Trump: ‘No deal until there’s a deal’
David Smith
That was quick. Donald Trump left more questions than answers as he fawned over Vladimir Putin but gave precious few details about their high-stakes summit.
“I believe we had a very productive meeting,” he said. “There were many, many points that we agreed on … There’s no deal until there’s a deal. I will call up Nato … I’ll of course call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today’s meeting … We really made some great progress.”
He added: “I’ve always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin – with Vladimir … We were interfered with by the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax.”
Trump warmly thanked Putin, who invited him to Moscow, and dozens of reporters shouted questions but in vain. The US president, who can typically never resist talking and talking, left the stage without answering any of them.
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Updated at 19.47 EDT
Key events
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35m ago
Interim summary
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52m ago
In 2024 debate, Harris told Trump that Putin ‘would eat you for lunch’ in Ukraine talks
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2h ago
Trump claims Putin told him 2020 election ‘was rigged’
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2h ago
Trump says his advice to Zelenskyy is ‘make a deal’
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2h ago
‘Wars are very bad; I seem to have an ability to end them’, Trump boasts after failure to broker Ukraine ceasefire
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2h ago
Trump boasts to Hannity that meeting with Putin was ‘a 10’
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3h ago
‘Next time in Moscow’: Putin invites Trump to Russia for next round of talks
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3h ago
‘I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire’, Trump tells Fox en route to summit,
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3h ago
After summit ends with a whimper, Trump turns to Sean Hannity to make sense of it all
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4h ago
Fox News calls it ‘really stunning’ that Putin spoke first on US soil
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4h ago
Trump: ‘No deal until there’s a deal’
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4h ago
Trump-Putin news conference abruptly ends with no questions from reporters and no details of agreement
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5h ago
Trump calls meeting with Putin ‘extremely productive’ but says more needs to be done to end war in Ukraine
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5h ago
Putin says he reached an agreement with Trump
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5h ago
Putin speaks first at the joint news conference in Alaska
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5h ago
Trump-Putin summit news conference begins
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5h ago
Kremlin says Putin’s talks with Trump are over
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6h ago
White House edits out Trump’s applause for Putin in social media clip
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6h ago
Ukrainians mock Trump for rolling out the red carpet for Putin
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7h ago
‘On the day of negotiations, the Russians are killing as well,’ Zelenskyy says from Kyiv
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8h ago
Trump-Putin meeting is under way
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8h ago
Trump and Putin begin summit, joined by respective delegations
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8h ago
Trump and Putin greet each other as summit begins
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9h ago
Putin to be joined by Russian cabinet officials at summit
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9h ago
Putin lands in Alaska ahead of summit
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9h ago
Emotions run high in frontline Ukrainian city over ceding land to Russia
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Trump-Putin meeting no longer one-on-one, press secretary says
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9h ago
Trump lands in Anchorage, Alaska
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10h ago
The view from Alaska: meeting could prove a win-win for Trump and Putin
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Russian government plane lands ahead of summit
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10h ago
Trump’s pivotal meeting with Putin to begin shortly
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Trump hand delivered a letter from his wife, Melania, to Putin at the meeting, White House officials have told Reuters. The letter raised the plight of children abducted during the war in Ukraine, they said, without providing further details.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted, taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories without the consent of families or guardians, which Ukraine has called a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
Putin has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for the alleged war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility,” the charge says.
Moscow ha previous said it has been protecting vulnerable children from a war zone.
Melania Trump was not on the Alaska trip, however she is emerging as one of the strongest influences on her husband, whose inner circle tends to shift as people fall in and out of favour.
Trump has credited the first lady’s scepticism with sharpening his partial rethink about Putin. At a meeting with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, on 15 July he said: “I go home. I tell the first lady: ‘I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said: ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit.’”
At another White House event that same day, he said: “I’d get home, I’d say: ‘First lady, I had the most wonderful talk with Vladimir. I think we’re finished.’ And then I’ll turn on the television, or she’ll say to me one time: ‘Wow, that’s strange because they just bombed a nursing home.’
For more on the role Melania is playing in shaping her husband’s politics, read this in depth feature from the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour.
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Updated at 23.27 EDT
Interim summary
We will continue to gather reaction and try to make sense of what happened in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s developments so far:
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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met on a red carpet laid down for them at a US military base in the former Russian territory of Alaska, and spent about three hours in private talks, with top foreign policy aides, aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian observers were horrified that Trump laid out a red carpet for Putin, and even applauded him.
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The meeting, billed as a summit, came to an end much earlier than scheduled, after the first of what was supposed to have been two rounds of talks.
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Reporters were summoned for what was billed as a joint news conference, but were instead treated to a pair of brief statements that lasted, in total, 12 minutes. After Putin claimed that some sort of agreement had been reached, Trump said that there had been ‘no deal’ and then abruptly ended the event, taking no questions.
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A Fox News reporter called it “really stunning” that Putin spoke first in the event.
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In a post-summit interview with his supporter Sean Hannity, Trump said that the meeting with Putin had been “a 10” and suggested that Putin “spoke very sincerely” about his desire to end the war in Ukraine.
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Trump also claimed to Hannity that Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” and “you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”
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In 2024 debate, Harris told Trump that Putin ‘would eat you for lunch’ in Ukraine talks
Eleven months ago, during a presidential debate, Kamala Harris scoffed at Donald Trump’s claim that he would be able to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, based on his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
After Trump claimed that he would get the war ended even before taking office, as president-elect, Harris shot back.
“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris said. “You would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch”.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discussed Ukraine during their debate in September 2024.
In the end, when Trump did meet Putin as president on Friday, seven months into his second term, their discussion of ending the war went so badly that even the planned working lunch with the leaders and their aides was canceled.
That meant that the Russians went home without tasting the filet mignon the president had planned to serve them, in sharp contrast to the last summit between the two presidents, in Helsinki in 2018, when lunch was served.
A photograph of that 2018 lunch, taken by the New York Times photographer Doug Mills, is also a reminder of how different the make-up of Trump’s delegation was then.
In 2018, Trump sat down to lunch with Putin flanked by: John Kelly, his chief of staff; Fiona Hill, his Russia adviser; Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state; Jon Huntsman, his ambassador to Russia; and John Bolton, his national security adviser. Every one of those former aides subsequently left Trump’s inner circle and openly denounced him.
By contrast, Putin was joined at the 2018 lunch by: his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov; his foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov; and his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. All of them were at his side in Alaska on Friday.
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Updated at 22.57 EDT
Trump claims Putin told him 2020 election ‘was rigged’
Donald Trump claimed in an interview with Sean Hannity on Friday that Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him at their summit meeting that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” through the widespread use of postal voting that year.
“Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things, he said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”
“We talked about 2020, he said: ‘You won that election by so much,’” Trump added.
A short time later, after making the false claim that California’s system of sending ballots to voters opened the door to fraud, Trump said: “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said ‘You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”
There is no evidence that voter fraud played any role in Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, but elections in Putin’s Russia are notoriously dishonest, with rampant cheating by the authorities documented by pro-democracy activists.
It is impossible to know if Putin did make these remarks, but Trump has a habit of putting his own words in the mouths of other people.
In the interview, he also claimed that Putin told him that the US was “dead” under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and was now “as hot as a pistol”.
Trump went on to repeat his claim that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him the exact same thing in May, when he visited the country. But Trump did not meet the elderly king of Saudi Arabia during his visit.
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Updated at 22.17 EDT
Trump says his advice to Zelenskyy is ‘make a deal’
Asked by Sean Hannity what advice he would give to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy after meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump said he would tell him to “make a deal”, to end the war.
He made no reference to any way in which Ukraine could make a deal with Russia while under occupation and bombardment.
Trump also repeated his familiar lie, debunked by the Guardian six months ago, that the US had given $350bn to Ukraine for its defense, while Europe had given just $100bn.
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Updated at 22.14 EDT
‘Wars are very bad; I seem to have an ability to end them’, Trump boasts after failure to broker Ukraine ceasefire
In an interview with Sean Hannity, recorded in the room where he just failed to convince Vladimir Putin to stop attacking Ukraine, Donald Trump just boasted that he has a special talent for ending wars.
“Wars are very bad, I seem to have an ability to end them,” Trump said.
The president was responding to a comment from Hannity, who praised Trump for playing a role in tamping down a series of largely dormant global conflicts in the past six months. Neither man mentioned that Trump had promised on the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours if elected.
Trump with Putin after their press conference. Photograph: Gavriil Grigorov/AFP/Getty ImagesShare
Updated at 22.39 EDT
Trump boasts to Hannity that meeting with Putin was ‘a 10’
Donald Trump’s post-summit interview with Sean Hannity is being broadcast now on Fox.
Trump began by repeating his claim that he “always had a great relationship with President Putin”, but cooperation between the United States and Russia was made impossible by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which he refers to as a “hoax”.
He then said that he did have a chance to speak privately to Putin, after their brief, 12-minute news conference. Putin “spoke very sincerely”, Trump said about his desire to end the war in Ukraine. Trump did not mention that the war began with Putin’s decision to seize Ukrainian territory in 2014, after his ally was deposed as president of Ukraine in a popular uprising. It then intensified in 2022 when Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Asked by Hannity to rate the meeting on a scale of one to 10, Trump replied that it was “a 10” because it showed that the leaders of the two nuclear-armed nations could cooperate.
“It’s good when two big powers get along,” Trump said.
Hannity then pressed Trump to reveal what Putin told him about why he thought the war in Ukraine would not have started if Trump was president. Trump demurred, but said that he could say in his own words that the reason was that Biden was grossly incompetent.
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Updated at 22.40 EDT
‘Next time in Moscow’: Putin invites Trump to Russia for next round of talks
At the end of Donald Trump’s brief and somewhat defeated-sounding remarks after his meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president extended an invitation to his US counterpart to hold the next round of talks in the Russian capital.
“Again, Mr President, I’d like to thank you very much, and we’ll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon,” Trump said. “Thank you very much, Vladimir.”
“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied, chuckling.
“Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump said. “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I, uh, I could see it possibly happening.”
Loop – next time in MoscowShare
Updated at 22.03 EDT
‘I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire’, Trump tells Fox en route to summit,
On his way to Alaska, Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that his goal for the talks with Vladimir Putin was to get the Russian president to agree to a ceasefire.
“So when you talk about deals, it’s all I do my whole life, I do deals, you never know, you don’t like to have too many expectations,” Trump told Baier in an interview recorded on Air Force One that was broadcast on Friday.
“But we’re going to go and find out. I’d like to see a ceasefire. I wouldn’t be thrilled if I didn’t get it, but everyone says, ‘You’re not going to get the ceasefire, it’ll take place on the second meeting’, but I’m not going to be happy with that.
“I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”
Donald Trump told Fox anchor Bret Baier on Thursday that he would not be happy if he failed to get Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire.Share
Updated at 20.45 EDT
After summit ends with a whimper, Trump turns to Sean Hannity to make sense of it all
The White House pool reporter tells us that Donald Trump “is currently doing a previously announced interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News”.
That interview, with an opinion host who is a strong supporter of the president and has campaigned for him, is scheduled to be broadcast on Hannity’s show in just over an hour.
The interview was billed by the network as an exclusive look behind the scenes at what was supposed to have been a meeting of historic importance, perhaps comparable to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China to meet chairman Mao Zedong. At the very least, Trump said that he hoped to convince the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to agree to an immediate ceasefire in his war on Ukraine.
Now that Trump’s talks with Putin have failed to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, a conflict that he promised on the campaign trail he could end in 24 hours, his discussion with Hannity will no doubt be a good deal less celebratory.
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Updated at 20.20 EDT