(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated one-on-one summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin marks his latest effort at securing a peace deal over Ukraine, a priority in his second term.
The meeting comes after a string of deals and agreements the White House said Trump has helped broker globally that should earn him something the president has long desired — a Nobel Peace Prize.
“President Trump has brokered on average about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing last month. “It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Trump himself has voiced grievance over not having a Nobel Peace Prize; while taking questions in the Oval Office in February alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weeks after the U.S. helped broker an ultimately short-lived ceasefire agreement over Gaza, the president said, “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. I deserve it.”
The president has also said he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for U.S.-brokered deals in other conflicts, including the June peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda and the May ceasefire between India and Pakistan.
“No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” Trump said on social media in June.
Observers say Trump’s desire for the Nobel Peace Prize looms large over the summit with Putin, as the president looks to fulfill a campaign promise to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s something he said he would do in the first 24 hours of his second term, though months into his term, as the war raged on, said he had meant the 24-hour pledge “figuratively.”
Ahead of the planned meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, some foreign policy experts have voiced concern over how Trump and his supporters’ fixation on the prize could impact diplomatic relations.
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a Washington Post column that “Trump’s unhealthy obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize has driven him to make a series of rash decisions in pursuit of ending the war in Ukraine.”
“The latest example is the scheduling of a premature summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska — an object lesson in how not to do diplomacy,” he wrote.
Ian Bremmer — the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm — said in a post on X ahead of the talks that he fully expects Putin to “exploit Trump’s ambitions for admiration (a la Nobel Peace Prize) in an effort to get what he wants.”
Several world leaders and officials have expressed their support for Trump getting a Nobel Peace Prize in recent months.
Among them, the government of Pakistan said in June it has formally recommended that Trump receive the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership during the recent India-Pakistan crisis.”
A month later, Netanyahu told Trump that he nominated the president for the award after Trump pushed for a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
After signing a U.S.-brokered agreement at the White House aimed at ending decades of conflict between their countries, the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia said this month that Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and they would advocate for it.
Ahead of Friday’s summit, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told ABC News “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl that nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize is “the way to his heart.”
“I think what Trump has done is make it clear that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize more than anything else,” he said. “And the way to his heart, as Pakistani Chief of Staff [Asim] Munir found, Bibi Netanyahu found — offer to nominate him.”
Bolton, who has been critical of Trump’s foreign policy decisions, left his post during Trump’s first term amid reports of conflict among the president’s foreign policy advisers. Trump said he fired Bolton, while Bolton said he resigned. At the start of Trump’s second term, Bolton said Trump terminated his Secret Service protection.
White House officials have touted Trump as a “deal maker” intent on reaching peace. Heading into the summit, Vice President JD Vance called the expected meeting with Putin “a major breakthrough for American diplomacy,” saying in an interview with Fox News that a peace deal wouldn’t happen without Trump.
“We’re gonna try to find some kind of negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and Russians can live with, where they can live in relative peace, where the killing stops,” Vance said.
“Both the Russians and the Ukrainians probably at the end of the day are gonna be unhappy with it. But I don’t think you can actually sit down and have this negotiation absent the leadership of Donald J. Trump,” Vance continued.
Though he often brings it up, Trump has contended that he is “not politicking” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was last given to a U.S. leader in 2009, when former President Obama received it less than a year into his first term.
“It would be a great honor, certainly. But I would never politic. I’m not doing it for that,” he said during this month’s Azerbaijan-Armenia peace summit. “I’m doing it because of really, number one, I want to save lives. That’s why I’m involved so much with Ukraine and Russia — saving lives of Russians and Ukrainians.”
A day before the planned summit, Trump said he believed he’d have a “good” conversation with Putin but said that the more significant development in the peace effort would be a second meeting between the U.S., Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I’m there for one reason,” he said. “I want to see if I can stop the killing.”
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