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Trump meeting with Putin: will Trump defer to Putin again?

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President Donald Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to talk about Ukraine and the key question now is: Will Trump defer to Putin again?

Over the years it has become clear that the one person Trump has avoided criticizing or breaking with is Putin. A whole cottage industry has emerged with AI images and cartoons poking fun at Putin, who some on social media call Trump’s boss or “the home office.”

So what about this time? Putin is apparently delighted about this meeting for several reasons, as the New York Times reports:

Late last month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was facing a stark reality: He was on the verge of losing President Trump, the one Western leader possibly willing to help him get his way in Ukraine and achieve his long-held goal of rupturing the European security order.

After months of trying to get Mr. Putin to end the war, Mr. Trump had grown tired of ineffectual phone calls and talks, and had begun issuing ultimatums. Even worse for Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump appeared to have patched up his relationship with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite an Oval Office blowup earlier this year that delighted Moscow.

It was not clear that Mr. Trump would be able or willing to follow through on the threats he had made to put punishing tariffs on nations buying Russian oil, or what real impact such moves would have on Moscow. But Mr. Trump’s deadline for Mr. Putin to end the war was swiftly approaching, presaging some sort of further rift between the White House and the Kremlin.

So Mr. Putin shifted tack ever so slightly.

The result?

Despite previous refusals by Russian officials to negotiate over territory in the Russia-Ukraine war, the Russian leader, during a meeting at the Kremlin last week, left Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, with the impression that Russia was now willing to engage in some deal-making on the question of land.

“We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched,” Mr. Trump said Friday. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

By speaking a language Mr. Trump understands — the language of real estate — Mr. Putin secured something he had been seeking ever since January: a one-on-one meeting with the U.S. leader, without Mr. Zelensky present, to make his case and cut a deal.

“It has been a very good week for Putin,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at Kings College London. “He has taken himself out of a position of significant vulnerability. He has maneuvered this entire process into something that is more or less exactly what he needed it to be.”

At the same time, tensions between Washington and Kyiv have reappeared.

Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday that the Ukrainian Constitution does not allow Kyiv to negotiate away the country’s land. Mr. Trump initially told European officials that the meeting with Mr. Putin would be followed by a three-way summit with both Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky. But the Kremlin quickly said no such promise had been made. The White House proceeded anyway.

Make your bets now on what will happen. Given Trump’s deference to Putin — in policy and in his body language during meetings — it seems an easy bet.