On paper, everyone is in agreement: Donald Trump says he wants a ceasefire; Kyiv’s negotiating team has already agreed to a 30-day ceasefire proposal at marathon talks with the Americans in Jeddah; and Vladimir Putin says he accepts the idea, albeit with a few “nuances”.
But Putin’s so-called nuances are bigger than mere wrinkles, and at the end of an intense week of diplomacy around Russia’s war in Ukraine, a ceasefire – never mind a sustainable peace – still looks to be something of a distant prospect.
While Trump has proved very willing to pile the pressure on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, most visibly in their disastrous meeting in the White House two weeks ago, his ability or desire to force concessions out of Putin is less clear.
Indeed, the only concession Trump publicly demanded from Putin last week was for the Russian president to spare the lives of “thousands of Ukrainian troops” supposedly surrounded by the Russian army – a battlefield situation first claimed by Putin, but which the Ukrainian army and independent military analysts said did not actually exist.
Putin graciously agreed to consider Trump’s proposal – as long as the possibly imaginary Ukrainian troops surrendered first.
The whole exchange, along with Putin’s warm praise of Trump for “doing everything” to improve relations between Washington and Moscow, left the distinct impression that the experienced Kremlin leader is once again getting the better of his American counterpart.
“Putin is very dangerous when he’s directly talking to Trump,” said the Kyiv-based political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko.
“He knows how to charm him, how to give compliments. And he can tell Trump that these cunning Ukrainians are trying to trick you, and so on.” Putin’s trademark “yes, but” answer to the US ceasefire proposal was essentially a carefully packaged “no”, according to many Kremlin observers.
“They are trying not to reject it fully, because it can spoil the relationship with Trump and complicate things, so they have to say ‘Yes, we agree, but…’ And then this ‘but’ makes it impossible,” said political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya.
Russia has no interest in a ceasefire for the sake of it, she said, and is only interested in talks that would bring about a final settlement advantageous to the Kremlin. “Russians don’t want a ceasefire unconditionally – they have been saying it for a long time,” she said.
According to Stanovaya, Putin still believes there is a “real Ukraine” that exists in parallel to Zelenskyy and other supposed radicals in Kyiv, and that these real Ukrainians want good relations with Russia.
“They are not saying it explicitly, but the idea is that with Ukraine as it is now, with Zelenskyy in power, there won’t be a deal, there will be nothing. Ukraine must admit it has lost the war, it has no chances to reverse the military situation, and that the only way to get out is to start talking to Russians about Moscow’s peace terms,” she said.
That, of course, is a far cry from what Kyiv and most of Ukraine’s western allies have in mind for a lasting peace. Discussions, led by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, to rally western nations into providing some kind of military able to police an eventual peace, appear to be far removed from the reality of the Kremlin’s current position.
The decisive question will be whether or not Trump is ready to really push Moscow when the scale of Putin’s “nuances” becomes clear. Putin put his position to Trump’s negotiator Steve Witkoff in closed-door talks on Thursday in Moscow. In a time-honoured tactic, he reportedly underlined the power dynamic of the meeting by keeping Witkoff waiting for eight hours before receiving him for discussions. In a social media post yesterday, Trump insisted “there was no wait whatsoever”, accusing those who suggested otherwise of being “sick degenerates”.
At least one positive for Ukraine last week was the apparent reset of relations with the Americans after the White House debacle, at talks in Saudi Arabia. Instead of JD Vance or others in Trump’s circle known to have a dislike for Ukraine, the White House sent secretary of state Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, seen as two of the more traditional foreign policy thinkers among the eclectic mix of those around Trump.
Instead of Zelenskyy, who communicates with raw emotion, the Ukranian delegation was led by chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, known for speaking quietly and drily. The talks went on for eight hours with only a short break for lunch, and those involved said they were marked by methodical back-and-forth, rather than emotional appeals.
“Historians underestimate the role of human exhaustion in making historical decisions,” Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, wrote on Facebook after the talks. “It is in these last hours, when fatigue is already making itself felt, that a way out of the impasse and even difficult compromises suddenly become possible.”
After the two delegations called their respective presidents, an agreement was made: Ukraine would agree to a 30-day ceasefire, and the US would resume intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries – a return to the status quo that after the preceding fortnight felt like a diplomatic victory.
Witkoff was not in Saudi Arabia, while Rubio and Waltz did not travel to Moscow, leaving it an open question as to how coordinated the US dealmaking is. Keith Kellogg, the retired general whom Trump initially appointed his Ukraine and Russia envoy, and who was known to be a supporter of Kyiv, appears to have been completely sidelined from the process, with reports that the Kremlin asked him to be removed from high-level meetings.
If, against the odds, Trump can persuade Putin to agree to the 30-day ceasefire, discussions will then move on to the more difficult question of how to turn that into a sustainable peace. Even before that, there would be the issue of how such a ceasefire is monitored, along the long and unstable frontline.
“A ceasefire can’t be based only on political statements,” said Fesenko. “The military would have to sit down and agree on the contact line, the monitoring procedure.It’s all harder now – before, there was just artillery, now there are drones. Who is going to control or at least monitor this?”
