Ahead of last week's summit in Alaska between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, many feared the meeting would result in some sort of grand bargain that abandoned Ukraine to the Kremlin's predations.
That, however, didn't happen.
The talks, though cordial, were inconclusive and ended without an agreement. Moreover, further consultations between the senior advisors of both sides were called off – suggesting there wasn't enough agreement between the principals even to hammer out a tentative compromise.
To jittery Russia-watchers, this has provided a measure of comfort. After all, no deal is clearly better than a bad one. But as additional details of the Alaska summit continue to trickle out, Russia's diplomatic strategy is becoming clearer – and more worrisome. That's because Moscow is making an effort to convince Washington to embrace "land for peace" as a formula to resolve the conflict that it itself started.
In their closed-door deliberations, Russia's president apparently rejected the idea of any sort of temporary ceasefire with Kyiv. Rather, he insisted, Ukraine needs to fully withdraw from the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, pull back from other occupied areas as well, and give up its claims to the Crimea Peninsula, which Russia unilaterally annexed back in 2014. In other words, the Kremlin's is offering up the promise of peace in exchange for significant territorial concessions on the Ukrainian side. It's a decidedly bad bargain, and Middle Eastern history tells us why.
Over the past forty years, successive Israeli governments have tried repeatedly to offer territorial concessions to the Palestinians in order to achieve an end to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. These included the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s, the year 2000 Camp David Summit, the Olmert peace offer of 2008, and many more overtures besides
All of these initiatives sought to trade territorial concessions for the promise of normalization and security. And all of them fell short, for a simple reason. The formula they articulated failed to account for the ideological impulse that led the Palestinian leadership, whatever its composition, to consistently seek the outright elimination of the Jewish state.
Russia feels much the same way. In recent years, the Kremlin has embraced a broad, neo-imperial ethos that seeks to recreate an expanded sphere of geopolitical influence Moscow believes it rightly deserves. And Ukraine, which played a central role in successive Russian empires for the better part of a millennium, is a key part of these plans.
Thus, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was prefigured by a long treatise by the Russian president himself (one still readily available on the Kremlin website) in which he extolled the "historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians" – and laid out the intellectual justification for the war to come.
And those impulses clearly persist; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived at the Alaska summit sporting a USSR sweatshirt in a not-so-subtle signal of this persistent imperial objective.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets with President Trump later today, he'll need to remind him of that ideology, and what it means for his country. He must also make clear that, faced with such an implacable adversary, trading territory for peace is guaranteed to only be a temporary solution.
To hammer the point home, he would do well to teach the President and his advisors a well-known Russian adage—the one which posits that "the appetite comes with the eating."