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News Analysis
For President Trump, consistency is less important than leader-to-leader diplomacy.
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents in four decades at The Times, where he has focused on superpower conflict, the subject of his latest book. He covered the Anchorage negotiations between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Aug. 25, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
“Nothing’s going to happen,” President Trump told reporters on Air Force One in mid-May, “until Putin and I get together.”
Mr. Trump was making the argument that, for a problem as contentious as the Russian war in Ukraine, the only solution was a meeting of the minds of the leaders of the two superpowers, who could strike deals, knock heads and make it happen.
Now, nine days after that meeting happened at an American air base in Anchorage, all the outward signs are that any real progress has ground to a stop. Mr. Trump had hinted that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine would meet one on one and then together with Mr. Trump; neither meeting has been scheduled. “The agenda is not ready at all,” Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said on NBC on Sunday.
And while Mr. Trump insisted to European leaders that Mr. Putin had agreed to allow a peacekeeping force inside Ukraine, by midweek the Russians were describing a very different construct, one in which Russia would participate in security guarantees for the country it invaded in February 2022. If ever there was a geopolitical fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem, that seemed to describe it.
It is all symptomatic of the strategic incoherence of the past 10 days or so. At times, Mr. Trump portrays himself as a mediator, someone who can use his influence to extract concessions from Mr. Putin, then get Mr. Zelensky to offer up some land and strike a deal. In other moments, he sounds like an ally of Ukraine, promising to help secure it from future attack. Last week, he wrote a social media post saying Ukraine had “no chance of winning” without being allowed to attack deep inside of Russia, blaming his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for not permitting Ukraine to “fight back, only defend.”
After declaring in Anchorage that Mr. Putin wants peace, he now admits to doubts, and says he will figure out which side is to blame for failure, if it comes to that. “We’ll know which way I’m going, because I’m going to go one way or the other,” he told reporters Friday.
