5 times Trump has caved to Putin as world waits for Alaska peace talks showdown

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin hold a press conference after their 2018 summit (Image: Getty)

Donald Trump will soon sit down with Vladimir Putin to try and thrash out a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. The summit is taking place in Anchorage, Alaska at the US military's Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The White House has played down expectations of a major breakthrough in talks, saying the meeting is more a "listening exercise" and had been requested by Putin.

"The goal of this meeting for the President is to walk away with a better understanding of how we can end this war," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week. However, Trump appeared to take a tough line with the Kremlin on Wednesday, telling reporters that there would be "very severe consequences" for the Russian leader if no progress towards peace was made. Whether this turns out to be the case remains to be seen. The recent past has shown the US President frequently caving in to Putin and doing his bidding. Below the Express takes a look at a number of occasions when the Russian President trumped his US counterpart and got him to do and say things he wanted.

Donald Trump talked tough before his meeting with Putin (Image: Getty)

The US President met his Russian counterpart for a tête-à-tête in Helsinki in 2018 during his first term.

After nearly two hours of talks, the two leaders emerged to take questions from the press pack. He was asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or Putin when it came to the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

"President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be," he replied.

US intelligence agencies concluded in 2016 that Russia was behind an effort to tip the scale of the US election against Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.

Vladimir Putin has previously shown no inclination to compromise (Image: Getty)

The US leader lost no time in canvassing for Russia to be readmitted to the G7 after returning to the White House end Moscow's economic and political isolation.

Russia was expelled from what was then the G8 after it invaded Crimea in 2014 in a covet military operation.

At a G7 summit in June, Trump repeated his view that the decision to boot out Russia from the G8 was a "big mistake".

“You wouldn’t have that war,” he said. “You know you have your enemy at the table, I don’t even consider, he wasn’t really an enemy at that time.”

Pete Hegseth is the US Secretary of Defence (Image: Getty)

Vladimir Putin has tried to blame Nato for his brutal war in Ukraine, claiming that the military alliance's ever eastwards expansion poses an existential threat to mother Russia.

The Kremlin tyrant will not countenance Ukraine's membership of the organisation and has demanded that Nato guarantees that Kyiv will not be able to join if a peace deal is to be struck.

In February and before any serious negotiations had taken place between American and Russian officials, Putin was granted his wish by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Prior to a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, the former Fox News host said: “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement."

The Kremlin has regularly tried to blame Ukraine for starting the war and has called for new elections in the country.

Putin hopes to displace Zelensky and replace his government with one that is willing to bend to Russian demands. The Kremlin boss in effect wants to turn Ukraine into a Russian client state like Belarus.

Unfortunately, President Trump and officials in his administration have regularly parroted these Kremlin narratives.

Following a horrific Russian attack on Sumy which killed 35 people, Trump said: "When you start a war you've got to know you can win the war. You don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles."

He has even called Zelensky a dictator and pressured him to hold an election. After Zelensky criticised him in February for "living in a disinformation space" governed by Moscow, a furious Trump called the Ukrainian leader a "dictator", adding: "He refuses to have elections. He's low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?"

The US opposed calling Russia the aggressor in a G7 statement on the third anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The world’s leading economies have traditionally issued a statement of support on February 24th, the day on which the full-scale invasion started three years ago.

However, US envoys objected to the phrase “Russian aggression” and similar descriptions that have been used by G7 leaders since 2022 to describe the conflict.

“We are adamant that there must be a distinction made between Russia and Ukraine. They are not the same,” an official briefed on the matter told the Financial Times.

“The Americans are blocking that language, but we are still working on it and hopeful of an agreement."