Putin will hope to appeal to Trump’s business instincts by discussing economic ties alongside the future of Ukraine.
United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday in a bid to try and end Russia’s three-year assault on Ukraine.
In the run-up to the meeting, Trump said that he believes Putin is ready to agree to a ceasefire. But his suggestion that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could “divvy things up” has alarmed observers in Kyiv.
For their part, remarks from top Russian officials suggest that Moscow has tried to water down discussions about the war by linking them with other bilateral issues, particularly restoring economic ties with the US.
On Thursday, Putin sat down with top officials at the Kremlin to discuss the Alaska meeting. He said that he believed the US was making “sincere efforts to stop the fighting, end the crisis and reach agreements of interest to all parties involved in this conflict”.
