Putin Placates Trump, But Dodges Wider Ukrainian Peace Deal

Yahoo

18-03-2025

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held an extended phone call today to discuss the war in Ukraine, which the U.S. president has touted as a major step toward kicking off peace talks in the devastating conflict.
However, statements from both the Kremlin and the White House indicate only a limited agreement was reached – while Putin has shifted the onus for further progress onto Ukraine, demanding that Kyiv stop mobilizing and arming its soldiers before Moscow will agree to a broader ceasefire.
'My phone conversation today with President Putin of Russia was a very good and productive one,' Trump wrote in a social media post. 'This war would never have started if I were president!'
While no full transcript of the call has been made public, the White House released a brief read-out with carefully curated details.
'The leaders agreed that the movement to peace would begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire,' the White House read-out said. 'The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside.'
In its version, the Kremlin noted that it had agreed to a 30-day ceasefire on energy targets, but emphasized that it wanted a full halt to all foreign military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine as a precondition for ending the conflict.
The tenor of the discussion between the two leaders described in the read-outs accords with the analysis of several experts, who see Putin's intentions as placating the American president, while staving off meaningful progress toward a ceasefire as Russian forces advance on the battlefield.
'Today's Putin-Trump conversation will be about Russia-U.S. relations and what they each think they can extort from Kyiv, not peace in Ukraine,' Prof. Ruth Deyermond, a senior lecturer at King's College London's Department of War Studies who specializes in U.S.-Russia relations, observed ahead of the call.
'Russia and Ukraine were negotiating a halt to strikes on energy infrastructure well before Trump won the presidential election. So not a single concession comes from the Russian side after 2-plus [hours] of [a] Trump-Putin call,' Daniel Szegelowski, the head of the Eastern Europe Program at the Polish Institute for International Affairs, wrote after it ended.
The Kremlin has previously said that any negotiations with the U.S. toward a ceasefire must also involve a wider discussion aimed at lifting sanctions and normalizing ties — and reshaping the world order to Putin's liking.
That appears to have happened, as Trump and Putin also 'spoke broadly about the Middle East,' 'the need to stop the proliferation of strategic weapons,' and 'enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability,' according to the White House read-out.
A cessation of missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure will be welcome in Ukraine, but falls short of the wider pause in hostilities for which officials in Kyiv had hoped. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had agreed to a U.S. proposal for an immediate and total 30-day ceasefire, but has been pessimistic about the prospects for progress — and anticipated Russia would delay in today's Trump-Putin call.
'It is clear to everyone in the world — even to those who refused to acknowledge the truth for the past three years — that it is Putin who continues to drag out this war,' Zelensky said in a video address posted to social media on Monday night. 'For a week now, Putin has been unable to squeeze out 'yes' to the ceasefire proposal.'
Russia, too, will welcome a pause in attacks on energy infrastructure, as oil production and storage facilities have been the primary target for Ukraine's increasingly sophisticated long-range attack drones.
Putin's delaying tactics, in offering a win for Trump without making a larger commitment that affects Russia's favorable military momentum, also plays into a broader strategy to encourage and exploit growing rifts between the United States and its European allies, in order to neutralize NATO.
'Western dominance is slipping away and new centers of global growth are emerging,' Putin told a gathering of business leaders in Moscow, just minutes before his phone call with Trump.
Moscow is gleeful that the pro-Russia camp within Trump's inner circle has vocally embraced its longstanding worldview, with influential Russian commentators praising the American president.
'[Trump] is much more conservative. He is in favor of traditional values. He is in favor of the patriotism of the nation, and I define that as the great power's world order. Putin and Trump coincide in accepting this model instead of liberal globalism,' Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist philosopher who has been influential on Putin's regime, told CNN in an interview earlier on Tuesday.
Putin also likely hopes that Washington's relationship with Kyiv will continue to deteriorate amid Trump's personal animosity toward the Ukrainian president.
Trump has echoed the Kremlin's view that Zelensky is an 'illegitimate' leader, at one point even calling on him to step down.
The administration's antipathy toward Zelensky was on full display in a tactless meeting at the Oval Office last month, in which Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance verbally attacked the Ukrainian leader, saying he 'was not ready for peace.' Multiple U.S. officials have echoed Trump's assertion that Zelensky is a 'dictator,' calling for elections in Ukraine — which are currently prohibited under martial law.
One of Putin's primary goals in starting the war three years ago was to remove the pro-Western, democratically elected government in Ukraine, and install a puppet government friendly to Moscow.
Putin has long maintained that his fundamental goals in Ukraine are non-negotiable: no NATO membership; no foreign military support or troops; demilitarization of Ukraine's armed forces; the installment of a 'neutral' regime in Kyiv; and territorial concessions.
The U.S. has already signaled its willingness to support at least some of these goals, including a ban on NATO membership and territorial concessions. Trump further said that his goal was 'dividing up certain assets' in Ukraine between Russia and the U.S. — an unfortunate echo of the secret deal between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II in 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in which the two authoritarian powers agreed to divide Poland.
Ahead of the phone call today, Trump demonstrated that his views about the conflict were in alignment with Moscow's claims, specifically pointing to a Russian offensive to retake territory captured by Ukraine in Kursk province.
'Tomorrow, I will speak with President Putin to save Ukrainian soldiers who are in a very difficult situation,' Trump said on Monday. 'They are surrounded by Russian forces. If it weren't for me, they'd be gone already. I managed to convince them to hold off for now.'
Multiple independent analysts in both Russia and Ukraine contest this characterization, acknowledging that while the Ukrainians were losing ground in Kursk, no large units were 'surrounded' and the bulk of forces were retreating in good order.
Fundamentally, the war in Ukraine is not going well for either of the warring parties. Three years into the conflict, there have been nearly a million casualties, according to estimates by U.S. officials.
Across the nearly 500 mile line of contact, much of the war has devolved into attritional trench warfare. Ukraine's military situation is dire, with the embattled nation unable to muster the manpower it needs to hold the line. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Russian soldiers are killed or wounded every day, eking out incremental gains. But tens of thousands more are sent to the front each month, to fight and die in Ukraine as Russia continues to advance.
There remains a significant gap between these realities on the ground and the Trump administration's assertions that it can achieve peace quickly.
Neither Ukraine nor any of the U.S.' NATO allies have been directly included in discussions between Moscow and Washington at this point.
Leaders in Europe are watching developments closely, and have already been alarmed by Trump's earlier decision to cut off military and intelligence aid to Ukraine — a decision the American president reversed when Kyiv agreed to Washington's ceasefire proposal.
While many European leaders have used strong rhetoric when speaking about the war, and the European Union taken together is the largest overall contributor of aid to Ukraine, the reality is that the United States has shouldered the bulk of the burden in supplying direct military aid to Kyiv.
But there are signs that – after three years of brutal armored and trench warfare, and nightly missile and drone attacks by Russia against civilians in Ukraine – Europe is awakening to its own danger.
'Russia poses the greatest threat to European security,' said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, just moments before legislators in the Bundestag voted to pass a massive defense spending bill, unprecedented in modern Germany and a collateral result of the crisis in Euro-American relations.
That threat was manifested clearly only hours after Putin ended his call with Trump, as air raid alerts sounded across nearly half of Ukraine, including in the capital Kyiv.
Russian one-way attack drones had started their nightly journeys toward Ukrainian cities, and the sound of air defense machine guns and interceptors began echoing through their streets.
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