Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage was sold as diplomacy, but staged as theatre. Nothing was settled, no ceasefire announced, not even a token gesture towards halting the bloodshed in Ukraine. What it offered instead was spectacle: Putin basking in legitimacy on American soil, Trump basking in Putin. The choreography told us everything we needed to know.
Putin spoke first at the press conference. A break with diplomatic convention, but one that ensured his framing dominated. He rode to the venue in the US presidential limousine, as if to underline that the world’s stage now belongs to him. He invited Trump to Moscow; Trump simpered that it might cause “a little heat” but did not rule it out. The symbolism was unmistakeable: Russia dictating the terms, America nodding along.
Ukraine, meanwhile, was absent. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the man whose country is being immolated, was nowhere near the table. Trump, who had humiliated him earlier this year alongside JD Vance in the Oval Office, treated him as an afterthought: a phone call “very soon.” In Anchorage, the warmth was reserved for Putin, not for the supposed ally. The message was clear. Ukraine is expendable, an instrument for Trump’s domestic theatre.
This is not an aberration. Trump has always understood foreign policy as a stage for personal grievance. In Alaska he repeated, with Putin’s nodding approval, that the 2020 election was “rigged.” He reminded the press that “Russia wouldn’t have invaded if I had been president.” Putin, ever the opportunist, endorsed the line, feeding Trump’s narrative of betrayal at home while legitimising his rule abroad. The bloodiest war in Europe in eight decades became just another prop in Trump’s long-running pageant of resentment.
So the fighting continues. Even as they sat beneath a screen declaring they were “Pursuing Peace,” reports filtered in of Russian sabotage groups piercing Ukrainian lines, air raid sirens across the east, rumours of nuclear-capable missile tests designed to frighten and bargain. Putin has no interest in peace. Only in time, territory, and leverage. What Trump gifted him in Alaska was time, territory, and leverage’s most precious lubricant: legitimacy.
This is the real achievement of Anchorage. Not a ceasefire, but an embrace. Not negotiations, but capitulation wrapped in choreography. Putin emerges stronger, framed as America’s equal, invited into the White House candidate’s arms. Trump emerges grinning, having proved again that he prefers Russia’s strongman to Ukraine’s elected leader. Zelenskyy is humiliated; NATO sidelined; the Ukrainians still bleeding in Donbas told, once again, that their fate is incidental.
The fawning to Putin matters because it exposes the logic of Trumpism: America First means Ukraine Last. Peace is not the aim, but optics; diplomacy is not dialogue, but a mirror for Trump’s own resentments. Putin understood this from the start. Anchorage proved him right.
