Defense &
National Security

Defense &
National Security

The Big Story

White House puts a low bar for Trump-Putin summit

The White House is lowering expectations for any breakthrough from President Trump’s summit on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

© Greg Nash

Trump and other administration officials have indicated Friday’s summit in Alaska is not meant to be one that will bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine, using terms like “listening session” and “feel-out meeting” to describe the planned discussion about the war in Ukraine.

The president and his team have also largely avoided predicting any deliverables that might come out of the meeting and noted that it will likely take a follow-up summit involving both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for any concrete progress to be made on a ceasefire.

“There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting that will be more productive than the first,” Trump said Wednesday. “Because the first is I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing.”

The White House has steered clear of making any firm commitments about what will come out of Friday’s gathering in Anchorage, and details have been scarce as officials work to rapidly pull the event together on one week’s notice. The president himself has offered mixed signals about what will happen.

Trump is expected to meet one-on-one with Putin, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, and the event will take place at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. But other logistics were still being sorted out as the summit approached.

“This is a listening exercise for this president,” Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “Look, only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present. And so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end.”

Trump is a wild card in Friday’s meeting.

He has avoided setting expectations for the event, telling reporters earlier this week that the conversation with Putin “will be good, but it might be bad.”

Trump on Wednesday threatened “severe consequences” if Russia did not stop the fighting after this week’s summit, then minutes later acknowledged that he is unlikely to be able to get Putin to stop targeting Ukrainian civilians.

And he said he hoped to arrange a second meeting quickly involving Putin and Zelensky, or that perhaps a second meeting would not happen at all.

“If the first one goes OK, we’ll have a quick second one. I would like to do it almost immediately,” Trump said. “I think the second meeting – if the second........

© The Hill