Efforts to jump start diplomatic talks to end Russia’s war against Ukraine were stalled on Saturday after President Trump said the United States would buy Russian diesel, the latest case of Washington’s undermining Kyiv by giving Moscow economic breathing room.
Mr. Trump’s announcement on Friday came despite a Russian ban on exporting fuel and was followed by the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel exports until April. The Kremlin apparently offered no concessions in return.
Hours later, Russian officials said there would be no immediate resumption of peace talks.
“We will think about when these negotiations might be resumed,” Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir V. Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said in a statement Friday night.
The diplomatic efforts fizzled shortly after Ukrainian negotiators arrived in Miami to meet with Mr. Trump’s top envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. As those talks were about to begin, Mr. Trump spoke over the phone at length with Mr. Putin.
While Mr. Trump’s announcement of the diesel deal made no mention of Ukraine, it was poised to hurt Ukrainian efforts to defend itself, as any major purchase of Russian fuel would help fund Moscow’s war machine.
Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that the talks in Miami had ended without a breakthrough.
In an online chat with reporters on Friday evening, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine did not hide his sense of betrayal.
“I believe our team is simply being used as a smoke screen, and that is certainly not fair,” Mr. Zelensky said. He has worked hard to maintain a stable relationship with the White House as Mr. Trump has steered America closer to Russia and away from traditional democratic allies.
“It is certainly not how partners should treat each other,” Mr. Zelensky added, calling Mr. Trump’s announcement on diesel a “weak decision.”
For Kyiv and its European allies, the short-lived talks in Miami laid bare how U.S. diplomacy has drifted from the pursuit of a durable peace settlement to a hunt for business deals with Russia. The Trump administration has placed the burden of compromise almost entirely on Ukraine and put little pressure on Moscow to stop its campaign to destroy the Ukrainian state.
On Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said Russia had directed five guided bombs at a residential area of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, killing at least 15 people, including three children. “In Russia, they take any easing of pressure to mean they can keep fighting, to mean they can keep dropping bombs on cities,” he said.
Daniel Fried, a longtime senior U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Poland, said it was “very clear that the Russians are completely uninterested in any diplomatic approach and are simply standing back waiting for the West, the U.S., the Ukrainians to come to them with some bigger and better offer.”
“When you start chasing after them, they simply smirk and wait for you to purchase bigger and better bouquets to throw at their feet,” Mr. Fried said.
Mr. Fried argued that decades of relations with Moscow showed that appeals would fail unless backed by the threat of acute consequences.
“If you have sticks, wield the sticks,” he said.
He said Mr. Trump was undermining not only Ukraine’s security but also Europe’s.
“All of this is taking place at a time when Russia is escalating its shadow warfare against Europe, and we are acting as if that is not occurring,” he said.
It is not clear if Mr. Trump’s move to import Russian diesel will have much of an immediate impact on prices before the U.S. midterm elections.
In a statement on Friday evening, Mr. Putin said after his phone call with Mr. Trump that Russia had “confirmed its willingness to supply oil and petroleum products to the U.S. market and global markets at large,” but he did not specify any amounts.
Ukraine has also made clear that it will continue a campaign against Russian refineries, which has drawn Mr. Trump’s ire.
Mr. Trump’s end run around Ukraine continued a pattern that had been playing out since he started his second term claiming he could end the war in 24 hours.
Last year, Kyiv agreed to a call by Mr. Trump for an immediate, unconditional cease-fire, but Moscow flatly rejected it. That first round of diplomacy established a dynamic that still defines negotiations: Ukraine received no reward for saying yes, and the Kremlin paid no price for saying no.
Since then, ambitions of forging a lasting peace have largely evaporated. Instead, there have been a handful of hastily announced tactical pauses and holiday truces.
Still, when the Trump administration opened the latest diplomatic track on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Ukrainian officials were startled by how far Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff went in their offerings to Russia.
According to officials familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential diplomatic talks, the Americans placed three lucrative economic incentives on the table to coax Moscow into a limited cease-fire either on energy infrastructure or at sea.
Washington floated releasing billions of Russian sovereign assets immobilized in the West. The money, the officials said, was viewed as an upfront incentive for partial truces, not a reward for their enactment. This revived a proposal from last year to release funds to Russia. Then, the suggestion was to release up to $100 billion.
The Americans also revisited a plan to sell off parts of the Russian oil giant Lukoil in a multibillion-dollar deal that would go to a group of Middle Eastern investors, including some with business ties to U.S. negotiators.
And Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner revived a U.S. proposal that would allow Belarus, the Kremlin’s ally and neighbor, to export potash, according to officials familiar with the talks.
Kyiv has been careful not to reject any proposal outright but has demanded guardrails. For instance, it has suggested dollar-for-dollar mirror payments of frozen assets to Ukraine or guarantees of additional military aid upon any truce breach.
But Mr. Zelensky’s frustration with Washington was clear earlier this week when he visited the site of a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in northern Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the front lines. The strike killed 22 people, including five children — among more than 100 civilians killed in Russian strikes last week alone.
Asked about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comments that talks to end the fighting were “proving elusive” because the war had reached a “strategic stalemate,” Mr. Zelensky bristled.
“We are not at a diplomatic dead end,” he said. The problem, he added, was that there was not enough pressure on Moscow.
“Shut down their entire economy,” he said. “Sew Russia’s mouth shut. Don’t feed them with your own sales.”
Valerie Hopkins and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
The post Ukraine Peace Talks Sputter After Trump and Putin Strike Fuel Deal appeared first on New York Times.
