This week has been one of the most tumultuous and crucial in the global political battle over the war in Ukraine. It began last Friday with the awkward summit in Alaska between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed three days later by the rushed arrival of seven of the most prominent European leaders supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and their arrival at the White House to support a hastily scheduled meeting with Trump.
This unprecedented series of events led Trump to accede to at least two of Putin’s most damaging demands: no ceasefire in Ukraine and no additional sanctions on Russian oil and gas.
Russia has steadily moved closer to its goal of reintegrating the global economy, free from mounting sanctions and, in return, enormous benefits for the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. It even offered lucrative contracts to ExxonMobil at the outset of the summit. Ukraine has attempted to compete, offering oil and gas contracts and a refinery project on special terms reserved exclusively for American companies under Trump’s US-Ukraine mining deal. Efforts are also underway to facilitate increased sales of Russian oil and gas under the guise of US ownership.
The negotiations failed to defuse Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine, which has continued, costing lives and financial resources as the talks progressed. Instead, the episode highlighted a deceptive new global balance of power, in which the Trump administration maintains its alliance with the world’s most brutal autocrats.
“Putin has been completely ostracized by the West,” Sergei Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “And now an American president has invited him to Alaska for such a symbolic and important event, even though he didn’t have to do anything to get there except continue fighting in Ukraine.” Perhaps Putin considers himself capable of achieving a major victory without paying a price.
The summit, which was supposed to end the war in Ukraine, focused just as much, if not more, on opening up opportunities for investment and trade cooperation between the United States and Russia. Although the Ukrainian issue was declared the main agenda item, “bigger global issues” will be on the agenda in Alaska, including ambitious plans for US-Russian energy cooperation, according to prominent Russian lawmaker Sergei Gavrilov, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal ahead of the summit.
“Under the guise of peace negotiations, Putin is only seeking political and economic gains, including easing global economic pressures,” Yulia Melnyk, an environmental policy advisor and co-founder and director of the Ukrainian environmental organization Ekultava, told me. “One of the main solutions to this war is to free ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels.”
“I thought this war was clear: who are the bad guys? But I no longer see the United States as the ‘good guys,’ meaning that the world order as it was isn’t collapsing, but you can see the cracks,” Ukrainian Maria Freeman told me, her voice filled with sadness. “It all started with my country, and it cost lives.”
I met Freeman on a busy street corner in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, amid a sea of blue and yellow Ukrainian flags and bright yellow sunflowers. She joined hundreds of others protesting the war in Ukraine in the streets on the eve of the summit. They smiled, waved, and held signs reading: “Where is Zelensky?” “Stay home, dictators!” and “I see fascists from my window,” their chants drowned out by the honking of trucks and cars passing in solidarity. Freeman’s family fled the city of Luhansk in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014 after Russian occupation and annexation, only to be driven out of Ukraine after Putin’s invasion and full-scale war in 2022, the deadliest war in Europe since World War II.