Donald Trump is set to hold direct talks with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, as he tries to seal a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. The meeting will take place in Alaska and will be held at the US military’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.

The White House has tried to play down expectations of a breakthrough in talks, saying the summit was a “listening exercise” and had been requested by Putin. “The goal of this meeting for the President is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists on Tuesday. Trump has suggested that there could be some “land swapping”, a notion immediately dismissed by Ukraine‘s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Tatyana Stanovaya – a political analyst and senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre – believes Putin is prepared to withdraw troops from Kharkiv or Dnipro and Sumy regions.

In exchange, Ukraine must pull out of Donetsk and Luhansk, while a frozen contact line should be established in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

However, she argues Putin’s primary concern remains securing what he calls “security guarantees” — in effect, the geopolitical “neutralisation” of Ukraine.

Stanovaya also explains that Putin’s main objective is to persuade Trump that Europe and the current Ukrainian leadership are the obstacles to ending the conflict.