Photo: Alexander Kazakov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s neediness is giving the Kremlin ample ammunition ahead of his who-knows-what-will-happen meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Envisioned perhaps as a high-stakes drama sure to highlight Trump’s negotiating prowess, the Alaska summit set for later today has become a comedy of errors before it’s even begun. And the clearest sign of that might be Trump’s own declaration on the eve of the meeting that he’s the “toughest” negotiator former KGB officer Putin has ever been forced to contend with.

Putin has “never had to deal with anybody like me,” he told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade — and he’s probably right, just not in the way he thinks he is.

The farce began with the decision to host the sit-down in Alaska, a former Russian-controlled territory touted by some hard-liners in Russia as the next target in rebuilding the Russian Empire, and it gained momentum with Trump’s bumbling declarations leading up to the meeting.

By the time Russia’s delegation had already set off for Anchorage on Thursday, the Kremlin had hijacked the meeting’s agenda and turned the war in Ukraine into an afterthought, touting economic deals to be made and predicting breakthroughs in bilateral cooperation. So confident is Moscow in these deals that Putin’s finance minister will be coming along; his U.S. counterpart, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is also said to be attending with a set of economic incentives on the table that reportedly includes offering Russia access to Alaska’s natural resources.

Trump, meanwhile, can’t make his mind up. Initially threatening Russia with “very severe consequences” if Putin doesn’t agree at the summit to end the war against Ukraine, Trump has now drastically lowered the bar from “We’re going to get [the war] stopped” to “There is a 25% chance that this meeting will not be a successful meeting.” And if that’s the case, he says, he’ll just walk away and give up.

“I’ll do a press conference to say that the war is going to go on and these people are horribly going to continue to shoot each other and kill each other, and I think it’s a disgrace, and I’ll head back to Washington.”

It’s no surprise that Moscow views Trump’s brain as a pile of mush to be molded however it pleases.

The Kremlin, having already seen Trump’s threatening “ultimatum” to stop the fighting turn into an invitation to the U.S., seems to have no intention of even taking discussions about Ukraine seriously, instead banking on the Alaska summit as a way to win a grab bag of other prizes from Trump.

The location of the meeting is the first big prize, giving Putin aide Yuri Ushakov the chance to point out that Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where the two presidents will meet, is home to a cemetery where Soviet pilots killed in World War II are buried, proof of a “wartime camaraderie” between Moscow and Washington.

The Kremlin has boasted that it also plans to bring “broader issues” to Trump’s attention, with Putin saying Moscow hopes to make a deal “in the area of control over strategic offensive weapons.”

That may be why Russian authorities are said to be quietly preparing for a new test of a nuclear-powered intercontinental cruise missile that Putin has hailed as “invincible” and capable of dodging American missile defenses. Researchers cited by Reuters this week said a flurry of activity at the test site of the Burevestnik in the Barents Sea suggests an impending launch, which may be timed to coincide with the Alaska meeting, depending on the outcome.

Even as preparations were in full swing Thursday for the historic sit-down, Trump was mocked in Kremlin-controlled media; one meme circulated by a Kremlin pool reporter skewered his desperation for a Nobel Peace Prize with an image depicting the U.S. president viewing a phone app telling him he needs just two more countries to reconcile in order to “unlock” his reward. Similarly, a column in the Kremlin-aligned Moskovsky Komsomolets noted that Trump clearly has no plan for the meeting, though his “suggestibility” and “inattentiveness,” along with his obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize, suggest he will be easily swayed.

After Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov gushed that Trump’s “unprecedented” approach to resolving the war had received high marks from Putin “personally,” Sergei Markov, a former Putin adviser, cheered from the sidelines on social media: “The Kremlin heard my suggestion to flatter Trump. The guy loves such words! Give them to him!”

The flattery appears to be part of a two-pronged approach to Trump that, on the other end of the spectrum, features underhanded taunts that emphasize his obliviousness and demonstrate Kremlin control.

Such was the apparent message in November 2024, when shortly after Trump won the U.S. presidential election, Russia’s most-watched news program on state-controlled television broadcast nude photos of soon-to-be First Lady Melania Trump.

Or when Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was reportedly presented earlier this month with an award from Putin to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son was killed fighting alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. Never mind that the award — the Order of Lenin — was given to a real-estate investor now tasked with high-level foreign diplomacy. Or that its intended recipient is a CIA official on the opposing side of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The real taunt behind the award is that it’s defunct, though before it lost all state recognition with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was posthumously awarded to some western defectors, including the notorious British double agent Kim Philby.

But none of that matters, or will matter, if Putin is clever enough to utter a few magic words at Friday’s summit, something along the lines of, “This man is an extraordinary peacemaker, and it would be a travesty not to give him the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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