{"id":335517,"date":"2025-08-11T10:48:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T10:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/335517\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T10:48:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T10:48:23","slug":"putin-will-fool-trump-why-ukrainians-are-wary-about-alaska-talks-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/335517\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Putin will fool Trump\u2019: Why Ukrainians are wary about Alaska talks | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine\u00a0\u2013<\/strong> Taras, a seasoned Ukrainian serviceman recovering from a contusion, expects \u201cno miracles\u201d from United States President Donald Trump\u2019s August 15 summit<\/a> with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s going to be no miracles, no peace deal in a week, and Putin will try to make Trump believe that it is Ukraine that doesn\u2019t want peace,\u201d the fair-haired 32-year-old with a deep brown tan acquired in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Taras, who spent more than three years on the front line and said he had recently shot down an explosives-laden Russian drone barging at him in a field covered with explosion craters, withheld his last name in accordance with the wartime protocol.<\/p>\n

Putin wants to dupe Trump by pandering to the US president\u2019s self-image as a peacemaker to avoid further economic sanctions, while the Russian leader seeks a major military breakthrough in eastern Ukraine, Taras said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPutin really believes that until this winter, he will seize something sizeable, or that [his troops] will break through the front line and will dictate terms to Ukraine,\u201d Taras said.<\/p>\n

As the Trump administration trumpets the upcoming Alaska summit<\/a> as a major step towards securing a ceasefire, Ukrainians \u2014 civilians and military personnel \u2014 and experts are largely pessimistic about the outcomes of the meeting between the US and Russian presidents.<\/p>\n

This is partly because of the facts on the ground in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this month, Russia intensified its push to seize key locations in the southeastern Donetsk region, ordering thousands of servicemen to conduct nearly-suicidal missions to infiltrate Ukrainian positions, guarded 24\/7 by buzzing drones with night and thermal vision.<\/p>\n

In the past three months, Russian forces have occupied some 1,500sq km (580 square miles), mostly in Donetsk, of which Russia controls about three-fourths, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates based on geolocated photos and videos.<\/p>\n

The pace is slightly faster than in the past three years.<\/p>\n

Within weeks after Moscow\u2019s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Russia controlled some 27 percent of Ukrainian territory. But Kyiv\u2019s daring counteroffensive and Moscow\u2019s inability to hold onto areas around the capital and in Ukraine\u2019s north resulted in the loss of 9 percent of occupied lands by the fall of 2022.<\/p>\n

Russia has since re-occupied less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, despite losing hundreds of thousands of servicemen, while pummelling Ukrainian cities almost daily with swarms of drones and missiles. Russia\u2019s push to occupy a \u201cbuffer zone\u201d in Ukraine\u2019s northern Sumy region failed as Kyiv\u2019s forces regained most of the occupied ground.<\/p>\n

Ukraine also controls a tiny border area in Russia\u2019s western Kursk region, where it started a successful offensive in August 2024, but lost most of its gains earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The scepticism in Ukraine over the Alaska meeting is also driven by reports of what the US might offer Putin to try to convince him to stop fighting.<\/p>\n

Reports \u2014 not denied by Washington \u2014 suggest that Trump might offer Moscow full control of Donetsk and the smaller neighbouring Luhansk region. In exchange, Moscow could offer a ceasefire and the freezing of the front line in other Ukrainian regions, as well as the retreat from tiny toeholds in Sumy and the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to the reports.<\/p>\n

But to give up Donetsk, Kyiv would have to vacate a \u201cfortress belt\u201d that stretches some 50km (31 miles) along a strategic highway between the towns of Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk.<\/p>\n

Donetsk\u2019s surrender would \u201cposition Russian forces extremely well to renew their attacks on much more favorable terms, having avoided a long and bloody struggle for the ground,\u201d the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said on Friday.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine will not \u201cgift\u201d its land<\/a>, and that it needs firm security guarantees from the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t need a pause in killings, but a real, long peace. Not a ceasefire some time in the future, in months, but now,\u201d he said in a televised address on Saturday.<\/p>\n

Some civilian Ukrainians hold a gloomy view on the prospects of peace, believing that Kyiv\u2019s tilt towards democracy and presumed eventual membership in the European Union, and Moscow\u2019s \u201cimperialistic nature\u201d set up an equation that prevents a sustainable diplomatic solution.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe war will go on until [either] Ukraine or Russia exist,\u201d Iryna Kvasnevska, a biology teacher in Kyiv whose first cousin was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2023, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

But the lack of trust in the Alaska summit for many Ukrainians also stems from a deep lack of faith in Trump himself.<\/p>\n

Despite Trump\u2019s recent change in rhetoric<\/a> and growing public dissatisfaction with Moscow\u2019s reluctance to end the hostilities, the US president has a history of blaming Ukraine \u2013 for the war and its demands of its allies \u2013 while some of his negotiators have repeated Moscow\u2019s talking points. It is also unclear whether Zelenskyy will be invited to a trilateral meet with Trump and Putin in Alaska, or whether the US will go ahead and seek to shape the future of Ukraine without Kyiv in the room.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump has let us down several times, and the people who believe he won\u2019t do it again are very naive, if not stupid,\u201d Leonid Cherkasin, a retired colonel from the Black Sea port of Odesa who fought pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk in 2014-2015 and suffered contusions, shrapnel and bullet wounds, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe did threaten Putin a lot in recent weeks, but his actions don\u2019t follow his words,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He referred to Trump\u2019s pledges during his re-election campaign to \u201cend the war in 24 hours\u201d, and his ultimatums to impose crippling sanctions on Russia if Putin does not show progress in a peace settlement.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s ultimatum to Putin, initially 50 days long, was reduced to \u201c10 to 12 days\u201d and ended on Friday, one day after the Alaska summit was announced.<\/p>\n

Military analysts agree that Putin will not bow to Trump\u2019s and Zelenskyy\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the very fact of a face-to-face with Trump heralds a diplomatic victory for Putin, who has become a political pariah in the West and faces child abduction charges<\/a> that have led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant against him. Putin last visited the US for bilateral meetings in 2007, only coming for UN summits after that, but not visiting the country since the warrant was issued.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s paramount for Putin is the fact of his conversation with Trump as equals,\u201d Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany\u2019s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the deal will be limited to an agreement on cessation of air strikes, and Putin will get three months to finalise the land operations \u2013 that is, to seize the [entire] Donetsk region.\u201d<\/p>\n

An air ceasefire may benefit Russia, as it can amass thousands of drones and hundreds of missiles for future attacks. The ceasefire will also stop Ukraine\u2019s increasingly successful drone strikes on military sites, ammunition depots, airfields and oil refineries in Russia or occupied Ukrainian regions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen [Putin] will, of course, fool Trump, and everything will resume,\u201d Mitrokhin said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine\u00a0\u2013 Taras, a seasoned Ukrainian serviceman recovering from a contusion, expects \u201cno miracles\u201d from United States President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[32,299,12,285,332,7661,657,49,286,333],"class_list":{"0":"post-335517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-russia","13":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","14":"tag-ukraine","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-us-canada","17":"tag-vladimir-putin"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115009743129806307","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}