Can Putin sway Trump with economic offers in Alaska?

United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday in a bid to try and end Russia’s three-year assault on Ukraine.

In the run-up to the meeting, Trump said that he believes Putin is ready to agree to a ceasefire. But his suggestion that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could “divvy things up” has alarmed observers in Kyiv.

For their part, remarks from top Russian officials suggest that Moscow has tried to water down discussions about the war by linking them with other bilateral issues, particularly restoring economic ties with the US.

On Thursday, Putin sat down with top officials at the Kremlin to discuss the Alaska meeting. He said that he believed the US was making “sincere efforts to stop the fighting, end the crisis and reach agreements of interest to all parties involved in this conflict”.

Earlier on Thursday, Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s top foreign policy aides, told reporters about Russia’s preparations for the talks. He said it was “obvious to everyone that the central topic will be the settlement of the Ukraine crisis”.

“An exchange of views is expected on the further development of bilateral cooperation, including in the trade and economic sphere,” he said, pointing out that: “I would like to note that this cooperation has a huge and, unfortunately, untapped potential.”

Ushakov also announced that in addition to Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s delegation in Alaska would also include the country’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation.

The inclusion of Siluanov and Dmitriev is another sign that the Kremlin hoped to discuss economic matters at the summit.

In 2021, before Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, total trade between Russia and the US amounted to $36.1bn. This included $6.4bn in US exports to Russia, and $29.7bn in US imports from Russia – amounting to a US trade deficit of $23.3bn.