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Now that the fanfare surrounding the two hastily convened international summits that took place thousands of miles apart over the past week in an effort to end the war in Ukraine has subsided, the main resulting sentiments are relief that the outcomes of both meetings are not likely to exacerbate an already ghastly war, and cautious optimism for future diplomatic negotiations that might end it. But not much beyond that.

The first summit was between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Anchorage, Alaska on Aug. 15. The second took place three days later in Washington, where Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was accompanied during his meeting with Trump by the leaders of several major European nations who provided a human shield (in the nicest possible sense) around him.

As with all such meetings, they were as much about optics as they were about the actual content of the discussions. Considering the ill-tempered meeting between Trump and Zelensky six months earlier, during which the former ambushed the latter in front of the media, there was a collective sigh of relief that this time their meeting was conducted in a much better spirit, and that the damage caused by the American president rolling out the red carpet a few days earlier for the otherwise internationally outcast Putin seemed not to have had any lasting impact.

Beyond the choreography of the two occasions, which was mainly to do with the ways in which Trump conducts domestic and international politics, any expectation that they might result in instant agreements in the glare of publicity would either have been naive or the result of lack of understanding about how diplomacy works. Summits exist to finalize and announce to the world an outcome after behind-the-scenes and quiet back-channel negotiations achieve a breakthrough. Otherwise, they are most likely mere grandstanding.

What the Trump administration fails to understand is that no amount of smiles or flattery can hide the fact that underlining this conflict is the long-standing view in Moscow that Ukraine has no right to exist independently of Russia. Putin does not hide this belief. As recently as late June, he told the St. Petersburg Economic Forum: “I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”

This was no slip of the tongue, simply repetition of what Putin and those very close to him have been claiming for a long time: that Ukraine is an artificial state and the Ukrainian people are, in fact, Russians. As long as this remains the prevailing mindset, any agreement will amount to no more than a ceasefire deal that Russia would be ready to violate at the first opportunity. Watertight security guarantees are therefore paramount.

Putin’s strategy is to drive a wedge between the US and Europe and, in doing so, weaken Kyiv both on the battlefield and on the diplomatic one. His meeting with Trump in Anchorage was hardly a resounding success, but the Russian leader was already the main beneficiary of it even before his plane touched down in Alaska, simply because he had been invited to meet the sitting American president while still shunned by most Western nations since his ill-fated, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

There was a collective sigh of relief that the American-European meeting was conducted in a much better spirit.

Yossi Mekelberg

Putin gained international recognition from the very country that is supposed to be the leader of the free world, basically for nothing, while all of Washington’s major allies continue to regard him as a complete outcast. This encouraged him to be audacious enough during the post-summit press conference to state that if a peace agreement is to be reached, the “root causes” of the conflict will have to be eliminated. For him, this is a euphemism either for the disappearance of Ukraine altogether, or for the country to agree to be subservient to Moscow.

This subtext completely eludes Trump. He genuinely wants to reach a peace deal but for this to happen he needs to refrain from rewarding a head of state for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes in March 2023. A head of state who continues to demand immediate recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, and that Ukraine agrees to demilitarization, neutrality, no foreign military involvement in the country, and to hold new elections — all of which are bound to be rejected, and rightly so, by Ukraine and the rest of Europe.

One of the cardinal mistakes made by the US administration was to conclude the summit in Anchorage with no mention of a desperately needed ceasefire agreement, first and foremost to stop the killing but also to create conditions more conducive to peace negotiations, which cannot exist under fire. Putin departed feeling reassured that he was not facing further sanctions or any other “severe consequences,” as Trump had threatened ahead of the meeting should a ceasefire deal not be achieved. Yet, as much as there was the strong feeling that Putin had the upper hand in the summit, it nonetheless did leave the door open for future negotiations.

When the diplomatic theater moved to Washington for the meeting between Trump and Zelensky, it was obvious that it was, to a large extent, a massive exercise in damage limitation. In an unprecedented development, no fewer than seven heavyweight European leaders — including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian and British Prime Ministers Giorgia Meloni and Keir Starmer, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte — gathered to prevent a repeat of the farcical meeting between Trump and Zelensky in February, knowing that not only was the future of Ukraine at stake, but also European security and America’s commitment to it.

Recognizing that pleasing Trump is now part of contemporary diplomatic engagement with the US, the Ukrainian president abandoned his usual military fatigues in favor of a business suit and, in front of the cameras, thanked the American president countless times in the space of a few minutes.

Not much progress was made, then, but Trump’s call for direct talks between Putin and Zelensky, which he might also join should they take place, might yet mark a significant development. Moreover, although still not fully committed, this was also the first time that Trump has pledged that the US would help to guarantee Ukraine’s security, though he still views Europe as the “first line of defense.”

Significantly, the European leaders showed backbone by pushing back against Trump’s dismissal of the suggestion that a ceasefire was needed before negotiations could take place to end the war. Merz was very clear on this, saying: “I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire. So, let’s work on that and let’s try to put pressure on Russia.”

A ceasefire agreement is not only an obvious demand to make in order to stop the killing, it would enable more flexibility in negotiations, which remains impossible as long as Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are being killed by Russia every day. Most importantly, Europe — in mobilizing its heavy-hitting leaders, who almost invited themselves to accompany Zelensky to the White House — displayed a united front that made it clear they will not allow Ukraine and its occupied territories to be sold out in any agreement between Washington and Moscow.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg