It’s the bilateral summit every European leader wants to be at.And for good reason. On Friday, Donald Trump is scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.Territorial concessions are likely to be discussed, and Europe (not least Ukraine) doesn’t want its borders to be redrawn through force.But, as things stand, there are no invites for the country being invaded, nor the continent it sits in.”Brace ourselves for some pretty outrageous Russian demands,” warns Lord Simon McDonald, a former head of the UK Foreign Office.”It will be theatrical,” he adds. “Putin is going to ask for things that nobody else would concede – with the possible exception of Donald Trump.”President Zelensky has said he won’t agree to the giving up of any land, or even freezing the conflict along the current front lines.His argument is that it won’t slow a Russian war machine that has waged a full-scale war for more than three and a half years. Concessions, he claims, would only speed it up.”It’s clear Putin wants a photo with the most influential people on Earth, which is President Trump, and he wants sanctions to be postponed, which he’ll probably get,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, tells me.”The question is, what is success for the US in the meeting?” she asks. “If President Zelensky is there, it would be a clear success.”But if Ukraine’s leader isn’t at the Alaskan table, how might the Kremlin’s proposals be challenged?”He could go,” said the US president on that possibility. But Kyiv and Europe want it to go from a “maybe” to a “yes”.Adding to their anxiety is the one-on-one format being a Kremlin idea the White House agreed to.Brussels’ European Quarter isn’t its usual flurry of political activity during August, but these US-Russia talks have changed that.On Monday, Kallas hosted a virtual meeting of foreign ministers where they called for an unconditional cea …
