Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
“Plan A is: Get the shooting to stop,” said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday, noting the U.S. administration’s main goal is to secure a quick ceasefire before moving on to broader talks about a settlement to permanently end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But that clearly isn’t what Russian President Vladimir Putin has in mind, as he demonstrated by withholding his agreement to a full 30-day ceasefire in his 90-minute phone conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday. Shortly after the call, Russia launched a drone assault over Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
Offering the diplomatic bare minimum, the Russian leader said he would hold off striking at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days — a self-serving concession as that will save Russia’s energy system from being hit by the Ukrainians, who have just dramatically increased the range of their powerful Neptune subsonic cruise missiles from 200 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers.
All in all, Trump and his motley crew of special envoys, family members and presidential pals seem keener to converge with Russia on broader geopolitical issues than really press him hard on Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s read-out from the call was long on the idea of a broad Washington-Moscow reset — on topics ranging from economic cooperation to ice hockey — and short on anything that looked like a meaningful peace deal for Ukrainians.
In a sign that a real breakthrough is a remote prospect, Russia stuck firmly to its maximalist guns on demanding an end to military aid and intelligence to Kyiv, while 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 and the EU.
Going along with Volodya
The Trump camp is showing it is all too ready to go along with Putin as he purposely mixes discrete stages of the Ukraine negotiations, changing the sequencing either to ensure any final settlement is firmly in Russia’s favor or to avoid acceding to a full ceasefire altogether.
The Russian leader and his top aides have been emphatically outlining their red lines for a peace deal over the past weeks — 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, 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. And they’ve ruled out the deployment of European troops to monitor any peace deal that’s agreed.
In short, Russia is delivering an absolute “no” to the security guarantees Ukraine wants to protect it against what its sees as inevitable further attacks from Putin.
Rather than wait for formal peace talks, the Kremlin is trying to cajole agreement on its red lines now, holding the ceasefire proposal hostage without having to formally reject it — a move that would risk Trump’s wrath. Trump has promised more sanctions against Moscow if Putin doesn’t commit to a peace deal but, for now at least, he’s allowing the Russian president to slip off the hook and set the tempo.
A familiar playbook
Watching this play out, some commentators argue Putin is dithering, playing for time and unable to make up his mind. But it can also be said that he is merely dipping 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 wear them down and either manage to secure his main goals or drive everything into an interminable back-and-forth.
As far as the Kremlin sees it, negotiations are the continuation of war — just by other means.
In flipping the negotiation process, Putin is getting a helping hand from Team Trump.
Trump and his special envoy Steven Witkoff have already been discussing the terms of the settlement in order to try to get the ceasefire deal, while Trump and Putin have been talking about “land,” “power plants” and “dividing up certain assets” before any “official” peace talks.
Before speaking with Putin this week, Trump boasted on his Truth Social media platform that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to.”
That’s news to Ukraine. Trump notionally agreeing to Putin’s terms about land and Ukraine’s assets is forcing Kyiv into a position of either rolling over and accepting what the two leaders have privately agreed or rejecting the pre-packaged deal.
If Ukraine were to object to being presented with a fait accompli, Putin can simply blame Kyiv for any breakdown in negotiations, which would feed into Trump’s predisposition to identify Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the villain.
Team Trump has already made its disdain for Zelenskyy patently clear. It was on public display during the ugly clash in the Oval Office in February. And it has also been made obvious behind-the-scenes, with the secret talks between members of Trump’s entourage and Zelenskyy’s domestic political rivals, which POLITICO revealed earlier this month.
Those talks were part of a U.S. bid to muster support for early elections — which they’re convinced Zelenskyy would lose, despite current opinion polls indicating otherwise. And according to three Ukrainian lawmakers and a Republican foreign policy expert, all granted anonymity to speak freely, the back-channeling involved Trump’s son Don Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, controversial conservative talk-show host Tucker Carlson and Witkoff — the latter being the only one who has any official role. POLITICO has since reached out to all four for comment about the talks but has received no response.
“They see Zelenskyy as an impediment,” the Republican foreign policy expert said. “How do you undercut Zelenskyy and make him more compliant? Well, you engage his political adversaries, and you show him that the United States has other Ukrainian partners and other options.”
“But I think that much of the Trump world, or at least some of the Trump world, is delusional in thinking they can anoint someone in Ukraine to be their partner and to electorally succeed in the short-to-medium term whenever elections take place,” they added. “It’s very much a lack of understanding of Ukraine.”
Likewise, there may be some delusion as to what Putin is about, as he tries to dictate the broad terms of a final deal before the guns have fallen silent — terms that if largely accepted, would accomplish his main war aim: subjugating Ukraine and keeping it within Moscow’s grasp.
“Putin appears to have been partially successful in holding the ceasefire proposal hostage as part of his efforts to extract preemptive concessions from U.S. President Donald Trump in negotiations to end the war,” the Institute for the Study War noted, in a similar vein.
“Putin is attempting to change the sequence of talks in order to push Trump into making preemptive concessions on issues that are not part of the U.S.-Ukrainian temporary ceasefire but are part of Russia’s war aims,” the think tank warned.
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