Daniel Torok/The White House
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump in Anchorage, Alaska, August 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump came into his second term in office promising to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours. Now, six months later, he could be on track to deliver. Trump’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with other European leaders, in Washington, D.C., may have put the United States, Russia, and Ukraine on a new path toward peace.
Conversely, a failure of this initiative could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.
After the meeting in Alaska, Putin framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”
Trump, who may or may not take part in an upcoming meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, presents the U.S. role as simply that of an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.
Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin—not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies. The war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a revived Cold War between the United States, Russia, and China.
In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, updated and revised to cover the first three years of the current war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.
We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history, given his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States. Is this just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?
At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet in Alaska was a recognition that they had to address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly in order to seize a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed seven months after its invasion in February 2022.
The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much more rapidly. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of the country’s 600-mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often covering several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.
How would the United States and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.
Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Alaska summit: “We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”
Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence, and target missile and drone strikes.
If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles are already targeting bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?
The United States’ and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as then-President Joe Biden wrote in The New York Times in June 2022. But every time the United States and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they actually leave Ukraine in a weaker position.
The neutrality agreement that the United States and United Kingdom rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.
NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they sought. U.S. General Mark Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed counter-offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize.
No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the fact that it has been downhill since then; 69 percent of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.
So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the role of the United States in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith. That is the only way to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war and the wider Cold War of which it is part.