Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
In the surreal dance Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin have been engaged in for months, both want Donald Trump to see the other as the obstacle to peace. For now, the Ukrainian leader is winning.
The latest evidence comes from the peace talks in Istanbul that Trump had promoted ― the first direct negotiation between the two sides since the start of the war. Zelenskyy had the courtesy to show up while his Russian counterpart was a no-show, sending instead a relatively low-level delegation, described by Zelenskyy as merely “decorative.”
Could this be the moment Trump finally concedes that Putin has no serious interest in negotiating an end to the war he started three years ago?
The Ukrainians certainly hope so. Since the ugly verbal brawl in the Oval Office between Zelenskyy, Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance earlier this year, the Ukrainian leader has been trying to avoid allowing his impetuosity to lead him off-script again. Instead he’s cleaved to the strategy he and his team decided soon after Trump’s reelection ― of doing their best not to antagonize the prickly American president.
So the plan has been to play along, leave it to an obdurate Putin to be Mr. Nyet and hope eventually the impatient Trump will grow frustrated and realize the Russian leader isn’t ready to negotiate in good faith after all.
Why would he go?
What’s not certain though is that Trump has actually reached that point yet. In fact, he’s still being largely conciliatory when talking about the Russian president.
Of Putin’s decision not to go to Istanbul, “why would he go if I’m not going?” Trump asked in Qatar on Thursday. “I didn’t think it was possible for Putin to go if I’m not there.”
That seems to be an invalid excuse by Trump. Earlier this week he raised the prospect of heading to Turkey himself ― if the Russian leader decided to go. Of course, the Kremlin left everyone guessing to the last moment, announcing definitively only right on the eve of the talks that Putin wouldn’t be attending.
Moscow also left it until the eleventh hour to provide any detail about who would be in its delegation. With Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov not included either, it was clear this would not be an empowered team. A further signal of that was the man chosen to lead the delegation, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who served as an arch-patriotic culture minister from 2012 to 2020 and who oversaw the recent redrafting of official history school textbooks to advance the Kremlin’s dreary weaponization of historical memory.
All Putin was doing by sending a delegation was to offer the diplomatic bare minimum to prolong the dance. As Zelenskyy noted, aside from his own presence, Ukraine was represented by a top-level delegation “ready to make any decisions that could lead to a long-awaited just peace,” adding, “I’m here. I think this is a very clear message.”
Root causes
So here, yet again, the Kremlin is stalling — a tactic it has employed time and again when participating in negotiations it has little interest in concluding other than on its own full terms. Condition No. 1: It doesn’t want a ceasefire before it gets concessions that would mean the end of democratic Ukraine.
It is yet another sign that a real breakthrough is a remote prospect. The Kremlin is sticking firmly to its maximalist aims all under the guise of wanting a fix to the “root causes” of the war — Kremlin shorthand for eviscerating democracy in Ukraine and thwarting the country’s political trajectory toward NATO. The pseudo-historian Medinsky, the delegation leader, will no doubt be droning on in Turkey about the “root causes.”
The Trump camp has shown so far it is ready to go along with Putin. The Russian leader has purposely set out to change sequencing of negotiations so a ceasefire follows a deal he’s satisfied with rather than the other way round. By doing so he hopes he either wears the U.S. out or forces it to walk away completely — as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested is possible.
The Russian leader and his top aides have emphatically outlined their red lines for a peace deal for months — conditions that would, in effect, rip the state of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees Ukraine will never join NATO, that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, and with severe limitations on weapons. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern oblasts they claim as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such.
Trump has suggested recently he might have to resort to tougher measures, including more economic sanctions against Moscow in the event Putin doesn’t commit to a peace deal but, for now at least, he seems to be allowing the Russian president to slip off the hook and set the tempo, and to dip into a playbook he’s used before.
Much like he did with American negotiators over Syria, he’s forcing his interlocutors deeper into a labyrinth of conditions and “root causes,” seeking to exhaust them and secure his main goals, or drive everything into an interminable back-and-forth.
The question remains whether Trump will tire of all this. For him, Ukraine has always been just part of a bigger diplomatic game to reset relations between Washington and Moscow ― an irritant in the way. The trick for Putin is to keep Trump hoping a deal can be done, that a reset is possible.
What Zelenskyy is trying to do is to get the U.S. president to understand he’s being strung along.
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