Delay and Distract: Putin Strings Trump Along on Ukraine

Without leaving home or indulging President Donald Trump’s suggestion of a face-to-face meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin got everything he wanted out of the first direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations on the Ukraine war in Istanbul last week: Stalemate.

Likewise, in a two-hour phone call with Trump on Monday, Putin maneuvered his way out of committing to Trump’s proposed 30-day ceasefire to facilitate the start of peace talks, an appeal Trump made three months ago that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accepted.

The wily Kremlin leader instead agreed only to being “prepared to work with Ukraine on drafting a memorandum for future peace talks.” Four months into Trump’s second presidential term in which he vowed to end the Ukraine war on Day One, all he has achieved in his deal-making with Putin is a concept of a plan to wind down his war on a timetable TBD.

Putin’s vague reference to possible movement at some point in the future left the White House diplomatic initiatives where they have been since Trump took office four months ago: Trump boasting that only he has the leverage with Putin to bring the war to an end and Putin rebuffing White House intervention because he has yet to achieve his goal of fully subjugating Ukraine.

In his call with Trump, Putin introduced further procrastination on a ceasefire, citing the need for both sides to draft a memorandum on the terms of an eventual peace treaty, with neither a target date for achieving a negotiated accord nor any hint at halting his battlefield operations in the meantime.

The Kremlin leader also earlier rebuffed Trump’s offer to meet him in Istanbul and bless the fraught negotiations with their influential presence. Putin skipped the meeting he’d called for at the highest level, leaving Trump hanging around the Middle East after his Gulf Arab summits until it became clear Putin was a no-show.

Putin is a master at delay-and-distract, the tactical maneuvering that has carried him through more than 11 years of an internationally condemned invasion of a peaceful and sovereign neighbor. He postures as the rescuer of a centuries-old Russian empire that fell to defeat due to czarist excesses and World War I losses.

Putin laments the 1991 breakup of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union that collapsed after 74 years of Communist repression and economic dysfunction, spinning off Russia, Ukraine and the other 13 Soviet republics into independent states. His negotiators in Istanbul and Putin himself clung to the demand that the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine must be addressed, meaning the Kyiv government’s moves toward alignment with Western democracies and away from the authoritarian empire Putin is trying to reconstruct. The Kremlin is vehemently opposed to Ukraine joining the NATO defense pact or the European Union economic bloc on the continent.

Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff, like Trump a former real estate developer, has shopped a U.S. peace plan for Ukraine that is highly favorable to Russia, granting U.S. recognition of the illegally seized Crimean Peninsula and acknowledging the “reality” of Russian occupation of large swaths of four other Ukrainian provinces. Russia’s counter proposal calls for Ukraine to cede those provinces to Russia, even the parts that remain under Ukrainian government control like the capital cities of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

During Kremlin meetings between Witkoff and Putin, the Kremlin leader basically told Trump’s front man, “Yes, please. What else do you have to offer?”

Trump has voiced concern on occasion that Putin “may be tapping me along,” dragging out the diplomatic engagements only to have Kremlin negotiators walk away from all proposed steps toward ending the Ukraine war, the deadliest in Europe since World War II ended.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, over the weekend to assess whether the most recent diplomacy had yielded progress. Rubio, once a staunch Russia hawk now protective of Trump’s chummy relationship with Putin, damned with faint praise the fruitless Istanbul meeting in saying the talks “were not a complete waste of time.”

At the Istanbul meeting, Russian and Ukrainian delegates agreed to swap 1,000 prisoners of war each, Rubio noted as the one positive development from the at-times contentious talks.

The discussions lasting less than two hours began with a hostile warning from the lead Russian negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, a conservative former culture minister who led the last failed effort to negotiate an end to Russia’s invasion in the spring of 2022.

“Perhaps someone at this table will lose even more of their loved ones. Russia is ready to wage war forever,” Medinsky warned, recalling a 21-year-long war with Sweden three centuries ago. “Never try to deceive the Russians and steal something from them, because sooner or later Russians always come to claim what is theirs.”

Putin’s view that Ukraine belongs to Russia is at the heart of the Kremlin’s bloody campaign to take it by force. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the December 1991 Belavezha Accords that the then-presidents of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian republics signed proclaiming the Soviet Union defunct and its 15 republics independent countries within their Soviet republic borders. Neither has he respected Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons in 1994 that came with Russian recognition of its sovereignty and independence.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on X that Medinsky’s warning that Russia is ready to fight on for decades warranted a U.S. response and called on Trump to increase pressure on Putin instead of awarding him a meeting.

Trump’s readout on his call with Putin claimed they’d agreed on “immediate negotiations” between Russia and Ukraine on a ceasefire, an account Putin disputed in his own assessment that nothing had changed as a result of the recent diplomacy.

Mykhailo Podoliak, senior advisor to Zelensky, confirmed in a tweet on X that “the status quo has not changed.”

Trump spoke with Zelensky briefly after his call with Putin and consulted with the leaders of Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Finland. The Western allies have been critical of Trump’s reluctance to pressure Putin to accept concessions, to no avail. After the White House call with Putin, Trump backed off from his demand for Kremlin commitment to an immediate ceasefire and seemed to have abandoned his pursuit of a face-to-face meeting with Putin.

Trump’s frustration with his inability to persuade Putin to accept any compromise from his vision of total dominion over Ukraine has become more apparent in recent days, leading him to warn he might just walk away from the vow he made on the campaign trail to end the Ukraine war. He has alluded to the possibility of the Vatican taking on oversight of a peace process under the auspices of newly elected Pope Leo XIV.

While the pope would be a more honest broker than Trump who has long sided with Putin in proposing Ukrainian territorial and autonomy concessions, it remains to be seen if Putin would submit to a forum headed by the Catholic leader, nor whether Trump’s ego would allow him to pass the mediation effort to Vatican oversight and the chance of the pontiff succeeding where Trump failed.

Former Russian political prisoner and democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, now living in the United States after last year’s U.S.-Russia prisoner exchange, told MSNBC after the Trump-Putin call that Russian aggression in Ukraine would not be stopped by Trump condoning territorial concessions to Putin.

He, like other freed Kremlin foes, hailed the Istanbul agreement to swap 1,000 prisoners and encouraged the Russian side to include civilian hostages and abducted Ukrainian children.

“There is nothing we can do about the hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of Putin’s aggression but we can save the lives of hostages and POWs,” the exiled dissident noted.