U.S. negotiators outmatched by Russians in Ukraine talks, say analysts

Washington Post

04-04-2025

The Trump administration has twice claimed major progress in peace talks over the war between Russia and Ukraine, with partial ceasefires on energy infrastructure and in the Black Sea, only to see all sides present wildly different interpretations on what had been agreed on as the fighting continues.
Ukraine (and initially the United States) talked about a ceasefire for all civilian infrastructure, while Russia said it was for energy infrastructure alone, and both sides claimed almost immediately the other had violated it. For the Black Sea, meanwhile, Russia saw it as a chance to lift sanctions on its banks, while Ukraine said it included port infrastructure.
In remarks Wednesday in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump insisted the negotiations were going well, saying: 'We're being given good cooperation by Russia and by Ukraine. But we have to get it stopped.'
It was a conflict he said he could solve in 24 hours during his campaign, but the results since, while much trumpeted by the administration, have sapped confidence in the negotiations and the evenhandedness of the American negotiators by participants and outside observers alike.
Trump's display of temper last weekend — when he criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for seeking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's replacement even before peace talks could take place — was the first tacit admission that the talks so far are not going as planned, with the Kremlin offering no meaningful compromises despite a number of important gestures from the U.S.
'I don't know if it shows the inexperience in handling these matters,' said Thomas Graham, senior director for Russia at the National Security Council under the George W. Bush administration and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'I think what it shows is the Trump administration is very intent on demonstrating progress, things that they can point to as success and covering up the challenges ahead.'
Joshua Huminski, a senior vice president at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, downplayed these doubts, however, and said the Trump administration's approach to the talks was all about initial confidence-building measures.
'I think this is kind of relearning the art of negotiating, the art of the deal in the Trump era,' he said. Trump's unusual approach to negotiation was an advantage, he contended. 'I think this is a New York property developer approach to setting the diplomatic negotiating agenda and keeping negotiating partners off balance.'
Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in an interview last month called the talks between Putin and Trump 'epic' and 'transformational,' and 'enormously beneficial for the world at large.'
Many Ukrainians, however, are already losing trust in the peace talks, with 75 percent saying that under Trump, Ukrainians could expect an unfair or partly unfair peace deal, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
These fears grew after the Trump administration surrendered some of its strongest tools of leverage at the outset — including normalizing relations with Moscow and accepting Russia's conditions that it gets to keep most of the territory it seized by force and barring Ukraine from NATO.
'I've had questions, too, about impartiality and fairness,' said Thomas Greminger, head of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and former director general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
'We have seen President Trump and other members of the U.S. government regularly and publicly making concessions. And that's normally not what you do in a process running up to negotiations,' he said. 'That is a huge difference to what we've been hearing from the Russian side.'
Critics contend that the U.S. negotiation team is no match for the hardened ex-Soviet officials with decades of negotiating experience and knowledge of Ukraine. The Russian team includes longtime Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, former diplomat Grigory Karasin, and Sergey Beseda, former head of the FSB's Fifth Service, the counterintelligence department.
The U.S. team is not made up of experienced Russia experts, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, while Trump's main Russia envoy, Witkoff, is a property developer and friend of the president.
'For the Russians, it is a very kind of easy team, and they're definitely running circles around their American counterparts. And for now, I think that they're quite successful,' he said. Russia's success in convincing the Trump administration to work on improving ties on a parallel track to the peace talks — not as a condition of progress on peace — was 'a big victory for Russian diplomacy.'
Although Trump last weekend did voice some anger at Putin, his administration continues to offer him important concessions. On Wednesday, Kirill Dmitriev, a close Putin ally and head of the sovereign wealth fund, became the most senior Russian official to visit Washington since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He held talks with Witkoff despite being under U.S. sanctions, which would have had to be temporarily lifted for the trip.
'The Russians expect that Trump may be the gift that keeps on giving to Russian foreign policy goals,' said Gabuev, including 'destroying transatlantic unity, which has been [a] Russian foreign policy goal for many years, if not centuries.'
Trump's foreign policy shift and threats toward allies are seen by the Kremlin as 'a real revolution' and a 'window of opportunity,' said Russian analyst Vladimir Pastukhov of the University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies. 'They are trying to use some tactical benefits from the changing circumstances.'
Russia's moves have left the American side exposed multiple times throughout the process: Before meeting Witkoff last month in Moscow, for example, Putin floated an unconfirmed story that a large group of Ukrainian soldiers was surrounded as Russian forces retook territory in the Kursk region. Trump repeated the story uncritically and asked Putin to show mercy.
After last month's phone call with Trump and Putin, the Trump team announced a 30-day partial ceasefire on both energy and infrastructure — but the Kremlin statement said this applied only to energy infrastructure. The U.S. then adopted this version, without explaining the shift.
There were more discrepancies last week: The U.S. announced that both sides had agreed to a Black Sea ceasefire, but the Kremlin then released a list of conditions before this could take place, including lifting sanctions on several Russian financial institutions — major concessions that would have required a European buy-in that was not there.
'So for all practical purpose, there is not a ceasefire. There is not a Black Sea initiative that has been agreed by the Ukrainians and Russians. We have the illusion of progress with no concrete steps toward implementing the actions that the administration is talking about,' said Graham.
But the lopsided nature of the process became clearer when Witkoff unquestioningly repeated several more of Putin's false claims, including that Ukrainian regions annexed by Moscow wanted to be Russian because citizens voted for this in referendums — even though the referendums of occupied populations are not legal under international law, according to the United Nations.
'He appears to be more Putin's envoy to Trump than the other way round,' Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London, wrote in an analysis. 'It is usually wise for someone who wishes to play an intermediary role to keep their cards close to their chest and avoid alienating either side.'
Witkoff also gushed in an interview about Putin telling him that he visited his local church to pray for Trump after an assassination attempt in July.
'What comes through is that he is fundamentally uninformed about the nature of the conflict and has never really dealt with Russia before, and doesn't understand the negotiating tactics and particularly how Putin might try to manipulate the situation,' said Graham.
When asked whether he was concerned that Witkoff was voicing Kremlin propaganda, Zelensky said in an interview last week with four European journalists: 'Witkoff indeed very frequently quotes the Kremlin narratives. I believe this won't bring us closer to peace.'
With the emerging doubts about the peace process, both sides are maneuvering to take advantage — or avoid a military disadvantage — should they fail. Russia's goal is to see Ukraine blamed if peace talks fail so that the U.S. halts military and intelligence support, opening a path to military victory. Ukraine seeks the opposite.
On Tuesday, Moscow reinforced its hard-line, maximalist demands when Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov complained that Russia's demand 'to solve the problems related to the root causes of the conflict' was being ignored by the U.S., and 'we cannot accept all of this as it is.'
As the U.S. overstates its progress in talks, Moscow seems concerned that Trump's negotiators do not understand how serious it is about these demands, according to Graham.
'The question is whether the administration has the patience to continue those negotiations and whether they can conduct the negotiations in ways that can extract concessions from the Russian side,' he said.
Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.