Ukrainians

By hosting an unprecedented short-notice summit with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and key European leaders on Monday, President Trump significantly raised the prospects for ending Russia’s three-and-a-half-year-long war against Ukraine. The vibe at the opening was affable and positive. The participants genuinely looked determined to work out compromises that only a few weeks ago appeared illusory. It was a good sign for long-term Euro-Atlantic security cooperation in the face of challenges that, in Trump’s words, we have not faced since World War II. Toward the end, Trump’s call to Moscow brought a follow-up U.S.-Ukraine-Russia summit within reach.

But the rising expectations also reveal formidable obstacles on the path to peace. As the world’s leaders were heading to Washington, Putin’s forces unleashed 182 infantry assaults, 152 massive glide bombs, more than 5,100 artillery rounds and 5,000 kamikaze drones on Ukraine’s defenses and 140 long-range drones and four Iskander ballistic missiles on Ukraine’s cities. The attacks claimed at least 10 civilian lives, including a small child. This is how Russia attacks Ukraine daily, signaling disrespect for Trump’s diplomacy.

The Monday summit also revealed that Putin’s ostensible concession at the Alaska summit to agree to international security guarantees for Ukraine is a poisoned chalice. On the surface, it seemed like a breakthrough toward compromise. The White House summit participants jumped on it and put the guarantees at the center of discussions.

And yet there has been no agreement, and the world has more questions than answers. How could the Ukrainian armed forces be strengthened to deter Russia? Who would pay? How could Russia be prevented from rebuilding its Black Sea Fleet and blocking Ukrainian grain exports? What troop deployments would be needed? Who would put boots on the ground in Ukraine? What kind of guarantees should match what kind of territorial concessions?

Such questions are fraught with complex debates. Between the U.S. and Europe. Within Europe. Within the Trump administration. Within Ukraine. And all of that even before having to negotiate the issue with the Kremlin. The net outcome of the past week’s diplomatic huddles will be Putin buying time for his aggression as Washington abstains from sanctions hoping for peace.

Disingenuously, in exchange for this poisoned chalice of a concession, Putin demanded that Ukraine should cede not only lands currently under Russia’s illegal military occupation but also a large piece of the Donetsk province still under Kyiv’s control. That area is home to 300,000 people and is a major defense stronghold. Controlling it would give Russia a springboard to deeper attacks targeting big cities and threatening to bring Ukraine to its knees.

Putin’s offer also threatens to tear apart Ukraine’s society. In my tracking poll with Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology completed in early August, close to half of 567 respondents want Ukraine to reassert control over all of its internationally recognized territories, including the Crimean peninsula illegally annexed in 2014. Only 20% would be content with freezing the conflict along the current front lines. The option of ceding territories to Russia still under Kyiv control is so outrageous that it was not included in the survey. Eighty percent of Ukrainians continue to have faith in Ukraine’s victory and to see democracy and free speech — core values Putin would take away — as vital for Ukraine’s future.

Getting Ukrainian society right is important for Trump’s peace effort to succeed. Discounting Ukrainians’ commitment to freedom and independence has a lot to do with where we are now. Putin launched the all-out invasion in February 2022 expecting Ukrainians to embrace Russian rule. Then-President Biden assessed that Ukrainians would fold quickly and delayed major military assistance to Kyiv.

Misjudging Ukrainians now would most likely result in a rejection of peace proposals and possibly a political crisis there, inviting more aggression from Moscow while empowering more dogged resistance to the invasion, with a long, bloody war grinding on.

Thankfully, Trump has the capacity to keep the peace process on track. First, he can amplify two critically important messages he articulated at the Monday summit: U.S. willingness to back up Ukraine’s security guarantees and to continue to sell weapons to Ukraine if no peace deal is reached. Second, he can use his superb skills at strategic ambiguity and pivot back to threats of leveraging our submarine power and of imposing secondary sanctions on countries trading with Russia. Third, he can drop a hint he’d back up the Senate’s bipartisan Supporting Ukraine Act of 2025, which would provide military assistance to Ukraine over two years from confiscated Russian assets, the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal proceeds and investment in America’s military modernization.

The Monday summit makes the urgency of these and similar moves glaringly clear.

Mikhail Alexseev, a professor of international relations at San Diego State University, is the author of “Without Warning: Threat Assessment, Intelligence, and Global Struggle” and principal investigator of the multiyear “War, Democracy and Society” survey in Ukraine.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Taras, a seasoned Ukrainian serviceman recovering from a contusion, expects “no miracles” from United States President Donald Trump’s August 15 summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

“There’s going to be no miracles, no peace deal in a week, and Putin will try to make Trump believe that it is Ukraine that doesn’t want peace,” the fair-haired 32-year-old with a deep brown tan acquired in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

Taras, who spent more than three years on the front line and said he had recently shot down an explosives-laden Russian drone barging at him in a field covered with explosion craters, withheld his last name in accordance with the wartime protocol.

Putin wants to dupe Trump by pandering to the US president’s self-image as a peacemaker to avoid further economic sanctions, while the Russian leader seeks a major military breakthrough in eastern Ukraine, Taras said.

“Putin really believes that until this winter, he will seize something sizeable, or that [his troops] will break through the front line and will dictate terms to Ukraine,” Taras said.

As the Trump administration trumpets the upcoming Alaska summit as a major step towards securing a ceasefire, Ukrainians — civilians and military personnel — and experts are largely pessimistic about the outcomes of the meeting between the US and Russian presidents.

This is partly because of the facts on the ground in eastern Ukraine. Earlier this month, Russia intensified its push to seize key locations in the southeastern Donetsk region, ordering thousands of servicemen to conduct nearly-suicidal missions to infiltrate Ukrainian positions, guarded 24/7 by buzzing drones with night and thermal vision.

In the past three months, Russian forces have occupied some 1,500sq km (580 square miles), mostly in Donetsk, of which Russia controls about three-fourths, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates based on geolocated photos and videos.

The pace is slightly faster than in the past three years.

Within weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Russia controlled some 27 percent of Ukrainian territory. But Kyiv’s daring counteroffensive and Moscow’s inability to hold onto areas around the capital and in Ukraine’s north resulted in the loss of 9 percent of occupied lands by the fall of 2022.

Russia has since re-occupied less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory, despite losing hundreds of thousands of servicemen, while pummelling Ukrainian cities almost daily with swarms of drones and missiles. Russia’s push to occupy a “buffer zone” in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region failed as Kyiv’s forces regained most of the occupied ground.

Ukraine also controls a tiny border area in Russia’s western Kursk region, where it started a successful offensive in August 2024, but lost most of its gains earlier this year.

The scepticism in Ukraine over the Alaska meeting is also driven by reports of what the US might offer Putin to try to convince him to stop fighting.

Reports — not denied by Washington — suggest that Trump might offer Moscow full control of Donetsk and the smaller neighbouring Luhansk region. In exchange, Moscow could offer a ceasefire and the freezing of the front line in other Ukrainian regions, as well as the retreat from tiny toeholds in Sumy and the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to the reports.

But to give up Donetsk, Kyiv would have to vacate a “fortress belt” that stretches some 50km (31 miles) along a strategic highway between the towns of Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk.

Donetsk’s surrender would “position Russian forces extremely well to renew their attacks on much more favorable terms, having avoided a long and bloody struggle for the ground,” the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said on Friday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine will not “gift” its land, and that it needs firm security guarantees from the West.

“We don’t need a pause in killings, but a real, long peace. Not a ceasefire some time in the future, in months, but now,” he said in a televised address on Saturday.

Some civilian Ukrainians hold a gloomy view on the prospects of peace, believing that Kyiv’s tilt towards democracy and presumed eventual membership in the European Union, and Moscow’s “imperialistic nature” set up an equation that prevents a sustainable diplomatic solution.

“The war will go on until [either] Ukraine or Russia exist,” Iryna Kvasnevska, a biology teacher in Kyiv whose first cousin was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2023, told Al Jazeera.

But the lack of trust in the Alaska summit for many Ukrainians also stems from a deep lack of faith in Trump himself.

Despite Trump’s recent change in rhetoric and growing public dissatisfaction with Moscow’s reluctance to end the hostilities, the US president has a history of blaming Ukraine – for the war and its demands of its allies – while some of his negotiators have repeated Moscow’s talking points. It is also unclear whether Zelenskyy will be invited to a trilateral meet with Trump and Putin in Alaska, or whether the US will go ahead and seek to shape the future of Ukraine without Kyiv in the room.

“Trump has let us down several times, and the people who believe he won’t do it again are very naive, if not stupid,” Leonid Cherkasin, a retired colonel from the Black Sea port of Odesa who fought pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk in 2014-2015 and suffered contusions, shrapnel and bullet wounds, told Al Jazeera.

“He did threaten Putin a lot in recent weeks, but his actions don’t follow his words,” he said.

He referred to Trump’s pledges during his re-election campaign to “end the war in 24 hours”, and his ultimatums to impose crippling sanctions on Russia if Putin does not show progress in a peace settlement.

Trump’s ultimatum to Putin, initially 50 days long, was reduced to “10 to 12 days” and ended on Friday, one day after the Alaska summit was announced.

Military analysts agree that Putin will not bow to Trump’s and Zelenskyy’s demands.

Meanwhile, the very fact of a face-to-face with Trump heralds a diplomatic victory for Putin, who has become a political pariah in the West and faces child abduction charges that have led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant against him. Putin last visited the US for bilateral meetings in 2007, only coming for UN summits after that, but not visiting the country since the warrant was issued.

“What’s paramount for Putin is the fact of his conversation with Trump as equals,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

“I think the deal will be limited to an agreement on cessation of air strikes, and Putin will get three months to finalise the land operations – that is, to seize the [entire] Donetsk region.”

An air ceasefire may benefit Russia, as it can amass thousands of drones and hundreds of missiles for future attacks. The ceasefire will also stop Ukraine’s increasingly successful drone strikes on military sites, ammunition depots, airfields and oil refineries in Russia or occupied Ukrainian regions.

“Then [Putin] will, of course, fool Trump, and everything will resume,” Mitrokhin said.

The exchange stems from the Istanbul talks deal, but Russia claims Ukraine is not upholding its part of the agreement.

Russia has returned the bodies of 1,200 more Ukrainians killed in the war, according to Ukrainian authorities, bringing the total number of bodies repatriated to over 4,800, while the push for a ceasefire and an end to the conflict now in its fourth year remain elusive.

Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Ukrainian government body that oversees affairs regarding prisoners of war (POW), announced the news on Telegram, saying the handover was part of an agreement struck in talks in Istanbul earlier this month.

“I am grateful to everyone involved in this humanitarian mission,” said Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov. “Ahead is an important and responsible stage of identification. This is a complex and delicate work that will give each family the opportunity to receive answers.”

In a series of exchanges this week, Ukraine has repatriated more than 4,800 bodies returned by Russia, in accordance with the Istanbul agreement, Ukrainian officials said. This marks one of the largest returns of war dead since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia says Ukraine ‘hasn’t reciprocated’

Russian state media confirmed the latest handover of 1,200 Ukrainians, but said Moscow had not received a single Russian corpse in return.

“Russia says Ukraine hasn’t stuck to its side [of the deal], that it hasn’t reciprocated” reported Al Jazeera’s Assed Baig from Kyiv.

Ukraine has yet to comment.

As per their agreement in Istanbul, Kyiv and Moscow are to each hand over as many as 6,000 bodies and to exchange sick and heavily wounded prisoners of war and those aged under 25.

But Russia has so far reported only receiving a total of 27 Russian servicemen.

The latest handover of Ukrainians came as Russia claimed to seize the village of Malynivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and also appeared to close in on the northeastern Sumy region.

“Russian forces are roughly 18-20kms (11.2-12.4 miles) away from the capital of the Sumy region, which has been under constant drone and missile attack,” said Baig.