Russian exile and former chess grand master Garry Kasparov has said that Vladimir Putin is calling the shots on Ukrainian peace talks, and is “laughing” at President Donald Trump.
Trump, who vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict on day one of his presidency, has publicly demanded that Putin stop his bombing of Ukraine and come to the negotiating table.
Putin kept Trump’s U.S. delegation and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky waiting until the last minute before snubbing peace talks in Turkey last week, in a move that read like a power play.
Instead, Putin stayed in Moscow and held a meeting with the head of a Russian bank. Since then, Trump and Putin have had an “excellent” phone call, according to the U.S. president.
Putin said the call on Monday was “very meaningful and frank,” but a ceasefire remains elusive. Putin dialed in from a music school in Sochi, a city on the Black Sea, not far from Georgia. Trump was speaking from the Oval Office.
This too was a power play, according to Kasparov. Speaking on CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett on Monday evening, the former World Chess Champion who fled Russia due to political persecution by Putin’s regime, said the Kremlin chief’s choice of venue for the call shows his true feelings for Trump.
“Putin is laughing at him. He didn’t even come back to Moscow. He spoke to him from a music school in the obscure place in the south of Russia,” he said.
Burnett asked him if this “matters,” and Kasparov continued: “Of course! Putin shows disdain. Putin enjoys it. I mean, you can see the body language and also, a dictator has to show his strength.”
He added that this is a “message to Russians” from the tough guy leader. Kasparov added that it also serves as a message to other dictators around the globe.
“Trump is nobody. I mean, look, you know, ‘I can play the American president as a broken guitar,’” he said.
Kasparov added that Putin “doesn’t hear” the strong messaging from Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
“Putin knows that Trump is capable of doing nothing. And this is an American position as presented by JD Vance, that if Putin doesn‘t want to negotiate, we‘ll do exactly what he what he wants us to do. America is walking away,” he explained.
He declared that the president of the United States is “openly taking the side of a brutal dictator that has been carrying genocidal war against its neighbor.”
“And today, Putin is the main threat to the global stability. That should should tell us more about Donald Trump,” he added.
Kasparov even suggested that the two-hour 15-minute call that the leaders had on Monday might have even devolved into a negotiation about trade, rather than a ceasefire. “I mean, the old nonsense about a ceasefire that just went nowhere could take 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes,” he said.
“What about the rest, 90 minutes? And knowing Trump… he talked about trade, I think, you know, they talked about something else which interests Trump. Trump more [than] anything else, he cares about two things—vanity and greed. So I think Putin knows how to handle it.”
Kasparov claimed that Trump is using his “immense power” to “make him rich.”
“So he‘s not even hiding this intention. And Vladimir Putin is laughing,” he added.
He struck a similar tone on his Substack The Next Move, saying Trump “looks like a complete idiot” and a “beaten dog” that has bowed to all of Putin’s demands.
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