The Alaska Summit 2025: An Agreement Without Signatures

A prologue in late-summer light

History does not always unfold in marble halls. Sometimes it arrives under a high August sky, with the long daylight of Alaska washing everything in cinematic clarity. 

Even the airport choreography was deliberate: neither leader was made to wait for the other. The aircraft touched down within minutes; both men stepped out almost in sync, each walking his own red carpet to meet midway. Equal footing, equal theatre. It was political respect rendered in movement — an unspoken acknowledgement of authority.

It was not quite a summit; it was a statement. The statement was simple: like it or not, Russia’s president still occupies a central pillar in the global architecture. Pillars are seldom carried off the tarmac.

No arrest, but recognition

For weeks, excitable punditry insisted that Alaska would be the stage for an arrest. Reality was tidier and rather more telling. 

There was no spectacle, only the carefully measured grammar of statecraft.

Symbolism matters. The absence of humiliation was itself the headline. Whatever one’s judgement of the war, Putin was treated as an indispensable participant in the world’s argument with itself. That is not an endorsement; it is an admission of fact.

“Instead of cuffs, a carpet. Sometimes that’s the whole communiqué.”

A summit for Trump, not for Ukraine

Anyone who believed this meeting was designed to ‘solve Ukraine’ has missed the plot. The summit was built to fortify Donald Trump’s preferred image: the deal-maker who could end a war others prolonged.

On cue, Putin handed him a political gift — the public line that if Trump had been president in 2022, the war would never have begun. It was not flattery; it was ammunition. In one sentence, Trump’s central campaign claim was laundered into international daylight. For a domestic audience, the subtext writes itself: Biden equals war; Trump equals the chance of peace.

There are moments when politics reduces to arithmetic. This was one of them.

Ukraine as the curtain, not the play

Do not be distracted by the marquee. Ukraine hung across the stage like a velvet curtain, while the conversation behind it moved well beyond a ceasefire map. The Russian side did not arrive with a narrow political entourage; it arrived with heft — defence, foreign affairs, economy, finance. That is not the line-up for trench contours. That is the cast you bring when the script concerns security architecture, sanctions corridors, energy routes and the shape of tomorrow’s trade.

As one diplomat once told me: “When leaders talk about one war, they are usually negotiating another peace.”

The press were kept at arm’s length

After hours of talks, there was what we generously call a press conference. It wasn’t. There were statements; there were no questions. The choreography was intentional. Leave the words broad, keep the edges blurred, preserve room for manoeuvre.

Silence, in politics, is not always evasion; sometimes it is a down-payment. What matters is not what was said, but what was held back.

What awaits Ukraine

Three days on, the Ukrainian president is summoned to Washington. The timing is not accidental; it is the logic of sequence. There, one suspects, the tone will harden from exhortation to instruction. Call it terms, call it conditions, call it a route map to capitulation by any other name — the vocabulary is less important than the gravity.

The personal calculus for Zelensky will not be trivial. Guarantees — security, financial, even personal — can be re-written without ever being mentioned out loud. Should the United States step back from the role of unconditional patron, Europe will be invited to carry the burden. Nothing that happened in Alaska suggested Europe has the appetite for it.

An invitation to Moscow

The most revealing flourish was not in the wording but in the invitation: the next meeting, publicly mooted, in Moscow. Two years ago that would have been unthinkable theatre; now it is merely bold.

Trump later called the encounter “ten out of ten”. No treaty, no signatures, no ceasefire — and yet a perfect score. It tells you the metric: this was never about ticking boxes on a negotiator’s checklist; it was about resetting the optics and the leverage.

“There is no such thing as friendship in geopolitics. But there are moments when a deal borrows the mask of friendship and both men smile for the cameras.”

The Arctic — the quiet prize

Beneath the noise of ‘peace’ lies a quieter, colder word: Arctic. The Northern Sea Route. Hydrocarbons and rare earths. Insurance frameworks, ice-class fleets, ports and corridors whose value grows as the century warms. Russia holds the geography and the capacity; America has presence and reach. Alone, each is constrained. Together — even tacitly — the ledger begins to balance.

One can sketch the outline without colouring it in: you do not obstruct us where we insist; we do not obstruct you where you intend. The public hears diplomacy; the private file notes shipping lanes and drilling windows. It is not cynicism; it is the geometry of interests.

Europe — the absent subject

Where was Europe? Not at the table. Not even in the anteroom. The continent discovered, once again, that its fate can be debated in rooms where it holds no key.

The humiliation is not theatrical, it is structural. When Washington and Moscow perform bilateralism, Brussels becomes a spectator. The message from Anchorage was crisp in that bright August light: you no longer set the table; at best, you pick up the bill.

Why an agreement without signatures still binds

Formally, nothing was signed. Substantively, that was the point. Paper fixes men to promises; ambiguity binds them to possibilities.

Trump leaves with the narrative he wanted: I tried; the ball is no longer in Washington. Putin leaves with what he values: parity of posture and a reopened channel on equal terms. Europe leaves with a migraine. Ukraine with a narrowing corridor. The Arctic, silent as ever, waits.

“Not every settlement is written in ink. Some are drafted in silence and witnessed by camera crews.”

The risks, the wagers, the next moves

There is a danger in such theatre: that the audience hears ‘peace’ where none exists, and markets price what diplomats have not yet agreed. But there is also a wager here — that the performance creates its own reality. If the United States signals conditionality on Ukraine, if Russia signals patience on a broader settlement, if Europe frets and follows, then the shape of the endgame becomes self-fulfilling.

Watch for the practical tells, not the adjectives: who slows what to whom; which corridors open even as others close; which capitals suddenly rediscover the merits of ‘dialogue’. And watch, above all, for whether Washington chooses to carry less and lecture less, while Moscow chooses to push less and pocket more.

A note on power and posture

States rarely admit retreat. They prefer to rename it. The Alaska summit offered everyone a new vocabulary. America can call it refocus; Russia can call it respect; Europe can call it resilience; Ukraine has nothing flattering left to call it at all.

In the end, geopolitics is a grammar lesson. Who takes the subject position, who becomes the object, and who is reduced to a preposition in someone else’s sentence — that is the syntax of power.

Coda — the calm of August

It mattered that the day felt unhurried, that the light was clear and the air mild. The absence of drama was the drama. The lack of signatures was the signature. In that late-summer calm, two leaders arranged a future that will take months to decipher and years to live with.

The summit was officially nothing. Which is precisely why it may prove to be everything.