Putin Isn't Actually Enjoying This

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3 hours ago

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Within weeks of Donald Trump's second inauguration, pundits began saying that his return to office opened new doors for Vladimir Putin, offering Moscow opportunities it hadn't seen in years. The deference the new administration afforded the Kremlin appeared to be rivaled only by its hostility toward its own national-security establishment.
Trump entered negotiations to end the war in Ukraine by presenting Putin with a bouquet of inexplicable concessions. Washington ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine—then proposed that it might recognize the illegally occupied Crimean peninsula as Russian (in a reversal of long-standing U.S. policy), allow Russia to retain most of the territory it had seized since 2022, and lift sanctions. The U.S. even sided against its European allies when they presented a resolution at the United Nations condemning Moscow—and then it drafted a peace proposal that omitted any criticism of Russia.
You'd think Putin would be delighted by all of this. Instead, he's been thrown on his heels. Trump's efforts at rapprochement have left Russia's propaganda apparatus, foreign policy, and economic stability in worse shape than they were before January 20.
Whatever the intent, Washington has robbed the Kremlin of its north star: opposition to the United States. After years of routinely threatening to drown the Eastern Seaboard, Moscow can no longer afford the luxury of calling America its enemy No. 1. Thanks to Trump, the Kremlin now has to portray Washington as a rational negotiating partner—even as American-made missiles continue to rain down on Russian troops. The title of Russia's civilizational enemy has been reassigned to the European Union. The Russian propaganda machine has some flexibility, but being locked in an existential struggle with the Netherlands is far less flattering to the imperial mindset than going up against the world's leading superpower.
And so Russia's information mills seem to be glitching out. In a May 25 Truth Social post, Trump wrote that Putin was absolutely 'CRAZY' for bombing Ukrainian cities in the middle of negotiations. 'We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally,' Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in response. The last time I scanned Russia's top propaganda sites, I couldn't find a single hostile reference to the United States. On May 20, Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy speaker of the Russian senate, described two emerging camps: a 'Russian American' one 'discussing prospects for achieving peace,' and a 'Ukrainian European' one 'exploring options for continuing the war.'
The reversal isn't just a problem for Putin's media proxies. The Russian leader himself has been forced to improvise. For years, Putin claimed that direct talks with Ukraine were impossible because President Volodymyr Zelensky's government was illegitimate and, more important, Ukraine wasn't a real country—merely a proxy for the American imperial project. He framed the war as a conflict that only Russia and the U.S. could resolve, in a Yalta-style deal between great powers—preferably in occupied Yalta itself. Along came Trump, who repeatedly sidelined Ukraine and the EU to speak with Putin one-on-one. Putin looked set to get what he wanted. But then that changed, as all things Trump tend to do: By May, Putin wasn't carving up Europe with Trump—he was competing with Zelensky to convince the White House that the other side was out of control.
Trump's point man for Russia is the billionaire real-estate developer Steve Witkoff, whose bewilderingly affectionate approach to Putin continues to flummox the Western media. His meetings with the Russian dictator last for hours. He forgoes American translators (relying instead on Russian intelligence assets), sits alone with top Kremlin negotiators, and emerges voicing Moscow's talking points without even being able to name the Ukrainian regions Russia claims as its own. Even seasoned diplomats have to resist being crushed by Russia's imperial grandeur when they are received like state dignitaries inside the Kremlin complex. Someone who devoted his life to building condos barely stands a chance. Still, the Kremlin surely knows that Witkoff has no authority over what America can offer Russia. Only Trump does. For now, the man trying to rebuild the Russian empire is forced to negotiate with the king of Manhattan real estate.
And negotiate he must, because Trump has made forging a settlement between Russia and Ukraine a defining foreign-policy objective. The goal is an elusive one: Washington has so far failed to secure even a 30-day cease-fire. On May 1, the administration threatened to withdraw from the peace talks. Many in the West expected that this would translate into a win for the Kremlin: Trump, they assumed, would abandon Ukraine and strike a separate deal with Moscow. But Russia has reason to be wary that a thwarted Trump administration might not prove so amenable. The U.S. president apparently wants a diplomatic victory, and if he feels that he's been pushed aside, he may have less reason to end arms shipments to Ukraine—especially now that Kyiv is purchasing munitions—and more reason to blame Moscow for sabotaging the peace process.
For the Kremlin, standing between Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize is risky, but agreeing to a cease-fire while Russia is making steady, if incremental, gains on the battlefield is a step too far. So it opted for a third path: Putin held a rare late-night press conference inviting Ukraine to bilateral negotiations, dodging the cease-fire while handing Trump a symbolic win that he could sell as a breakthrough. For the Russian dictator, whose foreign and domestic policy is shaped by Brioni-clad men playing by prison-yard rules, the need to appease the U.S. president in this way is a distinctly uncomfortable—and demeaning—shift from the predictable antagonism of the Joe Biden years.
Trump frequently holds out the prospect of lifting sanctions or striking lucrative deals as incentives for Moscow to end the war. Russia was even spared from Trump's sweeping tariffs. But what the U.S. can offer Russia is ultimately underwhelming. The sanctions that hurt Russia the most—an oil-export ban, the freezing of two-thirds of its foreign reserves, and its exclusion from the SWIFT bank-to-bank payment network—all came from the EU. Russian exports to the United States were at their peak in 2011—before the annexation of Crimea, the full-scale war in Ukraine, and the U.S. energy boom—and amounted to just $34.6 billion worth of goods. That figure offers little hope for meaningful bilateral trade, especially now.
What does matter to Russia is oil sales. And in the months before the renewed conflict between Israel and Iran, oil prices dropped by 20 percent, largely because of the Trump administration's global tariff war. This forced Moscow to revise its federal budget for 2025–26; triple this year's expected budget deficit, from 0.5 to 1.7 percent of GDP; and, as a result, tap its fiscal reserves for $5.51 billion, or about one-tenth of its liquid assets, to balance the budget. It also cost Russia $39 billion in anticipated hydrocarbon revenue—more than the proposed deals with the U.S. could make up for. In other words, without imposing a single new sanction, Trump has significantly intensified fiscal pressure on the Kremlin simply by dint of his erratic economic policies.
Washington's public stance on Russia has certainly changed. One popularly circulated YouTube clip shows Secretary of State Marco Rubio refusing to call Putin a war criminal during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on May 21. But as someone who once worked with the Kremlin (I produced a talk show for Russian state media in the late 2000s), I can assure you: Putin would much rather be labeled a war criminal with oil at $70 a barrel than a rational leader looking to end the war with oil at $56.
During the first three years of Russia's all-out war in Ukraine, the United States and the EU presented a united front against Russia that proved, perhaps paradoxically, manageable for the Kremlin, in terms of both propaganda and strategic positioning. Trump has shattered that coherence, and now the Kremlin finds itself in an uncomfortable position, despite its triumphalist rhetoric and maximalist demands: It's scrambling to keep pace with an American president who has no idea where he's going.