Trump-Putin summit: was it a win for Russia or the US?

The highly anticipated US-Russia presidential summit in Alaska had raised hopes for progress on ending the Ukraine war, but instead left more questions than answers.

Still, observers viewed Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic return to US soil – his first in a decade – as a symbolic win for Moscow.

The nearly three-hour talks, which both Putin and Donald Trump described as “productive”, signalled a potential thaw in the fraught US-Russia relationship despite concluding without a ceasefire agreement, they said.

Meanwhile, as China offered a cautious endorsement of the summit, Chinese and Russian analysts warned that Beijing could face a strategic dilemma, wary of how the limited détente might reshape the US-China-Russia power triangle.

With Ukraine and Europe notably absent from the discussions, Trump’s post-summit remarks about territorial swaps and US security guarantees sparked confusion over whether he had tacitly accepted Russia’s retention of occupied territories amid the prolonged war.

There was a joint press appearance after the meeting, but neither Trump nor Putin announced concrete outcomes or details on what they had agreed on. They also did not take any questions from reporters.

Putin, who was the first to speak, described the US and Russia as “close neighbours”. He said he hoped “the agreement that we’ve reached together” would be seen “constructively” by Kyiv and European capitals and “they won’t throw a wrench in the works”.