After almost losing Trump, Putin changes tack and gets US president right where he wants him
After months of trying to get Putin to end the war, Trump had grown tired of ineffectual phone calls and talks and had begun issuing ultimatums. Even worse for Putin, Trump appeared to have patched up his relationship with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite an Oval Office blow-up earlier this year that delighted Moscow.
It was not clear that Trump would be able or willing to follow through on the threats he had made to put punishing tariffs on nations buying Russian oil, or what real impact such moves would have on Moscow. But Trump's deadline for Putin to end the war was swiftly approaching, presaging some sort of further rift between the White House and the Kremlin.
So Putin shifted tack ever so slightly.
Despite previous refusals by Russian officials to negotiate over territory in the Russia-Ukraine war, the Russian leader, during a meeting at the Kremlin last week, left Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, with the impression Russia was now willing to engage in some dealmaking on the question of land.
'We're going to get some back, and we're going to get some switched,' Trump said on Friday. 'There'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.'
By speaking a language Trump understands – the language of real estate – Putin secured something he had been seeking ever since January: a one-on-one meeting with the US leader, without Zelensky present, to make his case and cut a deal.
'It has been a very good week for Putin,' Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at Kings College London, said. 'He has taken himself out of a position of significant vulnerability. He has manoeuvered this entire process into something that is more or less exactly what he needed it to be.'
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