Of jets, handshakes and smiles: How Putin steamrollered Trump and deflated his deal-making hyperbole

Westerners often struggle to grasp Russian psychology. As biographer Richard Lourie observes in his book Putin: “America’s experts know Russia, they just don’t know Russians.” That gap becomes sharper when the subject is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy trained to mask his fragility and exploit the vulnerabilities of his opponents.

This ignorance was on full display in Alaska, where US President Donald Trump hosted Putin for peace talks on Ukraine. The summit was choreographed as a display of American might: B-2 bombers thundered overhead and F-22s lined the runway as Trump clasped Putin’s hand with a practised tug meant to project dominance—as though optics alone could substitute for substance.

But for Putin—an intelligence veteran skilled in reading and exploiting weakness—the theatrics must have bordered on the absurd. Each flyover, each staged handshake, and each show of strength would have highlighted Washington’s insecurity. True strength does not need to be advertised—it imposes itself. Trump’s “show of power” revealed the innate American anxiety, and his pompous vanity showcased the inner decay.

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Behind closed doors, the optics gave way to reality. For nearly three hours the two men spoke, but when they emerged, Trump appeared like a surrendered general, admitting, “We didn’t get there.” His self-proclaimed reputation as master dealmaker was punctured, and he conceded, “There’s no deal till there is a deal.”

Putin, by contrast, walked away without ceding an inch. Moscow gained everything it sought: An end to Putin’s diplomatic isolation in the Western world, the optics of equality with the president of the world’s sole superpower, and the widening of cracks in transatlantic relations, besides Ukraine being pushed further into despair—excluded from the talks and left alone to lick its wounds.

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The meeting vindicated what everyone knew except, of course, Trump: That tariffs don’t stop war; it didn’t during Operation Sindoor, and it won’t in Ukraine. More importantly, it showed the American dispensation that it was left with fewer cards, especially after the initiation of the tariff war, more so amidst the rebellions led by Bharat and China, along with other Brics nations such as Brazil and South Africa.

Know Your Enemy

Coming back to the Alaska summit, had Trump studied Putin more closely, he might have avoided such puerile missteps. He would have known that the Russian President is at his best when pushed to a corner, thanks to his street-fighting experience during his childhood in Leningrad. As Lourie writes: “The lesson that the streets of Leningrad taught was simple, and it stayed with Putin his whole life: The weak get beaten. Weakness is both disgrace and danger.”

That street code shaped Putin’s worldview and his political tactics. “The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: if a fight is unavoidable, throw the first punch,” the Russian president would concede much later in an interview. Putin thrives on others’ aggression, and in Alaska, Trump provided him just that.

However, Putin’s drive is not just personal psychology. As historian Orlando Figes writes in The Story of Russia, Ukraine is an “existential war” for him—he will fight until he can claim a credible victory.

Ukraine being non-negotiable for Russia makes Putin doubly lethal—and an almost impossible war for the West to win. Ukraine’s importance comes from the fact that it has always been central to Russia’s identity, both historically and strategically. “All Russian history flowed from Kiev. Every schoolchild learned: Kiev is the mother of Russian cities, Ukraine is Russia’s breadbasket,” Lourie notes. During the Soviet Union’s 75 years, Ukrainian leaders—including Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko—ruled for three decades.

A Missed Opportunity

At the heart of the Ukraine conflict lies Russia’s enduring apprehension of encirclement by the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). Lourie recalls how, in 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if Moscow pulled its forces from East Germany and allowed reunification, Nato would not move “one inch east”. In the three decades since, Nato has expanded not by inches but by hundreds of kilometres.

The policy was so fundamentally flawed that it had even drawn criticism from George Kennan, America’s foremost Russia strategist and author of the Cold War containment doctrine. Kennan called Nato’s enlargement “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era”, predicting it would revive “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”.

The Ukraine war is a making of the West’s own folly, envy, and ambition. In his first presidential term, Putin actually sought integration with the West. He frequently emphasised that Russia was part of European culture and even entertained the idea of joining Nato or the EU. But the Western European nations rebuffed him—repeatedly.

Orlando Figes describes this rejection as part of a “recurring pattern running right through Russian history since at least the eighteenth century”. Russia “sought respect and recognition as part of Europe, but when humiliated, it turned inward, rebuilt, and armed itself against the West”.

Putin soon realised Russia’s destiny couldn’t lie with the West, possibly inspired by thinkers like Nikolai Danilevsky. Figes writes, “His (Putin’s) thinking here was possibly derived from Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe, written in the wake of the Crimean War, in which the Pan-Slav thinker had maintained that Russia was a distinctive multicultural civilisation, neither understood nor recognised by Europe, which saw it only as an aggressor state and wanted to diminish it.”

Western condescension—rooted in a sense of cultural and even racial superiority—pushed Russia to reposition itself, not as European but as a Eurasian power. It started looking afresh at its Asian roots and allies.

Conclusion

There’s no solution to Ukraine without understanding these moot points and differences. Peace comes through negotiations, understanding and fair play, sometimes imposed through the barrel of a gun. It just cannot happen because a leader is in a hurry to gain Nobel nominations or even impress his domestic audience.

Trump went to Alaska hoping for a breakthrough he could tout to his domestic audience and impress upon the Nobel committee. Instead, he was steamrolled. For Putin, it was a win-win situation. He secured global legitimacy, widened Western divisions, and strengthened the impression that Russia dictates terms on the Ukrainian issue while Washington scrambles to catch up.

However, we are yet to hear the last word on Ukraine—and of course, the Trump-Putin saga.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.