US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have left Alaska without reaching an agreement for a ceasefire in Ukraine.
After an almost three-hour meeting, the leaders delivered a joint statement to the media before leaving without taking questions.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Donald Trump said early in his post-summit remarks here in Anchorage.
It was a roundabout way of conceding that after several hours of talks, there’s no deal. No ceasefire. Nothing tangible to report.
The president said that he and Vladimir Putin made “some great progress”, but with little details about what that might be, it’s left to the world’s imagination.
“We didn’t get there,” he later said, before exiting the room without taking any questions from the hundreds of gathered reporters.
Trump travelled a long way to only produce such vagaries, even if America’s European allies and Ukrainian officials may be relieved he did not offer unilateral concessions or agreements that could have undermined future negotiations.
For the man who likes to tout himself as a peacemaker and a dealmaker, it appears that Trump will leave Alaska with neither.
There are also no indications that a future summit that includes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is forthcoming, Putin’s “next time in Moscow” quip about their next meeting notwithstanding.
While Trump had less at stake during these negotiations than Ukraine or Russia, it still will put a dent in his domestic and international prestige after earlier promises that this meeting had only a 25% chance of failure.
What’s more, the president had to suffer the apparent indignity of standing silent as Putin started off the press-conference-that-wasn’t with extensive opening remarks.
It was a marked difference than the normal routine in the Oval Office, when the US president typically holds court while his foreign counterpart looks on without comment.
While Alaska is American territory, Putin seemed more at home in what his officials like to note was once “Russian America” before its 19th Century sale to the US.
That may eat at the American president over the comings days, as will press coverage that will present this summit as a flop.
The big question now – one reporters were unable to ask on Friday – is whether Trump will decide to impose his much-threatened new sanctions on Russia as punishment.
The president partially addressed that in the friendly confines of a Fox News interview before flying out, saying that he would consider such a move “maybe in two weeks, three weeks”.
But given the president promised “severe consequences” if Russia did not move towards a ceasefire, such a unspecific answer may prompt more questions than it answers.