Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin did not reach an agreement to end the war in Ukraine at the summit meeting on Friday, although they reported unspecified progress during a remarkably friendly meeting on American soil.
This meeting was the seventh personal meeting between Trump and Putin and the first during the second term of the American president. Putin, who has not visited the United States outside of UN meetings since 2007 and has been under American sanctions since 2022, was invited to a military base that is on the front line of defense of American territory against possible Russian aggression, notes The New York Times.
«The photoshoot itself essentially legitimizes war crimes, signaling to other autocrats or tyrants around the world that they can get away with the murder of civilians and still get a photoshoot with the US president», — stated earlier on Friday Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, on the MSNBC program «Morning Joe».
The US President rolled out the red carpet for Putin and even applauded him, warmly welcoming the man who is under American sanctions and has an international arrest warrant for war crimes.
As NYT writes, it is hard to imagine a more favorable situation for the Kremlin in negotiations. Trump did not accuse Putin of unleashing a brutal war and left without mentioning the sanctions he had threatened to impose just hours earlier if a deal was not reached.
«The meeting went 10 out of 10 in the sense that we got along great», — Trump said after the meeting, clearly shifting the focus from achieving a ceasefire to renewing warmer relations with a nation that the West has shunned since the invasion of Ukraine, and on developing personal relationships that he often perceives as friendship.
Putin achieved the main military objective: he came out from under sanctions and was greeted by the US president as a peacemaker. He bought time. He removed all talks about sanctions against his oil sector. And he conceded nothing.
Photo: The New York Times