- 5 months ago
Tinatin Japaridze, an analyst with Eurasia Group, joined "Forbes Newsroom" to break down President Donald Trump's separate meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes.
00:07Joining me once again is Tynatyn Japorice, an analyst with Eurasia Group.
00:11Tynatyn, thank you so much for joining me.
00:13It's great to be back with you, Brittany.
00:15It is great to be speaking with you, too, because you always give us updates and your input on certain developments
00:22as we see them coming out of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
00:25And it seems like there was seemingly some big developments over the past week or so.
00:31And I want to get your opinion to see if anything was accomplished.
00:34President Trump met with both presidents, Zelensky as well as Putin.
00:38But I want to talk about the meeting between Putin and Trump first.
00:42That happened in Alaska last Friday.
00:45So to start off the conversation, last time we spoke was in mid-July.
00:48And you said at that point we weren't going to see any major concessions or meaningful shifts from Vladimir Putin towards a ceasefire.
00:54Based on what you saw during the summit and then thereafter, do you still agree with that?
00:58I mean, where are we right now?
01:00So the short answer is I still do feel that we have yet to see any major concessions from Putin.
01:07And that's, of course, going to be instrumental here.
01:09The summit in Alaska was very heavy on optics, but light on substance, shall we say.
01:15There were no new commitments in terms of any major progress toward peace from the Russian side, particularly.
01:24The meeting confirmed what many of us had expected, and that is that this will be a long, drawn-out process with Putin using talks for the sake of talks in many ways, to his advantage for the time being at least.
01:37No concrete concessions, and it's very clear that his main goal right now is to buy time, to lock in battlefield gains, which Russia has been making over the past few weeks, delay new sanctions from the U.S., and to ensure that NATO membership for Ukraine remains off the table.
01:56But all in all, I think what Friday summit did produce was a meeting that followed on Monday, which we can unpack later in this conversation.
02:03Definitely. But I want to get back to the Friday one, because before that summit, President Trump told reporters a few days before that Russia would face severe consequences if Putin didn't end the war on Friday.
02:16Obviously, the war was not ended on Friday. Do you think that Russia should face those severe consequences? Because it doesn't seem like, as of now, they're on the table.
02:25They're not on the table right now, but that also doesn't mean I don't think that it's completely off the table.
02:30I think there's a little bit of a pause to give any sort of bilateral meeting or a trilateral meeting a chance to actually happen, to bring the two sides together, whether that looks like a ceasefire or a truce of some description, or a peace settlement, which I think is highly unlikely anyway this year.
02:50But Putin has actually shifted the goalposts, at least as of what we saw on Friday, a ceasefire is now framed as the end goal by Russia, not the starting point, which of course gives Moscow a clear advantage.
03:04The war, and by the war, I really mean the fighting on the battlefield, remains Vladimir Putin's strongest bargaining chip.
03:12And he is simply in no rush to end this because, of course, he has the time to continue making gains on the battlefield while the weather allows.
03:22So at the summit, Putin reportedly said that he would freeze hostilities only if Ukraine pulled back from the Donbass and formally renounced NATO membership.
03:32And I don't think that either of those two scenarios are going to unfold.
03:37So that leads me to imagine a sort of process going forward that really doesn't show us any concessions from the Russian side.
03:48And so if in a ceasefire now is Putin's end point, not the starting point, what is more of the starting point?
03:55Because President Trump, before his meeting with Zelensky on Monday, he laid out some concessions for Ukraine.
04:01No NATO membership and they weren't getting Crimea back.
04:05Do you think those are starting points from Putin as well?
04:09I think he wants far more than that, Brittany.
04:11I think he has made it clear over and over that what he wants ideally is a Ukrainian capitulation, even if he says right now that he would be willing to stop the fighting or active fighting, that is, if Ukraine agreed to pull out of the Donbass entirely.
04:30And on paper somehow also agreed to stop any progress whatsoever, any ambitions in terms of a future NATO membership, even that would not be enough for Putin, I don't think.
04:44Because he would inevitably use that time if there was some sort of a truce to build up his manpower, weapons, et cetera, to be able to come back again for another round of fighting.
04:59So I don't think in that respect that even if there were some sort of a brief truce, that Putin would be in any frame of mind for him to be willing to come to the table for a peace settlement, for a political settlement to the ongoing war and the broader conflict.
05:15He's just really not there yet.
05:17And I don't think he will be for a while.
05:20Putin started this war unprovoked.
05:23It's been dragging out now for over three years.
05:25Because just this past weekend, he had a meeting with the president on U.S. soil.
05:32He got that handshake photo.
05:33He got, as you said, photo ops.
05:36He was referred to on the luncheon menu as His Excellency Vladimir Putin.
05:41Is this legitimizing Putin on the world stage?
05:44And if so, I mean, what do you think America's part in this really is?
05:49It certainly is legitimizing Russia in Russia's mind on the world stage.
05:53And that was extremely important to Moscow.
05:57If you had seen the headlines that followed immediately after the Alaska summit throughout Russia, they were thrilled with how Putin looked.
06:07It was a very clear win for him.
06:09I don't think that it was a loss, per se, for President Trump.
06:12And I would go so far as to say that it wasn't entirely a loss for Ukraine as well, just because what followed, as I mentioned, was the Monday summit with the Europeans, with NATO, with Ukraine at the table here in Washington.
06:25So in that respect, I don't think anything terrible came out of it for any one party concerned, but certainly was a win for Putin.
06:34And the optics, as I said, looked fantastic for him.
06:37He felt that he was able to legitimize the war for his own constituents as well, to say that no matter what anyone has said over the past few years since the full-scale invasion, even though everybody tried to push Russia out from the international stage, they tried to isolate Russia from the West.
06:58There he was in the United States at the invitation of the U.S. President Trump, visiting with not just fantastic optics, but also, I mean, there really was a red carpet rolled out in front of him.
07:13And that certainly made him look stronger, at least stronger in that moment in time.
07:18And so then let's fast forward to Monday.
07:21We get to Monday.
07:23President Zelensky comes to meet with President Trump.
07:25And if we remember back in February, they had that explosive White House meeting, and this seemed to be the opposite of that.
07:33I mean, what are your takeaways from their meeting in the White House this time around?
07:37Well, certainly this was a much, much better meeting than what we saw back in February.
07:43And you and I talked about it in February, actually.
07:46But of course, you know, it was still nowhere near the red carpet welcome of the U.S. President gave Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
07:52But even so, this was good.
07:53It was certainly a calmer, warmer meeting overall.
07:58And also, President Trump appears to be edging now closer to European and Ukrainian positions, at least at the moment.
08:08But Moscow's pushback is what really keeps the progress stuck in slow motion.
08:12So I don't think that that necessarily achieved the end, but it certainly put everyone in the U.S., in Europe, also in Ukraine, of course, back on some sort of a track that is moving forward, where there's far more unity between the U.S. and Europe and Ukraine than what we saw a few months ago.
08:32And we certainly saw that with a flank of European leaders meeting with both Zelensky and Trump after the two of them met.
08:40What did you make of that meeting?
08:41Do you think anything was accomplished there?
08:43So the European leaders came to Washington with three big goals in mind, I think.
08:49One was that they wanted clarity on whether the U.S. is really prepared to offer security guarantees for Ukraine.
08:55We can unpack that a bit more later.
08:57But overall, I would say that that still remains to be a work in progress.
09:03There's a lot of sort of questions that need to be answered.
09:06There isn't enough clarity.
09:08But at least that process has started and talks and discussions are very much underway on that front.
09:16Second, there were laying groundwork for a possible three-way summit between Trump, Zelensky and Putin.
09:21And at least as far as a Putin-Zelensky meeting goes, that is likelier than not to happen in the near future.
09:28So that was some sort of progress as well.
09:31But TBD from the Russian side and also whether or not there will be any preconditions that are going to be attached to that meeting happening from the Russian side.
09:40And third, they drew a firm line against land swaps, aiming to push negotiations toward terms Putin will likely reject, setting the stage for more pressure and possible new sanctions.
09:52But overall, it was very important for the Europeans together with Ukraine to reiterate that no land swap talks can happen.
10:01That was, I think, one of the other big benefits of how everything unfolded on Friday.
10:06And what we saw was that it's highly unlikely, and I think we can say with a degree of confidence that it did not happen, that President Putin and President Trump sat down and President Trump essentially accepted any of the pressures that I'm certain came from the Russian side in terms of any land swaps that I think Putin wanted President Trump to negotiate on Ukraine's behalf without Ukraine in the room.
10:32We know that land swaps, as of now, are a non-starter for Ukraine and Europe.
10:37Are they a non-starter, in your opinion, for President Trump?
10:41Well, President Trump's big objective is an end to the war and a quick win if he can get it.
10:49So I think he may have tried and he likely did try to get the Ukrainians to agree to some concessions.
10:56But he also understood and appeared to have respected the fact that the decision, the final decision, lies with the Ukrainian side.
11:05So the U.S. is really in no position to be able to impose a lot of pressure on the Ukrainians to essentially agree to give up any of their sovereign land in return for peace.
11:20Although, of course, ideally for President Trump, Ukraine would be willing to to give some to to the Russians.
11:26But again, the biggest risk here is that if one gives a little bit to President Putin, he is simply going to come back for more the next day.
11:36I do want to talk about those security guarantees because President Trump did bring them up on Monday when asked.
11:41He said that Europe will be the first line of defense, but the United States will certainly be involved.
11:45He then joined Fox and Friends on Tuesday, and he did clarify that there's going to be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil fighting in that way.
11:53So I am curious, what do you think these security guarantees mean both for Europe and the United States?
11:59So the biggest takeaway, I think, from the Monday meetings was that the U.S. signaled, as you said, openness in principle to security guarantees for Ukraine,
12:07but did make it very clear that Europe and NATO would carry most of that burden and not Washington.
12:13So, you know, for example, as you said, we do not foresee any U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine, and we can safely rule that out.
12:21President Trump certainly did.
12:23But despite lack of clarity surrounding the details of what those security guarantees could look like in practice,
12:31the coalition of the willing and NATO actually are not now talking with security advisors in D.C.,
12:38with Secretary Rubio and so on, to actually determine what those guarantees could entail, not just from the U.S. side, but also from the European side.
12:50But through all of that, we need to bear in mind that Moscow will very likely reject any robust Western security guarantees,
12:58even if President Putin says that he's willing to accept some guarantees, anything that looks like robust Western guarantees and presence next door to Russia,
13:09as far as Moscow is concerned, will simply not be an option that Putin will be willing to accept anytime soon.
13:16So when President Trump tied next steps, even a possible three-way summit with Putin and Zelensky,
13:24directly to Putin's willingness to engage, this was a reminder as well that Moscow's position continues to drive the diplomatic agenda
13:32and not the other way around, certainly not Ukraine, but even the U.S.,
13:36because the U.S. right now is very much in this facilitation mode where President Trump is looking to facilitate the end of the war and any talks that lead to that end of the war.
13:48But I think he also is very, at least not as willing as he may have appeared at the beginning of his tenure
13:56when he came back to the White House to have a very, very active role.
14:01He certainly will have a role in this, but it'll be a lot easier for the United States to untangle itself
14:08if one or both of the sides appear to be dragging their feet too much.
14:14And then it'll be a lot easier for President Trump to say that he tried to do what he could.
14:18But it was either Kiev or Moscow that ultimately failed to end the war and therefore the U.S. tried but was not able to bring an end
14:28because of the lack of willingness on either of the two sides to come to the table.
14:34You and I always end our conversations on what you're looking out for next.
14:38And I think what we are intended to look out for is that bilateral meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin
14:44as well as Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, then there's supposedly going to be a trilateral meeting
14:50between those two leaders as well as President Trump.
14:53So what specifically are you looking out for in those meetings?
14:56So I'm looking out for a few things, Brittany.
14:59One is, as you said, the Putin-Zelenskyy meeting in particular, less so the trilateral, but the two-way.
15:04If it does indeed materialize over the next few weeks, it'll be very interesting to see under what conditions that happens
15:11and naturally what is achieved at the meeting should it go ahead.
15:15But again, I'm not expecting a magic fix there.
15:18Second will be whether President Trump defines a clearer U.S. role beyond dialogue
15:24and what those security guarantees could actually entail in practice.
15:28But that is, of course, subject to continued consultations and discussions with the coalition of the willing countries.
15:34Another major element that is worth keeping an eye on is Europe's and Ukraine's ability
15:41to maintain unity with the U.S. and resist pressure, especially if talks stall.
15:47Let's say, for example, if the meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin, for whatever reason, does not happen
15:52and the talks are stalled, are we going to continue seeing what we saw on Monday,
15:57this ability for Europe and Ukraine to get on the same page with Washington?
16:02New sanctions, that's another element that I'm keeping an eye on, again, contingent on what happens
16:11and whether President Trump's patience is being tested too much by Vladimir Putin.
16:17I think that is still possible, but likely only if Putin fully obstructs talks,
16:22though I think he will have to be very careful there, even if that means giving very little to President Trump,
16:28similar to what we saw in Alaska, just enough to delay any punitive measures
16:33and to give at least a mini-win to President Trump.
16:38But the bigger picture over the coming weeks and months for me remains the same,
16:43that the peace process is in slow motion with the war likely to drag on into 2026.
16:50Tenantin, I always enjoy our conversations, and especially because I look back at the prior conversation
16:56before you and I jump on here, and it seems like you have a crystal ball
17:00because you're always so spot on with your insights.
17:05So thank you so much for joining me, and until next time.
17:07Thank you so much. See you soon.
17:09See you soon.
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