about his wily counterpart. Summit breakthroughs are exceedingly rare, and 2025 looks to be no exception.