Trump’s affinity for Putin will be tested at high-risk summit in Alaska

Supporters of President Donald Trump are pushed back by police out side the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021, after a mob brea ched security and entered the building. President Trump and his aides have sought to play down expectations of an immediate breakthrough in his high-profile, high-risk meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)

By Peter Baker

As President Donald Trump looked ahead this week to his high-profile, high-risk meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, he reflected momentarily on the curious and confusing relationship between the two men. “I got along well with Putin,” he said.

Intriguingly, he used the past tense. Over the past few weeks, Trump has expressed rare frustration over the Russian leader’s unwillingness to make peace in Ukraine. But as the president elaborated this week, he sounded eager to switch back to the present tense when the two sit down in Alaska on Friday.

Trump’s affinity for the ironfisted master of the Kremlin has perplexed much of the political and diplomatic world for the past decade, challenging assumptions, fueling investigations, reshaping elections and upending alliances. Now the relationship faces its most critical test as Trump seeks to broker a halt to the war in Ukraine: Is he ready to put serious pressure on his Russian counterpart? Will Putin again win over the president to his way of thinking? Or is their friendship really on the rocks?

For all of his recent complaints about Russian intransigence and demands that the war stop, Trump has still largely held back from harsh criticism of Putin personally, preferring to use words like “disappointed” and “not happy.” He has aimed his sharpest broadsides instead at Dmitry Medvedev, the former caretaker president who has engaged in belligerent talk, a way of avoiding going after Putin more directly.

And in recent days, Trump has seemed to pivot back to his posture from earlier in the year, when he directed more blame for the war on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, even though it was Putin who invaded his neighbor in the first place and has rejected U.S. proposals for an unconditional ceasefire.

“Putin clearly pushed the envelope beyond what Trump was willing to take, and that explains why in the past month or six weeks you’ve seen increasingly negative comments about Putin,” John Bolton, a national security adviser to Trump in his first term and now a vocal critic, said in an interview. “His friend isn’t helping him out here. He’s not getting to a deal.”

But Bolton said Trump clearly has not given up on his friend. By inviting Putin to U.S. soil despite U.S. sanctions and an international arrest warrant for war crimes, he said, Trump has rewarded the Russian leader, effectively freeing him from the international isolation box established by Trump’s predecessor, President Joe Biden, and European leaders.

“He just doesn’t know enough to not get played,” Bolton said of Trump. “He wants to get along. He thinks he’s friends with Putin. I don’t think Putin thinks he’s friends with him. Putin’s as cold-blooded as they come.”

Longtime analysts of the U.S.-Russian relationship said Trump’s recent words of exasperation do not signal a real break with Putin, at least not yet.

“I don’t think there has been any meaningful shift in Trump’s views of Putin or his desire to achieve a reset,” said Angela E. Stent, a national intelligence officer on Russia during President George W. Bush’s administration. “It is true that he did express frustration with Putin and praise for Zelenskyy a few weeks ago, but that seems to have evaporated once he realized that Putin would not agree to anything before Trump’s imposed deadline” for a ceasefire.

Michael A. McFaul, who was ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, said he was struck by Trump’s momentary shift in tone a few weeks ago. “But lately he has drifted back to his old self,” he said, “again blaming Zelenskyy in part for Putin’s invasion, not entertaining Zelenskyy’s proposal for a trilateral meeting, and already suggesting that Zelenskyy is going to have to make major concessions, but saying nothing about what concessions need to be made by Putin.”

The meeting in Alaska will be Putin’s first visit to the United States outside of the United Nations since 2007, when Bush invited him to his family’s compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. After multiple phone calls and forays by his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Trump said he wanted to get in the same room with Putin to break the logjam.

“President Putin invited me to get involved,” Trump said this week. “He wants to get involved. I think, I believe he wants to get it over with. Now, I’ve said that a few times, and I’ve been disappointed because I’d have like a great call with him, and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place, and you’d have 60 people laying on a road dying.”

But Trump said he thought he could get through to his Russian counterpart. “I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, ‘You got to end this war; you got to end it.’”

Still, he and his aides have sought to play down expectations of an immediate breakthrough. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the meeting “a listening exercise for the president.” Speaking Wednesday, Trump said any real decisions would be made at what he hoped would be a follow-up meeting bringing together Putin and Zelenskyy. “It’s setting the table for the second meeting,” he said of Alaska. But he added that there would be “very severe consequences” if Putin did not go along.

Michael C. Kimmage, a historian of U.S.-Russian relations at the Catholic University of America and author of “Collisions,” a book about the Ukraine war, said Trump may believe that cultivating Putin serves a strategic purpose. When Trump returned to office in January, he said, he “thought he could scale back the war in Ukraine through his personal connection to Putin.”

That did not work, but Trump may still persist in his personality-driven diplomacy with Putin because he “cannot resist the media spectacle and the opportunity to place himself at the center of it.” Moreover, after recent interventions to stop fighting between Thailand and Cambodia and settle decades of dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, he added, it’s possible that Trump “thinks he’s on a roll.”

But in pursuing his Alaska summit with Putin without doing the usual diplomatic spadework of lower-level negotiations and consultations with allies beforehand to ensure success, Trump is attempting “a new style of diplomatic action,” Kimmage said. Trump, he said, appears focused primarily on settling the world’s big issues directly with leaders of the three major powers: himself, Putin and President Xi Jinping of China.

“This new style will turn much of the world into bystanders and simultaneously elevate a handful of leaders — with Trump first among equals — to a uniquely powerful status, a VIP club of statesmen, consisting primarily of Xi, Putin and Trump,” Kimmage said. “This impulse will be put to the test on Friday.”