In the lead-up to the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this month, things did not look good for Ukraine. Characterizations of the summit oscillated between a “new Yalta,” in which the U.S. president might agree to the Kremlin’s demands for a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, and a “new Munich,” in which Trump would throw Ukraine under the bus and withdraw U.S. support for the country’s defense. In other words, expectations in Ukraine and among Kyiv’s allies were low.
Yet the summit didn’t end in a major disaster for Ukraine. Trump didn’t negotiate with Putin on Kyiv’s behalf; he didn’t agree to start normalizing relations with Russia before the war in Ukraine was resolved; and on August 18, he received Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a phalanx of European leaders at the White House, where they collectively managed to throw the diplomatic ball back into Putin’s court. “This was very much a day of team Europe and team U.S. together supporting Ukraine,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said afterward.
But although Putin now knows that his aspirational Plan A, in which Trump would simply impose a deal on Kyiv written in Moscow, is unlikely to materialize, he has shifted to his more workable Plan B, in which Trump will lose patience and significantly reduce U.S. assistance to Ukraine. In the Kremlin’s calculus, this still counts as winning, and Putin’s diplomatic strategy is still following the three-pronged approach that my co-authors and I outlined in these pages a few months ago. Moscow is holding the U.S. president’s attention, forestalling a new round of painful U.S. sanctions, and keeping the fighting going.
This is because, in the Kremlin’s assessment, time is on Russia’s side. Moscow has the upper hand on the battlefield: it has maintained a significant numerical advantage in personnel and equipment, and despite mounting casualties, it has continued to gradually gnaw through the fortified lines in the Donbas. Moreover, Russia is catching up in drone warfare, denying Ukraine its competitive edge. Moscow doesn’t want a cease-fire to stop the war right now—unless, of course, all of its political demands are simply met.
Russia is playing Trump for time. But despite the country’s confidence, it’s not clear that Putin has a realistic contingency plan should Kyiv prove able to hold on, as it has for the past three years. If, for example, the EU speeds up delivery of ammunition and drones from existing stock and extends a financial lifeline to Kyiv by confiscating the $250 billion worth of frozen Russian assets sitting in its banks, the Kremlin may not achieve its strategic goal of Ukraine’s subjugation. Despite putting Russia’s economy and society on a war footing, Putin may need more than just time to win.
FROM PLAN A TO PLAN B
Early engagements with the second Trump administration seemed encouraging for Moscow’s Plan A. Trump appointed his friend Steve Witkoff as a special envoy for negotiations with Russia, and Witkoff visited Moscow several times and spent hours talking to Putin. Between Trump’s inauguration in January and the summer, the U.S. and Russian presidents had three lengthy phone calls, and Putin’s talking points clearly made an impact on his U.S. counterpart, as painfully evidenced in Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28.
Moreover, Moscow has been trying to compartmentalize the relationship with the United States, as was clear during the first high-level meeting between the Russians and Trump’s national security team on February 18. The Kremlin suggested seeking peace in Ukraine in tandem with a broader normalization of U.S.-Russian ties, which would include reopening the consulates in both countries (which have been closed since 2017), restarting arms control talks, and boosting mutual trade and investment.
By summer, however, it had become apparent that the Kremlin’s charm offensive was faltering. Zelensky, with a lot of counseling from European leaders, had managed to patch up the relationship with Trump by signing a mineral deal that provided the United States with preferential access to Ukraine’s natural resources, particularly rare earth minerals. In return, the White House has continued Kyiv’s access to U.S. military assistance, including American intelligence and the ability to purchase U.S. weapons with European money. And on July 14, speaking alongside Mark Rutte, the secretary-general of NATO, Trump threatened “very severe tariffs” if Russia didn’t agree to an unconditional cease-fire.
In the Kremlin’s assessment, time is on Russia’s side.
The threat of further economic coercion had teeth. In 2024, Russia exported a meager $3 billion in goods to the United States, so even triple-digit tariffs would not seriously affect the Kremlin’s budget. But Trump has imposed a 25 percent punitive tariff on Indian goods for purchasing Russian oil—a tariff that will likely further increase the discounts that Russian oil sellers need to provide to Indian buyers, reducing the profitability of the oil trade for the Kremlin.
The decrease in oil and gas revenues is already affecting the war economy: some of the Russian regions that previously offered lavish payouts for military recruits are reducing sign-up bonuses because funds are drying up. The most visible sign of this is the country’s ballooning budget deficit. At the beginning of this year, the Kremlin’s plan was to have a budget deficit of just 0.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Yet in June, the Kremlin had to increase that to 1.8 percent of GDP. It will overshoot even this target; in the first seven months of this year, the budget deficit already amounted to 2.2 percent of GDP.
More U.S. sanctions could also prove damaging. The United States, for instance, has not yet blacklisted Russian energy giants, such as Rosneft and Lukoil, but such a move would put significant pressure on the Kremlin’s cash flow. As Alexandra Prokopenko wrote in Foreign Affairs in January, the Russian economy has enough steam to support Putin’s war machine for another 18 to 24 months, but the situation is worsening.
This reality presented the Kremlin with a dilemma of whether to continue the hard-nosed course, ignoring Trump’s threats—or try to assuage him. In the end, the Kremlin decided it was better to initiate a meeting between the presidents and get Trump and Putin’s personal relationship back on track. The Kremlin invited Witkoff to come to Moscow, where he was presented with a semblance of an acceptable deal on August 7. The Russians also suggested a meeting with Trump, which was hastily organized in Alaska. The usual Russian mantra that leaders’ summits must be carefully prepared—a justification that the Kremlin uses to explain Putin’s reluctance to meet with Zelensky—was tellingly abandoned.
THE DEAL MIRAGE
After a three-hour conversation between Putin and Trump, the Alaskan summit’s scheduled working lunch was canceled and the press conference downgraded to official remarks by each president. This was a clear signal that Russia’s attempts to compartmentalize the Ukrainian war and to normalize ties in other areas had failed. But that was the only notable underperformance by Putin’s team.
On the core issue, Putin achieved his key goal for the meeting: he convinced Trump that the White House’s peacemaking efforts should be focused on reaching a comprehensive resolution to end the war, not an unconditional cease-fire, and that the fighting could continue in the meantime. Despite Trump’s previous claims, as well as urging by European leaders and Zelensky before the summit, the White House has imposed no punitive measures on Russia over the Kremlin’s refusal to agree to a cease-fire.
How did Putin succeed? He matched Trump’s performative diplomacy with performative negotiations, essentially tricking the Trump administration into believing that he was making serious concessions. According to Trump and various U.S. officials, such as Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance, Putin signaled in Alaska that he was ready to climb down from some of his maximalist demands—demands that were absurd to begin with.
A Ukrainian soldier fires a howitzer in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, August 2025 Maksym Kishka / Reuters
Instead of demanding the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the four regions to which Moscow lays claim, the Kremlin is now asking Kyiv to surrender only the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Moscow will accept the current line of contact. Putin apparently suggested that he is also willing to trade other parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies, including pockets of the Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, and Kharkiv regions.
These land swaps would see Kyiv surrender a land mass nearly ten times larger than what Russia is prepared to give back. Moreover, the quarter of the Donetsk region that Ukraine still controls, including the strategic cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, is the most fortified part of the country and has been turned into a massive network of defense installations since its recapture in 2014 from Russian-backed separatists. For Zelensky, surrendering this territory is all but impossible for both political and military reasons. All available polling shows that Ukrainian society will not accept the country’s territory’s being traded; and from the military perspective, surrendering western Donbas would amount to giving the invader the key to all of northern and central Ukraine. (There are no major fortification lines beyond the “fortress belt” that Putin wants Kyiv to abandon.)
Nevertheless, after the summit, Trump accepted the logic of “land swaps” offered by Putin, though he said that the decision would be Zelensky’s to make.
GUARANTEES WITHOUT SECURITY
Another key issue discussed in Alaska was postwar security guarantees for Ukraine. Witkoff told Fox News that “epic progress” had been made during the summit. According to him, Putin agreed for the first time to the concept of security guarantees for Ukraine, and the result could be even stronger than NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause—without actual NATO membership for Kyiv.
Moreover, according to Witkoff, Russia agreed to enact a law that it would not take any more land from Ukraine after a peace deal or “go after any other European countries.” These promises were greeted as “groundbreaking” by Trump’s team, and the U.S. president presented them as a major achievement during his August 18 meeting at the White House with Zelensky and a group of European leaders.
For a moment, there was optimism that a security guarantee could be hammered out. Capitalizing on the vague language of the Russian proposal, Europeans jumped on the opportunity to present a plan of their own: the deployment of a European “reassurance force” in Ukraine after the war, to which ten EU countries would potentially contribute troops, while Trump promised vague “air support” from the United States without elaborating on what that could mean in practice.
A genuine peace agreement remains as elusive as ever.
But on August 20, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov poured cold water on the plan. According to him, Moscow’s idea for a security guarantee is not a set of bilateral commitments between Ukraine and the U.S. and European governments with formulations similar to Article 5, but rather a consensus-based agreement guaranteed by the UN Security Council’s five permanent members—with the Kremlin holding veto power. Essentially, he wants the fox to help guard the henhouse. Moreover, Moscow insists on seriously limiting the Ukrainian armed forces—both in numbers and equipment—as well as their ability to cooperate with foreign partners in arms procurement, intelligence sharing, weapons design, and training.
The “epic progress” turned out to be strikingly similar to the positions Russia held in the talks that took place in Istanbul in the first two months after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ultimately collapsed. As first described here by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, those negotiations ended with no agreement in part because of Moscow’s and Kyiv’s inability to bridge the very same gap over security guarantees. For Putin, ending Ukraine’s security partnership with the West remains a core goal. But from Kyiv’s vantage point, the size of its army and ability to maintain ties to NATO’s militaries are a prerequisite for retaining sovereignty and thus nonnegotiable.
Moreover, Ukraine has reasons to believe that its negotiating position is stronger than it was in 2022. Unlike three years ago, European countries are finally ready to provide the security guarantees Kyiv seeks—or at least they now say so. Even more important, the depth of cooperation between Ukraine and NATO now far outstrips the level Putin worried about before the war, precisely because of Russia’s invasion. The alliance is intimately involved in building and testing weapons with Ukraine, training its army, and supplying it with intelligence and arms, including ones that can strike deep inside Russian territory. It is unimaginable that Kyiv would abandon this partnership voluntarily. Despite Trump’s wish to organize a meeting between Putin and Zelensky as well as a trilateral summit to seal the deal, a genuine peace agreement remains as elusive as ever.
SOLDIERING ON
It’s impossible to predict how Trump will deal with the chasm between Russia’s positions and what is acceptable to Ukraine. But while Putin stalls, it is clear that Europe is busy developing plans of its own. Europe’s Plan A consists of carefully pushing Trump to accept the fact that it’s the Kremlin that is obstructing his peace efforts and that only pressure can incentivize Putin to engage in compromise. If this plan succeeds, Putin’s procrastinating could backfire, with Trump at last hitting Russia with more sanctions. The Europeans are also planning on continuing to pay for American weapons for Ukraine. In the week after the Alaskan summit, the Pentagon approved the sale to Ukraine of $850 million worth of equipment, including 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition air-launched missiles with a range of 150 to 280 miles.
But if the Europeans’ Plan A fails—if Trump doesn’t blame Putin, or if he merely loses interest—they are developing their own Plan B. At the very least, they plan to maintain current levels of military support to Ukraine and increase the sanctions pressure on Russia (although the EU’s sanctions toolkit is far less powerful than Washington’s). If key European countries agree to step up the pressure, they could also share more of their existing military equipment stock with Ukraine, temporarily reducing the combat readiness of their own forces but keeping Ukraine in the fight at this crucial juncture. They could also provide a long-term financial lifeline to Kyiv by seizing the nearly $250 billion in state Russian assets frozen in the EU, allowing the purchase of U.S. weapons without reaching deeper into European taxpayers’ pockets. In theory, if the United States keeps providing intelligence, doesn’t drop the sanctions, and allows the EU to buy weapons for Ukraine, Europeans can self-organize and play a critical role in sustaining Ukraine’s defense effort to the very moment when Putin’s war machine may run out of offensive steam some 18 to 24 months down the road.
Europe’s Plan B probably will not deter the Kremlin: given Putin’s demonstrated ability to stomach pain and keep plugging away at an elusive victory, the Russian leader may instruct his generals and economic team to simply carry on. His government can navigate the deterioration in public finances by cutting expenditures on education, health care, and infrastructure, as it has throughout the war. Putin is also prepared to tap into the deep well of Russian manpower by force if the financial incentives dry up further. In July, the Kremlin launched digital draft notices to push more Russian men into the army; the moment a future recruit receives an electronic notification that he has been called up, Russia’s borders are closed to him and there are various penalties for not serving. The Kremlin is obviously preparing money and troops for a protracted war in which its only strategy is to outlast Ukraine militarily and economically.
Yet the eventuality for which the Kremlin does not appear to have a plan is that Russia will be unable translate its massive advantage in manpower and materiel into a decisive breakthrough—as has been the case since the war began. A plan, in other words, for the possibility that Ukraine’s defense lines don’t crumble after all.
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