Roving Periscope: Now, Putin plays hardball with Trump and Zelenskyy!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Republican candidate Donald Trump, who had boasted last year that, if elected as the US President, he would end the Ukraine war in two days, may now be doing a reality check—indeed, he recently claimed his statement was in a ‘lighter vein’—after his telephonic conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday did not yield the results he may have desired.
Ironically, when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Moscow had also said the “special military operation” against Kyiv would end on “48 hours.”
In a nutshell, Putin gave Trump bare minimum on Ukraine. So, the war goes on.
According to the media reports on Wednesday, while Putin agreed to stop attacking Ukrainian energy facilities temporarily, he declined to endorse a full 30-day ceasefire that President Donald Trump hoped would be the first step toward a permanent peace deal.
Ukraine said it would support the scaled-back agreement, which would require both countries to hold off firing on each other’s energy infrastructure for about a month. Experts said Putin avoided making significant concessions in what could be a play for time as Russian troops advance in eastern Ukraine to win as much territory as they can before any peace deal.
Following the lengthy call between the two Presidents on Tuesday, the White House said talks on a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea as well as a more complete ceasefire and a permanent peace deal would begin immediately.
It was unclear whether Ukraine would be involved in those talks, which Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said will take place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Sunday.
Putin ordered the Russian military to stop attacks against energy sites after speaking with Trump, the Kremlin said.
But he raised concerns that a temporary ceasefire might allow Ukraine to rearm and mobilize more soldiers, and doubled down on his demand that any resolution required an end to all military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, according to a Kremlin statement.
Trump told Fox News that any aid to Ukraine did not come up in the conversation.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country would support the proposal to stop strikes on energy facilities and infrastructure for 30 days. He said Russia launched more than 40 drones late on Tuesday, hitting a hospital in Sumy and other areas, including the Kyiv region that surrounds the Ukrainian capital.
“Today, Putin de facto rejected the proposal for a complete ceasefire. It would be right for the world to reject in response any attempts by Putin to drag out the war,” Zelenskiy said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
Trump, who has had a complicated relationship with Zelenskyy, spoke positively of his call with Putin. “We had a great call. It lasted almost two hours,” Trump said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” show.
But the US President did not get what he wanted. Ukraine, which Trump had previously described as being more difficult to work with than Russia, had agreed to the US proposal for a full 30-day ceasefire. However, Putin did not.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the West-backed Ukraine has tried to fight back against its much larger neighbor with drone and missile strikes deep in Russian territory, including on energy facilities. Those attacks, which Moscow says amount to terrorism, have allowed Kyiv to keep pressure on Russia’s economy.
In a social media post after the call, Trump said he and Putin had agreed to work quickly toward a ceasefire and eventually a permanent peace agreement.
“Many elements of a Contract for Peace were discussed, including the fact that thousands of soldiers are being killed, and both President Putin and President Zelenskyy would like to see it end,” he wrote.
Ukraine said on March 11 it was prepared to accept a full, 30-day ceasefire, a step that US officials said would lead to a more substantial round of negotiations to end Europe’s biggest conflict since the Second World War ended in 1945. The ongoing Ukraine war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions and reduced entire towns to rubble.
Trump has hinted that a permanent peace deal could include territorial concessions by Kyiv and control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Zelenskyy, who arrived in Helsinki, Finland’s capital, for an official visit on Tuesday shortly after Trump and Putin’s call ended, said Europe must be included in Ukraine peace talks.
The talks between Trump and Putin came as Israel resumed its attacks on Hamas in Gaza, threatening a fragile truce and underscoring the difficulty of securing lasting ceasefires in long-running conflicts.
The two leaders also discussed how to prevent future conflicts in the Middle East and “shared the view that Iran should never be in a position to destroy Israel,” the White House said.
Trump’s overtures to Putin since returning to the White House in January have alarmed US allies. Ukraine and its Western allies have long described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an imperialist land grab, and Zelenskyy has accused Putin of deliberately prolonging the war, while insisting that Ukraine’s sovereignty is not negotiable and Russia must surrender the territory it has seized.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned on Tuesday that Russia had massively expanded its military-industrial production capacity in preparation for “future confrontation with European democracies.”
Speaking at a press conference in Berlin with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, Germany’s outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the limited ceasefire was an important first step but again called for a complete ceasefire. He reiterated that Ukraine must be part of any final decision.
Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and most of four eastern Ukrainian regions following its invasion in 2022. In all, it controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
Putin said he sent troops into Ukraine because NATO’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He has demanded Ukraine drop any ambition of joining the Western military alliance.
He also said Russia must keep control of Ukrainian territory it has seized, Western sanctions should be eased and Kyiv must stage a presidential election. Zelenskyy, elected in 2019, has remained in office under martial law he imposed because of the war.
Putin gave the US leader just enough to claim that he made progress towards peace in Ukraine, without making it look like he was played by the Kremlin.
Trump can point to Putin’s pledge to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days. If that actually happens, it will bring some relief to civilians.
But it’s nowhere near the full and unconditional ceasefire that the US wanted from Russia. The “very horrible war” Trump has insisted he can stop is still raging.
And Putin, who was indicted as a suspected war criminal by the International Criminal Court (ICC), has been given a leg-up back to the top tier of global politics.
Russian state media report that the two presidents’ phone call lasted more than two hours. The Kremlin readout – its account of the call – is also long at 500 words.
It presents the conversation as chatty: they apparently discussed ice hockey, the kind of detail an audience back in Russia will lap up.
After three years as a pariah in the western world, and frosty relations long before that, Russia is back dealing directly with a US administration that wants to engage.
The two leaders are even discussing Middle East peace and “global security.”
The Kremlin must be struggling to believe the transformation.
Ahead of the call, some wondered whether Donald Trump might actually pile some pressure on Russia. After all, it’s been clear for over a week that it was stalling on the ceasefire.
But there’s no sign of a dressing down for Putin like the one Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky had to endure in the Oval Office a fortnight ago.
Both countries’ accounts suggest nothing has changed, BBC reported.
Russia repeats that it wants peace. But instead of grounding its drones and silencing its guns, it’s quibbling over how a still non-existent ceasefire might be monitored.
Meanwhile, it’s adding even more conditions aimed at crippling Kyiv’s ability to resist. One demand is that the flow of both weapons and intelligence to Ukraine from its allies has to cease. For Ukrainians, the only sliver of hope is that the US hasn’t agreed to any of this – yet. They can also point to the call as more proof that Russia has no interest in ending its invasion.
But all that talking will bring Ukraine minimal relief from its suffering.
For US diplomacy, too, it has to be disappointing.
But for the Kremlin it will feel like a pretty decent day, the kind unimaginable before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
