A summit fizzles, a crisis emerges

The much-vaunted Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska yielded results with little substance, especially as it was being billed as the summit that would lead to a ceasefire pact in the Russia-Ukraine war.

- HARSH V PANT

Instead, in a strange turn of events, Donald Trump is now questioning the need for an immediate ceasefire and backing the long-held Russian position that a full settlement of the issue is needed before any ceasefire can come about.

Trump will now be meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy to urge him to agree to a peace deal. But as the latter has said, "We see that Russia rebuffs numerous calls for a ceasefire and has not yet determined when it will stop the killing. This complicates the situation."

It was always complicated. Only Trump had a grandiose notion about his deal-making prowess that allowed him to conjure up the possibility of a quick pact with Vladimir Putin to end the war. In the end, it was Putin who got the better of Trump. He even used Trump's words that the conflict in Ukraine would have never started had Trump been in power to good effect. The once-shunned Russian leader is now back in American good books, being feted with a red carpet and driven in Trump's armored limousine. The contrast with the way Zelenskyy was treated in the White House just a few months back couldn't have been starker. No wonder Putin has described the summit as "very useful," underlining that "We [Russia] had the opportunity, which we did, to talk about the genesis, about the causes of this crisis," and that "it is the elimination of these root causes that should be the basis for settlement."

Putin has reportedly set out his conditions for peace clearly—Ukraine must withdraw from the Donetsk region of the Donbas for Russia to freeze the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.