Analysis: Trump may be forging progress in Ukraine or walking into Putin's trap
But is Putin, to quote the US president in a previous, and rare, moment of lucidity on Russian relations, merely 'tapping (him) along' again?
Trump's boiling frustration with Putin, who has tarnished the president's hopes of becoming a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Prize, evaporated after his envoy Steve Witkoff emerged from a three-hour meeting Wednesday with the Kremlin strongman.
Trump predicted that a summit within weeks could stop the war in Ukraine, saying there was a 'very good chance that we could be ending … the end of that road.'
His bullishness was more in character than his stance over the past few weeks, when he's lambasted Putin's 'disgusting' air strikes on Kyiv and called the world leader he's always tried to impress the most 'absolutely crazy.'
He cautioned Wednesday that there hadn't been a 'breakthrough' in Moscow. But he still seemed impossibly optimistic in light of Russia's recent drone and missile blitzes on Ukraine — some of the most intense yet — and the absence of any evidence over three years of combat that Putin has any intention of ending the horrific war.
Trump has repeatedly claimed great progress is imminent since taking office in January — after promising and then failing to end the war in 24 hours.
But Putin's reasons for continuing the war are far more compelling than any incentive Trump can give him to end it.
'I think we in Washington sometimes underestimate just how invested the Kremlin is in waging this war,' said David Salvo, a Russia expert and managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. 'The legitimacy and the fate of the entire Putin regime is based on not just concluding this war on Russian terms but continuing to fight it for the foreseeable future, the entire economy is propped up around the war.'
Salvo, a former State Department official, added, 'I just don't see anything that's going to move the needle and change the calculus of the Kremlin.'
Still, successful peacemaking often requires presidents to take risks. And if Trump somehow did manage to initiate a genuine peace process, he'd save potentially thousands of lives in a war that has devastated Ukrainian civilians. He'd also achieve a major milestone for the US and himself.
So is there any reason for optimism?
A Putin summit would be a grand moment of statesmanship and offer Trump a long-hoped-for one-on-one with the Russian leader and the chance to test his belief that, in person, he can use his dealmaking skills to end the war.
Trump is also proposing a trilateral meeting that would bring together Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the most significant diplomatic encounter since the illegal Russian invasion three years ago.
Russian has not yet publicly confirmed either of the summits. Moscow typically prepares for such meetings with painstaking lower-level talks, which it often uses as delaying tactics, so it might bristle at the rush.
But the raised stakes of a presidential meeting could put pressure on Putin to deliver at least something Trump can call a win. This might include a deal to halt air attacks on civilians, even if a full ceasefire and peace deal could take many months to clinch. But Russian ceasefire pledges are often not worth the paper they are written on.
Significant progress would also validate Trump's new strategy of trying to coerce Putin to the table with punishments rather than flattery. It may be no coincidence that apparent movement in the war came on a day when Trump said he'd slap heavy tariffs on India — one of the top buyers of the Russian oil that bankrolls the war effort. In two days, Trump faces his own deadline to also impose new sanctions on Russia over its snub to his ceasefire demands.
There was a rare note of optimism in Ukraine on Wednesday. 'Russia now seems to be more inclined toward a ceasefire — the pressure is working,' Zelensky said in his nightly wartime address.
Putin may still be playing the same old game.
In the first seven months of Trump's second term, he's been humiliated by Putin ignoring his peace efforts and making a mockery of Trump's claims that the Russian leader sincerely wants peace. Even Trump, who has a long history of genuflecting to the Russian leader, seems to have realized he was taken for a fool.
But Putin could be stringing Trump along again after meeting Witkoff, who left previous Kremlin meetings amplifying Russian talking points and whose record is threadbare to date on peacemaking in the Middle East and Ukraine is threadbare.
The president admitted he doesn't know what Putin's game is. 'I can't answer that question yet,' he told reporters on Wednesday. 'I'll tell you in a matter of weeks, maybe less.'
Trump might try to bill any Putin summit as a win on its own. But he'd be granting Putin a prize without securing a price. The ex-KGB lieutenant colonel in the Kremlin may be banking on Trump's love of theatrical photo-ops that often don't yield much. His first-term summits with tyrant Kim Jong Un, for example, failed to end North Korea's nuclear program.
Putin has long said he's willing to meet Trump when the moment is right, and such a meeting — which would evoke echoes of famous US-Soviet Cold War summits — would represent a reentry by a pariah leader on the world's top diplomatic stage. And any meeting would rekindle memories of the Helsinki summit in Trump's first term, when Putin was stunningly successful in manipulating his US counterpart.
'I think Putin will see it as an opportunity,' former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on 'The Source' Wednesday.
'I think he knows he's, deliberately or inadvertently, pushed Trump a little too far, and he will have some ideas about how to bring things back in his direction,' Bolton said.
The crunch question is what the Russians would offer as a summit deliverable. The US tried in the past for an agreement to halt air attacks by both sides. This might allow Ukrainians to leave their air raid shelters. But chances of a broader ceasefire seem remote. Major breakthroughs seem likely in Moscow's summer offensive. So why stop fighting now? Putin may see this new engagement with Trump as buying more time to bite off key strategic land in eastern Ukraine.
Another potential approach would be for Russia to coax Trump with inducements to take his eye off Ukraine — perhaps a promise for talks on a nuclear arms control agreement that would boost his legacy, or some significant economic cooperation that would conjure Trump's transactional instincts.
Ukraine must also be heard, and it will be wary of Trump returning to a pro-Russian peace plan that would have met Moscow's demands to retain all territory it has seized in Ukraine, as well as for NATO membership for Kyiv to be definitively ruled out. Moscow has long tried to play on Trump's skepticism about the war by encouraging splits between the US and Kyiv's European allies. So it was significant that European leaders were on a call with Trump and Zelensky on Wednesday.
President Ronald Reagan's Cold War maxim about dealing with Moscow — 'Trust but verify' — seems quaint given Putin's record of duplicity over the war. Zelensky on Wednesday had a more apt forewarning: 'The key is to ensure they don't deceive anyone in the details — neither us nor the United States.'
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