Vladimir Putin told the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 3 that there was, in his words, a chance of ending the war in Ukraine. Two days later, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sat with him at the Kremlin for three hours, and Yuri Ushakov called the session highly useful. The envoys flew on to Kyiv the next morning and returned without an agreement.
On September 8, Trump got Putin on the phone for an hour and made the pitch explicit: end the war quickly, and open the door to what Ushakov called full restoration of U.S.-Russian relations. Putin, per the same readout, “supported this approach.”
None of that produced a ceasefire. All of it produced something else: a Russian president, treated once again as a man Washington needs in the room.
That treatment didn’t start this month.
It started thirteen months ago in Anchorage, when Putin landed on American soil for the first time since 2015.
No deal came out of Alaska either.
Putin called it very good, substantive and frank.
Trump called it a great and very successful day. What came out of it was a habit: a channel that has survived a public complaint, a failed trip to Kyiv, and a war still showing no sign of stopping.
When this war ends, Putin is unlikely to walk away either fully restored or fully isolated.
His postwar position is already visible in outline: normalized enough to deal directly with Washington, still constrained by the legal and strategic costs of the war he started.
A Channel, Not a Ceasefire
Vladimir Putin at the opening ceremony of international military-technical forum.
Russian Armata T-14 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Start with what Alaska bought Moscow.
Not territory.
Not a single Russian soldier withdrawn.
It bought format: a leaders’ summit instead of a démarche, a red carpet instead of isolation.
In June, Russia publicly complained that Washington hadn’t followed through on what it called the Alaska understandings, without ever specifying what they were.
The complaint itself was revealing. Moscow was treating Anchorage as a baseline for subsequent bargaining, whether Washington accepted that interpretation or not.
September made the pattern explicit: the Kremlin session on the fifth, the phone call on the eighth, and on the twelfth, Kyiv’s Kyrylo Budanov saying his country was preparing for trilateral talks in October.
Three diplomatic events in ten days, each generating the next, none of which required Russia to give up an inch of ground its army has taken since February 2022.
The channel stays open.
The war goes on beside it.
The first does not tell us how the second ends.
The Warrant Doesn’t Expire With the Fighting
Here is what the channel cannot touch. The ICC issued its warrant for Putin in March 2023 for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied Ukrainian territory to the Russian Federation.
Nothing coming out of Moscow, Kyiv, or Washington can withdraw it.
Only the Court can, and it hasn’t.
The clearest test came in September 2024, when Putin flew to Mongolia, his first trip to a Rome Statute state since the warrant, for the anniversary of a Soviet victory over Japan at Khalkhin Gol. Mongolia didn’t arrest him.
A month later, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber found Mongolia in violation and referred it to the Assembly of States Parties. Enforcement isn’t automatic, but hosting him now carries a cost real enough that a friendly government paid it in public.
That matters, because the pool of states bound to arrest him hasn’t shrunk the way years of pressure might suggest.
Hungary announced its own withdrawal in 2025, then reversed course in May, days before it took effect.
The Court still counts 125 state parties, though five governments are now mid-exit: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger since June, Venezuela and Chad since July, with departures final in 2027.
Some of that pressure comes from Washington itself.
Secretary Rubio has spent the summer urging the Court’s members to leave and sanctioning groups that cooperate with it, even as the same administration normalizes the man whose arrest the Court seeks.
Washington can normalize Putin. It cannot cancel a warrant 125 governments are bound, on paper, to enforce.
What Beijing Gets to Keep
Then there’s a debt nobody in Washington can negotiate away, because nobody in Washington holds it.
China buys more Russian crude than any other country, and more of that trade now clears in yuan.
Every barrel is leverage in Beijing’s account, not goodwill in Moscow’s.
Russian President Putin addressing the nation.
Putin flew to Beijing in May and signed roughly forty documents with Xi Jinping.
Power of Siberia 2, the pipeline meant to replace the European gas markets Russia lost after 2022, wasn’t among them.
Beijing wants a price near its own domestic rate, roughly a fifth of what Russia gets from the pipeline it already runs to China.
By September, people close to the talks described them as stalled completely, with Chinese officials reportedly telling the Russians to drop the subject.
Russia’s energy minister answered, at the same Vladivostok forum where Putin floated his chance for peace, by renaming the project regardless. Power of Siberia became Power of Baikal. The price gap didn’t move.
Whatever peace gets signed won’t touch that asymmetry.
Moscow will still be selling into a market where the buyer sets the terms, because the war ended the leverage Moscow once held over European buyers.
None of this adds up to exile for Putin, or collapse, nor a return to Russia’s relationship with the West as it stood in January 2022. The picture is stranger than either.
The result is a Russian president who gets an hour on the phone with an American president and calls that progress toward full restoration, attends a BRICS summit in New Delhi, and still remains unwelcome across most of Europe, subject to a warrant 125 states are, on paper, obliged to enforce, and more dependent on a Chinese buyer’s mood than Russia has been in decades.
The Test After the Cameras Leave
None of this means talking to Putin is a mistake.
Somebody has to, if the war is ever going to end.
The mistake is reading the warmth of the talking as proof the Western isolation built since February 2022 is coming apart.
It hasn’t.
One government found a route around a piece of it.
The rest of the structure is still standing.
Washington’s bilateral track with Moscow cannot, by itself, normalize Putin everywhere else, and the Kremlin knows it.
The Alaska channel is good for summits, phone calls, and vague talk of restoration.
It is far less good at extracting the territorial concession sitting at the center of the current impasse.
Watch for the right thing once this week’s headlines fade.
Not whether Trump and Putin keep finding reasons to talk.
Whether anything they agree to ever produces Ukrainian consent, European sanctions relief, or a crack in the legal net still wrapped around him.
Until one of those three moves, Putin retains his seat at the table. But that seat remains very, very uncomfortable.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
