‘There’s no deal until there’s a deal’ After meeting for nearly three hours in Alaska, Trump and Putin have little to show
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump met for talks on Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. It was the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting since 2019, Putin’s first encounter with a U.S. president since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine (he last met with Joe Biden in 2021), and his first trip to the United States since 2015.
The talks lasted more than two and a half hours. They were initially scheduled as a one-on-one meeting with interpreters, but the format changed shortly before they began: Putin and Trump were joined by Russian Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State Sergey Lavrov, U.S. presidential envoy Steven Witkoff, and Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov.
By all appearances, the meeting yielded no major agreements. Afterward, Putin and Trump appeared before reporters to read prepared statements. Putin spoke for about eight minutes; Trump spoke for less than four.
Putin thanked Trump for his hospitality, repeated his longtime calls to “address the root causes of the conflict” in Ukraine, and claimed that the war would never have started if Trump had been in office in 2022.
Trump said there was no deal yet but insisted that “great progress” had been made. He voiced confidence that Putin wants to end the war and added that he hoped to meet his Russian counterpart again soon. Putin responded in English: “Next time in Moscow?” The two leaders then departed without taking questions.
The summit’s program was shorter than originally planned. A working lunch in an expanded format, with five participants on each side, had been scheduled but was canceled. Instead, after the press conference, Putin laid flowers at the graves of Soviet pilots buried at the base and met with Archbishop Alexey, head of the Orthodox Church in America’s Diocese of Alaska. Soon afterward, his plane departed for Russia.
