No agreement between Trump and Putin would be the best-case scenario

No one — in the United States, in Ukraine, or in Russia — quite knows what to expect from Friday’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska. There have been conflicting accounts of Russian demands and conflicting, often bizarre, statements from Trump. Some hope for peace; many fear that Ukraine may be forced into a bad settlement to satisfy Trump’s hankering for a Nobel Peace Prize; and still others think that the meeting, for which the White House is already downplaying expectations, won’t amount to much.

There is no question, however, that being received as an honored guest on American soil — on a military base, no less — is a big win for Putin. It will go a long way toward ending his diplomatic isolation and giving respectability to a man who unleashed a bloody war on the European continent. It also gives him a chance to talk to the President of the United States as an equal with whom he can make a deal about Ukraine’s fate.

Worryingly, Trump’s recent harsh rhetoric about Putin’s barbaric war seems to have softened again — and he appears, once again, to blame Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for allowing the war to start. He’s also griping about Ukraine’s resistance to "land swaps." At present, it’s not clear what these "swaps" would even involve. Early reports that Russia would trade some of the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies for other areas that Russia annexed in 2022 but Ukrainian troops still control turned out to be a misunderstanding. Apparently, Putin wants to be handed more Ukrainian territory — specifically, the entirety of the Donetsk region, nearly a third of which is still in Ukrainian hands — without ceding anything.

This, experts say, would be a very bad deal — not least because the remaining portion of Donetsk includes heavily fortified areas Russia isn’t even close to taking, despite some modest successes in its summer offensive in Eastern Ukraine. If Russia controls these areas, there is little to stop Russian troops from moving on to try to seize other regions — not immediately, since the "deal" would require a cessation of hostilities, but perhaps in a year or two.

Another option currently being discussed is a deal that would freeze current lines of contact. Ukraine appears prepared to consider it, probably as long as its loss of territory is recognized as a "fact on the ground" with no legal recognition of Russian sovereignty over these lands. European powers may be willing to go along.

Ukraine, exhausted by 3½ years of war, may have little choice but to accept such an agreement. While its situation on the front lines is not nearly as catastrophic as some claim, it’s very true that many of Ukraine’s defenders are demoralized right now, and popular support for fighting until all occupied territories are regained has dropped to just 24% (from 63% two years ago). There is no doubt that perceived loss of U.S. support is partly to blame for this — just as Republican-driven disruptions in U.S. aid even before Trump’s election victory are partly to blame for Ukraine’s battlefield failures.

Yet an agreement that freezes the lines of contact is also a likely prelude to a future war as long as Putin remains in power.

The best-case scenario for the summit is no agreement, with options left open for American and European aid. The worst-case scenario is a deal that will someday give rise to a shameful question: Who lost Ukraine?

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.