A couple of days ago, in the short editorial accompanying the evening mailer, I reiterated some familiar talking points about the peril inherent in face-to-face meetings with Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t just a Donald Trump issue. It’s an everybody issue. Even the likes of Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, autocrats who don’t fear Putin physically and who run nations far stronger than the modern Russian state, approach meetings with him cautiously.

Putin’s a spy by training and he’s the most nefariously conniving political operator in modern history. This is a man who claimed for his own the Russian state, beating out and otherwise subjugating a motley crew of oligarchs and the mafia to emerge from the post-Soviet smash-and-grab era as the most powerful Russian leader since Stalin.

To sit down with him, in the same room, is to be compromised. You’re not going to walk away without giving something up. To shake his hand and talk to him in person is the let him read your eyes and body language. That’s a risk, and not a small one.

It therefore came as no surprise that Trump emerged from Friday’s three-hour meeting with Putin in Alaska parroting a version of The Kremlin’s war narrative which, generally speaking, says it’s better to pursue a once-and-for-all peace agreement than to agree on an immediate ceasefire while talks unfold.

You don’t need to be a military analyst to understand why dragging the war out is preferable for Putin. Russia has the narrow upper-hand on a battlefield which by now looks like a bad day in Somme. Ukraine’s holding its own, but Kyiv’s resource-constrained. And Putin has no qualms whatever about throwing Russians (North Koreans, or anybody else who wants to fight) into the meatgrinder, a significant advantage when the other side’s leader actually cares about the lives of his people. Russia also enjoys air superiority and while Ukraine’s defenses in that regard are capable, it’s not the Iron Dome. The Kremlin can kill at will from the sky.

If you’re Putin, it’s not about buying time so can you win. There’s no hope for Russia of achieving a total victory in Ukraine. It’s obvious now that’s impossible, or at least if total victory means seizing Kyiv, pacifying the populace and establishing a Russian puppet government. If you’re Putin, the problem with an immediate ceasefire therefore isn’t that it impedes the Russian military on a march to Kyiv. They aren’t marching anywhere, they’re just sitting in trenches. Or in someone’s house they stole.

Rather, the problem with a ceasefire for The Kremlin is that it’d be tantamount to ceding leverage for no immediate gain. If you maintain even a slight upper-hand in the bloody day-to-day realities of the war, that’s leverage at the negotiating table: If the other side’s a net loser, however narrowly, every single day the war drags on, they need it to end more than you do.

As the self-proclaimed grand master of deals, Trump should understand that simple leverage “math,” and I assume he does but… well, suffice to say he came out the meeting with Putin having dropped his unofficial, albeit loud, demand for an immediate ceasefire in favor of a position that’s almost indistinguishable from The Kremlin’s.

After hailing “a great and very successful day in Alaska,” Trump early Saturday said everyone, including the leaders of the European powers, Mark Rutte and Volodymyr Zelensky, now agree “that the best way” to end the war “is to go directly to a Peace Agreement and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement.” Ceasefires, Trump mused, “often times do not hold up.”

As a quick, but grimly amusing, aside, Trump took it upon himself to dial up Alexander Lukashenko prior to meeting Putin, ostensibly to thank Lukashenko for letting loose a few political prisoners. Lukashenko is, of course, a Kremlin puppet, a role Belarus’s forever dictator embraces, if not exactly in those terms.

In a social media post, Trump described Lukashenko as “highly respected.” I want to emphasize: That may well be the most ridiculous thing Trump’s ever said, bar none. I realize that’s a helluva thing to assert given all the ridiculous things Trump’s said since 2016, but if you were putting together a thesaurus, you could… well, here’s a visual aid:

Lukashenko is, without question, the least-respected political leader on planet Earth, and that includes people like Kim Jong-Un. Lukashenko’s a living breathing antonym for “highly respected.” He’s a dictator, he’s a coward, he’s a sycophant and his three-decade run as a tyrant’s often attributed to roach-like survival skills, not exactly a compliment.

Anyway, whatever the Europeans say over the weekend ahead of talks between Trump and Zelensky in Washington next week, it simply isn’t true that everyone agrees it’s best to forgo a ceasefire in favor of talks to end the war. That wasn’t supposed to be Trump’s position in Alaska, or at least America’s European allies hoped it wouldn’t be.

“The leaders of Germany and France sounded broadly hopeful Trump will prioritize a Ukraine ceasefire when he speaks to Vladimir Putin on Friday,” Politico wrote, ahead of the summit in Anchorage. The piece quoted Friedrich Merz, who said Trump indicated to Germany that securing a ceasefire agreement from Putin will be “one of his priorities.” Easier said than done, as it turns out.

Although Putin and Trump each delivered nebulous statements describing some manner of “agreement” between Russia and the US, neither leader gave any details. Later, Trump told Sean Hannity it’s up to Zelensky now. He has “to get it done [and] European nations have to get involved a little bit,” Trump said.

European leaders appeared to walk back their demands for a ceasefire in the hours after the Trump-Putin meeting concluded, but don’t kid yourself: They’re just wary of irritating Trump at a delicate moment. Everyone other than Putin wants an immediate ceasefire. But if you’re Europe, pushing the issue risks a hard pivot from Trump back to Putin’s position, which would in turn raise the odds that Ukraine’s forced to make even more onerous concessions than it’ll probably have to make anyway.

To be sure, some of Trump’s apparent flip-flop on a ceasefire is just his “last person I talked to” bias. That’s a mainstay of Trump’s presidencies. Far from the shrewd negotiator who always gets his way, Trump habitually comes away from high-stakes meetings sympathetic to the position of the person he just spoke to. That’s what allowed Jensen Huang to buy US trade policy. And it’s what allowed Recep Tayyip Erdogan to invade northern Syria in October of 2019. I could go on.

“We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive [our agreement] constructively and will not throw a wrench in the works,” Putin told reporters in Alaska, of the nebulous arrangement between Moscow and Washington, which The White House didn’t so much as bother to elaborate on in the interest of transparency and public awareness.

On Saturday, Brussels’ top diplomat Kaja Kallas stated the obvious. “The harsh reality is that Russia has no intention of ending this war anytime soon,” she said, noting that Russia attacked Ukraine “even as the delegations met” Friday. “Putin continues to drag out negotiations and hopes he gets away with it,” Kallas continued. “He left Anchorage without making any commitments to end the killing.”

Putin’s entourage made a point of mocking everything to do with Trump’s brief summit. Sergei Lavrov showed up in a sweater that said “USSR” on it, and as Bloomberg detailed, Russian reporters were served Chicken Kiev on the flight, the dish “pointedly spelled the Russian way.”