US President Donald Trump’s push for a ceasefire in Ukraine did not yield results, with Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly not yielding. In the run up to the highly talked-up meeting in Alaska, Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin. In the end, though, the Russian President seems to have come out as a clear winner, having got his moment in the spotlight when he transformed from a global pariah to one who got to share the stage with the leader of the world’s most powerful country. In return, he gave pretty much nothing, it would seem.
Previously Trump had threatened a tougher approach to Russia, with warnings of more sanctions if Moscow ignored calls for a ceasefire. He has not followed through yet, and it remains to be seen if he does anything now. There are no dates for a future summit, nor agreement on whether anything at all was decided between the two sides.
And in a briefing that followed, it was Putin who inexplicably got to speak first, and a weary-eyed Trump spoke later, and no questions were taken.
The apparent failure of the talks may come as a relief for Ukrainian and European leaders, who were worried that Trump would yield to Putin’s demands and follow up on his earlier talk of swapping land. New Delhi too had one eye on America’s frigid outpost over 15000 kilometers away, to see if anything came out of the spectacle that could impact India’s prospects. There was some hope in India that if they reached a deal of some kind, that outcome would provide relief to New Delhi with respect to the secondary tariffs imposed on India. There was a belief here that the 25 per cent additional punitive tariff could possibly go away if the Trump administration believed that it was making some kind of progress with Putin on stopping the war.
President Donald Trump greets Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. (Photo: AP)
On the flip side, there was also the worst case scenario for India: if something came out of the meeting that looked really bad for Trump, personally or politically, then India would have to pay a price for that. This is despite the fact that the secondary tariffs seem to be less about Russian oil, and more about gaining leverage on India for not having concluded a trade deal with the US on Trump’s terms and for having publicly debunked the American President on his claims of having brokered a ceasefire in the four-day way with Pakistan.
There are two worrying statements for India that came in the context of the Alaska talks. Trump, in an interview with Fox News Friday, said that Russia “lost” India as an oil client (after he imposed secondary tariffs on New Delhi), while discussing on Friday the economic aspect of the Russian leader coming to the negotiating table. Earlier in the week, he’d said that the secondary sanctions on India had forced Putin to agree to the talks. “Certainly, when you lose your second largest customer and you’re probably going to lose your first largest customer, I think that probably has a role,” he said. India is Russia’s second largest customer for crude, while China, despite being first, has escaped secondary sanctions..
On Wednesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Washington could raise its current 25 per cent secondary tariff on India if Trump’s meeting with Putin failed to make headway on Ukraine. He also asked the European Union to impose a similar secondary levy on India. “We put a secondary tariff on Indians for buying Russian oil, and I could see if things don’t go well (in Friday’s Trump-Putin meeting), then sanctions or secondary tariffs could go up,” Bessent told Bloomberg Television.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
