On Politics: Why Trump wants to meet Putin

August 13, 2025

Trump’s Washington

How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.

Good evening. Tonight, our veteran national security correspondent, David Sanger, guides us through the stakes of President Trump’s upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin. We’re also looking at how the administration’s science funding cuts will affect research into health care disparities, and how Trump is exerting his influence over culture. We’ll start with the headlines.

• A federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can withhold billions in funding intended for foreign aid groups.
• Europe’s leaders say they’ve agreed with Trump on a strategy for his talks with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, on Friday.
• The Trump administration urged a federal court to uphold its sweeping global tariffs or risk an economic depression. Experts dispute the severity of that claim.
• Trump’s deployment of federal troops in Washington has begun. Here’s what it looks like.

The meeting on Friday will be the first for an American president since the Western world isolated Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. New York Times photographs by Doug Mills and Nanna Heitmann

At stake in Alaska: two egos, and a continent’s future

by Jess Bidgood and David E. Sanger

There is nobody with more confidence in President Trump’s deal-making abilities than Trump himself.

Yet, as his Friday meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia draws near, he and his top aides are lowering expectations, suggesting it’s not Trump’s job to make peace between Moscow and Ukraine and calling the summit little more than a “listening exercise.”

Statements like that belie the enormous stakes of the first meeting between Trump and Putin since the Russian invasion, particularly for the parties who aren’t expected to be present, which includes the leadership of Ukraine and of the European nations that have been living with the war on their doorstep. For Trump, though, the motivation is personal — it’s a chance to reset a relationship he has long boasted about but has lately become rocky, while bringing his personal brand of deal-making to the world’s biggest stage.

There’s a lot going on here. So I called David Sanger, who has covered the White House and national security for decades and who has written books about superpower conflict, before he boarded a series of flights to Anchorage earlier today.

He walked me through the calculus of risk and reward around this meeting — and why Putin can claim a modest win before it even starts.

As you’ve written, it used to be normal for an American president to meet with the Russian leader. George W. Bush met with Putin roughly two dozen times. Joe Biden met him only once, in 2021. But Trump’s meeting will be the first for an American president since the Western world isolated Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. What does he stand to gain from it?

Trump sees himself as a peacemaker, and this is tied up very much in his oft-expressed desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which he usually combines with some kind of comment to suggest that the Nobel Committee would never give it to him.

He has taken credit for a cease-fire between India and Pakistan, although the Indians have a different version of that story. He took a direct role in a peace pledge signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan, at the White House, and there have been other regional conflicts in which he’s played an important role. The big ones, though, have evaded him.

Those, of course, are the Israel-Hamas war and the Russian war with Ukraine, which he famously declared that he would solve in 24 hours, on the basis of his long and, in his view, respectful relationship with Putin. He has now come to question whether that relationship is what he thought it was, or at least what he portrayed it as, because Putin has held a series of perfectly friendly, constructive phone calls with him and then continued on the same battle plan that he was on before, with considerable recent success.

If the president comes out of Alaska without an immediate or imminent cease-fire plan, I think it’s going to be difficult for him to portray this as a win. But a cease-fire alone won’t be enough.

Who has the most at stake here?

The country with the most at stake, of course, is Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who wasn’t invited. The second-most at stake is President Trump and the countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. Let me explain.

For Ukraine, the risk is that Trump will push for something he’s been referring to as a “land swap.” He doesn’t say that Russia would simply get the land that it has already taken militarily, which would be problematic enough, because it would reward Moscow and Putin for invading a sovereign state.

Trump’s use of the phrase “swaps” leaves you with the impression that he might be willing to award the Russians territory that they have not gained militarily, in return for something else.

Tell us about the risks for Trump.

The big risk for Trump is that whatever comes out of Alaska is just a delaying action. Putin may calculate that what he needs most is a relaxation of sanctions, a reopening of trade and time to rebuild his force so that a few years from now, he can attempt a re-invasion of the rest of Ukraine and use the territory he’s gained as a launchpad to drive toward Kyiv. That’s a huge risk, and the Ukrainians are rightly worried about it.

To forestall that, the Europeans and Zelensky are insisting on security guarantees and continued arms shipments to Ukraine, as well as making sure that Trump doesn’t make any concessions about where NATO forces can be deployed in Eastern Europe. All of those issues are as important — and over the long term, perhaps more important — than where you draw the boundaries between Russia and Ukraine.

And there’s one more risk for NATO. Will Putin use this meeting to drive a wedge between Trump and the NATO allies? That is Putin’s greatest dream.

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