The Alaska Summit: Where Even Peace Is Controversial

By Nancy O’Brien Simpson

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Benjamin D Applebaum, https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/

Trump, Putin Alaska Arrival (9260677)

Imagine hating Donald Trump so much you want peace talks to fail.

That dark reflex was visible again at the Alaska Summit, where early signs of dialogue between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States were met with derision from voices more invested in political point-scoring than in the lives at stake. For some commentators, the problem was not whether talks might save Ukrainian civilians or Russian conscripts, but whether the very act of negotiation could be spun as a Trump victory. This is hardly new in American politics. In 1968, Richard Nixon’s allies quietly urged South Vietnam to resist Lyndon Johnson’s peace initiative, helping to prolong a war that killed tens of thousands more. Political rivalry, in its most cynical form, has a way of outlasting human lives.

But to understand why Russia is not interested in a ceasefire, one has to enter their frame of reference. For Moscow, a ceasefire is not peace; it is a trick. History has trained them in suspicion. During the Korean War, talks dragged on for two years while both sides replenished their armies. Today, NATO promises of limitless support for Ukraine make any pause feel less like compromise and more like surrender. Russia, having endured the “forever sanctions” imposed since 2014, believes that only a structural settlement—NATO guarantees, recognition of new borders, and the lifting of economic punishment—qualifies as peace. Anything else is theater.

The Western press often frames Russia as stubborn, unwilling to negotiate. Yet it was Russia, in late 2021, that sent draft security proposals to Washington and Brussels, offering talks before tanks ever rolled across the border. The proposals were dismissed outright. In the Russian imagination, that rejection confirmed what they had long believed: that they were not respected as a sovereign power, that their security concerns counted for nothing. What followed was brutal, yes, but also in their minds inevitable.

No side will get everything it wants. Wars do not end with neat lines of victory anymore. Korea remains divided, Bosnia fractured, Cyprus frozen in time. To expect Russia to abandon Donbas entirely is no more realistic than expecting Ukraine to quietly accept its permanent loss. What will come—because history demands it—will be compromise. Perhaps international peacekeepers will patrol Donetsk. Perhaps autonomy will be carved out on paper while remaining contested in practice. But neither total victory nor absolute humiliation is in the cards.

And so the argument that peace talks are betrayal—that even beginning them rewards aggression—is an old one. The same words were used against the Dayton Accords in 1995, accused of “rewarding ethnic cleansing.” They were hurled against the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, accused of legitimizing terrorism. Yet both agreements, fragile at first, grew into blueprints for stability.

Peace talks, even failed ones, move the clock forward. They force both sides to say aloud what they want and what they cannot have. They puncture the fantasy of total victory. And for all the voices—Western pundits, arms dealers, and political opportunists—who foam at the mouth that peace itself is dangerous, there is a harder truth: only through dialogue can the bloodshed stop. War exhausts nations. Peace, however imperfect, saves them.

And perhaps this is why the Russians cling to the word “peace” with such gravity. They carry centuries of endurance on their backs—sieges survived, winters that froze armies, cities rebuilt from ash. For them, peace is not softness but the deepest form of strength. It is not the opposite of war but its only worthy conclusion. To mock their insistence on it is to miss the simple fact that every people, at the edge of exhaustion, longs for the same thing: to set down their weapons, to bury their dead with dignity, and to imagine a future that is larger than the ruins of the present.