ANCHORAGE, Alaska — President Donald Trump’s plane touched down Friday at a military base in Alaska, where he will host Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit meeting in an audacious bid to broker a peace deal and stop a three-year war with Ukraine and its ever-rising body count.
Trump will be joined in the meeting by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a special U.S. envoy, Steve Witkoff, a senior White House official told NBC News — a departure from what was originally described as a one-on-one between the two leaders.
Putin will be accompanied at the meeting by two Russian officials.
Trump arrived first and waited aboard Air Force One for Putin’s plane to land. He then disembarked and greeted Putin on the tarmac, applauding as the Russian leader approached.
The men shook hands warmly and walked off side-by-side on a red carpet before getting into Trump’s limousine together for the drive to their meeting. A B-2 bomber and F-22 jets took part in a flyover after the greeting.
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Trump spent the run-up to the summit tempering expectations that it would produce a breakthrough, casting it instead as a prelude to an as-yet-unscheduled meeting that would include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
As he flew to Alaska, Trump gave an interview to Fox News and reiterated that point: “This is really setting the table today,” he said. “We’re gonna have another meeting if things work out, which will be very soon. Or we’re not gonna have any more meetings at all. Maybe ever.”
Normally bullish about his negotiating skills, Trump told Fox News Radio that the odds are 1 in 4 that his sit-down with Putin would be a failure. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, likened the summit to a “listening exercise” given that Zelenskyy wouldn’t be present.
“The president is realistic that this is likely a multistep process and he’s ready and positive about this step forward,” a senior Trump administration official told NBC News on Friday morning, when asked about the president’s mindset.
Still, the sit-down between the two leaders at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson stands as one of the few hopeful moments in a grinding conflict that started in February 2022 when Russia sent tanks rolling across the border into Ukraine with the goal of swallowing up its democratic neighbor.
Trump has pushed for the two nations to end the fighting as he makes an increasingly public campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
After boarding Air Force One on Friday morning for his flight, Trump said of his face-to-face visit with Putin: “Something’s going to come of it.”
Russia’s early attempt to march into Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, sputtered and the conflict has since devolved into a war of attrition, with casualties totaling about 1.5 million. At present, Putin holds a slight edge on the battlefield.
Trump enjoys considerable leverage over both combatants. If he chooses, he could slap stiffer sanctions on countries such as India that buy oil from Russia. Or he could withhold much-needed money and military hardware that have kept Ukraine in the fight against its bigger adversary. For those reasons alone, the warring countries need to take seriously Trump’s insistence that the conflict end.
“Putin is clearly in a weaker position,” William Taylor, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. “This invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be a disaster for him. Trump has the cards this time.”
Trump and Putin are set to begin talking around 3:30 p.m. ET with translators present for both sides. The U.S. delegation plans to lay out a red carpet for Putin when he leaves his plane, two senior administration officials said.
The location is itself rich in symbolism. For one, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin stemming from his conduct in the war, meaning he could have been apprehended if the site had been in a host of other nations. (The U.S. is not a signatory to the court.)
What’s more, Alaska used to belong to Putin’s country, a fact that Russian commentators and political elite have seized on as a positive signal for the talks. The U.S. purchased the territory in 1867 for $7.2 million, an acquisition that, ironically, strengthened America’s military position on the Pacific rim in a rivalry with Russia that has waxed and waned for decades.
“Putin has agreed to come to Trump, to come to America,” Robert O’Brien, White House national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “That’s critical because Alaska is a former Russian colony and Putin’s whole policy is about recovering what he believes to be former Russian Empire territory. Putin wants all of Russia’s territory back and yet he’s coming to a place that was a former Russian colony to meet with the president of the United States — when he has no chance of getting Alaska back.”
A subplot of the meeting is the personal chemistry between the American and Russian presidents. Trump took office in 2017 wanting a good relationship with Putin, who has become a pariah over his assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty. Upon his return to the White House in January, Trump at one point suggested he had a certain kinship with Putin over investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during a televised meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February.
More recently, Trump has voiced irritation with Putin over continued Russian attacks on Ukraine. Though Putin has sounded accommodating in phone calls, Trump has said, Russia hasn’t let up its military assault.
“We get a lot of bulls— thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said last month. “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday that the summit carries risks in legitimizing Putin. “My worry is that, well, the photo-op in and of itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, telegraphs to other autocrats or evil men around the world that they can get away with murdering civilians and still get a photo-op with the president of the United States,” he said.
Trump was initially optimistic he could end the war quickly. Lately, he’s conceded that the war has proved a more stubborn problem than he anticipated.
A central point of contention is land. Zelenskyy insisted last week that Ukraine would not cede territory to Russia.
“Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” he said.
Trump has suggested that some mutual “swapping” of territories would be part of a ceasefire. In his remarks Friday on Air Force One, he said that he would discuss divisions of territory in his meeting with Putin, though he added, “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.”
In a post on X Friday morning, Zelenskyy wrote in English: “The key thing is that this meeting should open up a real path toward a just peace and a substantive discussion between leaders in a trilateral format — Ukraine, the United States, and the Russian side. It is time to end the war, and the necessary steps must be taken by Russia. We are counting on America. We are ready, as always, to work as productively as possible.”
As it now stands, Trump is set to hold a news conference after his meeting and working lunch with Putin, and then fly home Friday night. The U.S. delegation attending the lunch includes Rubio, Witkoff, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
If the two sides make progress, Trump has said he might prolong the trip and invite Zelenskyy to fly in and take part in further talks.
Once a TV showman, Trump seems well aware of the drama and intrigue surrounding a summit that is drawing worldwide attention.
“High stakes!!!” he wrote in all-caps on his Truth Social platform before departing for Alaska.
