Putin and Trump take a 'win' at Ukraine's expense

The results of Tuesday's phone call between the presidents of the US and Russia were, by any measure, a win for President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin leader rejected the unconditional 30-day ceasefire on offer and suffered no consequences for doing so. He clearly sees his engagement with the US as a low-cost way of achieving his goals in Ukraine, and things are going swimmingly. What remains uncertain is just how much President Donald Trump is willing to give away to get a deal.

This presents a sharp dilemma for both Ukraine and Europe. Neither knows what was said in Tuesday's hour-and-a-half phone call; they weren't included. ,So as the American leader also declared himself a winner, they have to take on trust that his ultimate goals align with theirs. At a time when reasons for transatlantic trust are in short supply, both should assume the worst.

From Putin's point of view, he has gotten the US-Russia dialogue on how to carve up Europe into security spheres that he always wanted — and that his invasions of Ukraine were in part designed to force. Before the call, he told his senior officials in the broadcast part of a meeting that his conversation with Trump would be a step toward restoring relations between Russia and the US. He didn't discuss Ukraine at all.

Former President Dmitry Medvedev, a man doing constant penance for having been too cosy with the West while keeping Putin's seat warm in the Kremlin, trolled the result out in his typically crass way. "There is only Russia and America in the dining room," and Europe and Ukraine are on the menu, he posted on Elon Musk's X.

Tuesday's phone call proved that Putin remains, as he repeatedly says, uninterested in making concessions in Ukraine in exchange for an end to the war. This was, after all, an invasion he launched. With Trump in office, he is now in a better position to succeed than at any time since February 2022.

Trump claimed a win in getting Putin to agree to halt the bombing of Ukrainian "energy and infrastructure," but the Kremlin version of the readout was much narrower, offering only to spare "energy infrastructure." This wouldn't be a concession but rather a gain for the Kremlin, because Russia's oil industry is currently suffering more damage from Ukrainian drones than its own missiles can inflict on Kyiv's grid.

Putin also agreed to start talks immediately on a similar pause in hostilities in the Black Sea, from which his navy has already had to flee. What he made abundantly clear was that any true ceasefire, one that restricts Russia's ability to press forward on the battlefield, would require that the US and Europe halt all military supplies to Ukraine, and that Kyiv would have to halt its recruitment of fresh troops.

To Trump and his negotiators, those conditions might seem reasonable and a small price to pay to stop the bloodshed. Putin has said his concern about a short, unconditional ceasefire is that Kyiv would simply use the time to rearm, regroup and strengthen its defenses. Which of course it would. But this will be a dangerous moment. 

For Ukraine and Europe, the demand to halt supplies for Ukraine should be a red flag, an opener to normalise the otherwise outrageous requirement for Ukraine's demilitarisation that remains high on Putin's list of demands. Any such agreement would sound the death knell for Ukraine's existence as a state, which is of course its purpose.

Russia's president clearly believes he holds the stronger hand in these talks with the US, and how could he not? The US administration already conceded key Kremlin demands such Ukraine's exclusion from NATO before talks even began. Trump also cut Ukraine off from military aid and intelligence sharing at the critical moment when Putin had assembled an overwhelming force, outnumbering Ukrainian troops by up to five-to-one, to retake the Kursk region.

The impact was immediate, a rout and the loss of Ukrainian's only territorial bargaining chip. Russian and North Korean troops now look poised to open a new front on the other side of the border, in Ukraine.

So what does the US president want? As I've said previously, if we assume that he knows the first thing about negotiations, Trump's primary goal can't be a lasting peace for Ukraine or stability in Europe. If it were, one could only conclude he is getting played like a flute. Much more likely is that he sees ending the war in Ukraine as just a card to trade in a reset with Russia that would – as he said again after his phone call – bring economic and geopolitical benefits to the US.

But just how far the US is willing to go in appeasing Putin and rewarding the invasion of a sovereign neighbour remains unclear. Both Ukraine and Europe depend so heavily on the US for their defenses that they are doomed to play along until the moment that US appeasement would hand Russia, by default, the victory it has been unable to achieve in three years of war.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. 

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and is published by a special syndication arrangement.