Russia jubilant after Trump summit as Putin reportedly demands Donetsk and Luhansk

Russia’s reaction to Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska has been nothing short of jubilant, with Moscow celebrating the fact that the Russian leader met his US counterpart without making concessions and now faces no sanctions despite rejecting Trump’s ceasefire demands.

“The meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions,” wrote the former president Dmitry Medvedev on Telegram. He added that the summit showed that talks could continue as Russia wages war in Ukraine.

Trump entered the high-stakes summit warning “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire,” and threatening “severe consequences” if Moscow refused to cooperate.

But after a three-hour meeting with the Russian side that yielded no tangible results, Trump shelved his threats and instead said the meeting was “extremely productive”, even as Putin clung to his maximalist demands for ending the war and announced no concessions on the battlefield, where Russian forces are consolidating key gains in eastern Ukraine.

On Saturday morning, Trump also publicly dropped plans for an immediate ceasefire he had himself championed for months, instead embracing Putin’s preferred path to ending the war: pushing through a far-reaching agreement before halting any fighting.

All in all, the view from Moscow is that Putin appears to have gained the upper hand. “Putin gave Trump nothing, but still got everything he wanted. Trump finally listened to his demands,” said a member of the Russian foreign policy establishment, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In his remarks after the meeting in Alaska, Putin gave little indication of softening his stance, repeating that Moscow wanted the “root causes” of the conflict addressed – Kremlin shorthand for demands to demilitarise Ukraine, restrict its domestic politics and block its path to Nato.

Russian state media and the Kremlin elite were already in high spirits as Trump rolled out the red carpet and treated Putin as an equal, despite the Russian leader being wanted by The Hague court for war crimes.