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.
Key events
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.
Trump says his advice to Zelenskyy is ‘make a deal’
Asked by Sean Hannity what advice he would give to Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr 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.
‘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 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 1 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.
‘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.”
Here is video of Trump’s unusually spare remarks, which lasted just 3 minutes and 25 seconds.
‘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.”
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.
Fox News calls it ‘really stunning’ that Putin spoke first on US soil
Among those scrambling to make sense of the 12-minute news conference, at which no questions were taken before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin departed, are Fox News producers and correspondents who had hyped this meeting between the presidents of the United States and Russia as a summit of historic proportions, and one at which they would have exclusive access.
The network planned to broadcast an exclusive preview of the summit, recorded with Trump en route to Alaska on Air Force One, as the talks went on, to be followed by a second exclusive interview with the president, conducted by Sean Hannity immediately after the talks, to be broadcast during his 9pm show on Fox.
Those carefully laid plans were thrown into chaos by the briefness of both the talk and the news conference.
Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox White House correspondent, just noted in a live report from the conference room that what unfolded was very different from what Trump administration officials told reporters to expect. The idea, Heinrich said, was that there would be a news conference with the two leaders, and the opportunity to question them, if the talks went well, but if the talks did not go well, only Trump would appear and Putin would be sent packing.
“Neither of those things happened,” Heinrich noted. “And what was really stunning to me, as someone who has been in a lot of these press conferences, is there were a few things that were very unusual. You had Putin come out and address the press first. We are on US soil here.”
“The way that it felt in the room was not good,” Heinrich also said. “It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
As Heinrich tried to make sense of what had taken place, the corner of the screen on Fox promoted Trump’s interview with Hannity, which is still scheduled to air at 9pm ET.
Putin also dominated the joint appearance in terms of speaking time. While the Russian leader spoke for about 8 minutes and 30 seconds, the US president was done in just under 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
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.
Trump-Putin news conference abruptly ends with no questions from reporters and no details of agreement
Donald Trump ended his brief remarks at the joint news conference by thanking Vladimir Putin, and saying that they would speak again soon.
“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied in English.
Trump then called the news conference to an end without taking any questions from the assembled reporters, or offering any details of what Putin called the agreement they had reached in their three hours of talks.
Trump calls meeting with Putin ‘extremely productive’ but says more needs to be done to end war in Ukraine
Donald Trump just began his very brief remarks by saying that the talks with Putin were “extremely productive” but more needs to be done to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
“I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on,” Trump said. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal. I will call up Nato … I’ll of course call up President Zelensky and tell him about today’s meeting.”
“We really made some great progress,” Trump said without revealing any details of what that progress was.
“I’m going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened, but we had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to,” Trump said. “There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant, one is probably the most significant. But we have a very good chance of getting there, we didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”
David Smith
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have begun their joint press conference in Anchorage, Alaska, standing at lecterns against a blue backdrop that says “Pursuing peace”.
Unusually, the visiting foreign leader went first. Speaking via Russian interpreter, Putin said he gave Trump a “neighbourly” greeting today because the US and Russia are neighbours and Alaska is a reminder of this. He acknowledged bilateral relations fell to the “lowest point since the cold war”.
Putin described Trump’s efforts on Ukraine as “precious” and claimed “everything that’s happening is a tragedy for us and terrible wound”. Without giving details, Putin said today’s “agreement” could help Ukraine’s security and urged Europe to “not throw a wrench in the works” and “not use backroom dealings” to torpedo it.
Putin says he reached an agreement with Trump
Putin says that he has reached an agreement with Trump and hopes that leaders in Kyiv “won’t throw a wrench” into the process of bring the war to an end. He offers no details on what the agreement is.
He also repeated his frequent demand that the root causes of the conflict need to be addressed. In the past, Putin has suggested that those causes include the elected government of Ukraine, which he has falsely claimed is led by Nazis.
Putin notes that Trump has claimed that the full-scale war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 would not have happened had Trump been the US president. Putin says that he agrees.
Putin speaks first at the joint news conference in Alaska
Vladimir Putin is speaking first at the joint news conference in Alaska after his talks with Donald Trump wrapped up ahead of schedule.
Putin said the talks were constructive before moving on to discuss the former Russian control of Alaska, noting the hundreds of Russian names of towns and numerous Russian Orthodox churches in the state.
The Russian leader’s emphasis on the historical Russian “heritage” of the US state will not be comforting to Ukrainian listeners, given Putin’s claim that the entire country, which was once part of the Russian empire, should be considered part of the “Russian world”.
“We have always considered the Ukrainian nation a brotherly nation,” Putin says.
Trump-Putin summit news conference begins
Donald Trump’s talks with Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine have concluded earlier than expected and a joint news conference with the two presidents is about to begin at a US military base in Anchorage, Alaska. We have live video from the room, and will bring you updates on their remarks here on the blog.
Kremlin says Putin’s talks with Trump are over
The Russian foreign ministry reports on social media that the first round of talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are over. Video posted on X by the ministry shows Putin walking away from the room and talking to his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.
The ministry says a joint news conference is expected to begin soon.
The unexpectedly short talks have prompted speculation that the meeting did not go well. In advance of the summit, Trump did say: “I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes. We tend to find out whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting or a bad meeting, and if it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly”.
Reporters have been called into the room set up for a joint news conference with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, my colleague David Smith reports from Anchorage.
We will bring you updates here once the event begins, but the timing is a bit of a surprise, since Trump’s aide, Dan Scavino, posted on X less than an hour ago that the first of two planned meetings between the US and Russian delegations was still taking place. That session, in which the two leaders were joined by two foreign policy advisers, was to have been followed by a larger working lunch.
