They have been circling each other carefully for seven days now. Sending out invitations to talk and mixing in a few ego-damaging jabs, he suggested that the only way to end the war in Ukraine would be for the two to meet, perhaps without the Ukrainians present. .
The relationship between President Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, which has always been the subject of mystery and psychodrama during the first Trump term, is facing its challenges again. But this is not a simple redo. President Trump delivered unusually harsh rhetoric last week, saying Putin was “destroying Russia” and threatening to impose sanctions and tariffs on Russia if he did not come to the negotiating table. Trade between the United States and Russia these days.
Calculating and restrained as always, Putin responded with flattery, agreeing with Trump that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president three years ago. He reiterated that he was ready to sit down and negotiate the fate of Europe: superpower for superpower, leader for leader.
“He wants to talk, and we will talk soon,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday night, but so far they have not spoken. In preparing the ground for first talks, they are signaling that they want to negotiate about more than just Ukraine. According to President Putin, this war is just one of the areas in which the West is fighting itself. Against Russia.
Both men seem to envision taking charge of all relations between Moscow and Washington, including resuming nuclear weapons talks. This conversation is running out of time. A key treaty limiting the two countries’ arsenals expires in almost exactly one year. After that, they will be free to pursue an arms race of a kind the world has not seen since the worst days of the Cold War.
Recalling a conversation he had with President Putin before losing the 2020 U.S. presidential election, President Trump said, “We want to make sure we can denuclearize. “I think it is very possible.” He appears to have assumed that China would also engage in the same dialogue. (At least so far I have refused.)
While Trump continued to use the word “denuclearization,” he almost certainly meant negotiating a new agreement to reduce, not eliminate, the transcontinental strategic nuclear weapons stockpile. Putin has talked about reviving discussions on “strategic stability,” a term among the talks’ negotiators that covers not only the number of nuclear weapons deployed on each side, but also where they are based and how they are inspected. , and steps to curb its use.
The last tentative arms control talks ended just before a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Putin has insisted that any talks on limiting nuclear weapons must also address the war in Ukraine. The Biden administration has refused to mix the two, fearing that Putin’s real goal is to trade limits on nuclear weapons and other concessions for territory he has captured in Ukraine.
But President Trump appears open to broader negotiations, which is exactly what President Putin wants.
It is unclear what the long-term security guarantees are for President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump has recently argued should have negotiated with Putin and avoided a devastating war.
President Trump clearly wants to position himself as a peacemaker. In his first term, he suggested he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and ending Europe’s biggest war since World War II would back up his claim. He seems disinterested in giving Ukraine a real role in the process, contrary to former President Joe Biden’s credo that “it’s not about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
“What President Putin wants to hear most in all this loud talk is that this is a deal that Russia and the United States will work out on their own,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a former diplomat and expert on Russia and Eurasia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. State Department official.
Keith Kellogg, an 80-year-old retired general who has been tasked by President Trump with conducting the talks, insists the focus will be on the economy, not casualties. “When you look at President Putin, you can’t just say, ‘Stop the killing.’ Because frankly, that’s not President Putin’s way of thinking,” he said on Fox News last week. President Trump “approaches war differently. He sees the economy as part of war.” And he will focus on limiting Russia’s oil revenues, Mr. Kellogg argues.
Putin, confident of his position on the Ukrainian battlefield despite Russia’s heavy casualties, has been trying to telegraph a wait-and-see approach to Trump. He said Russia’s war goals had not changed and that he was ready for talks to end the war, but that he would only do so on his own terms.
Putin has strongly signaled that he would seek an agreement that would keep at least the roughly 20% of Ukraine that Russia currently controls, exclude Ukraine from joining NATO and limit the size of its military.
At the same time, President Putin has made clear his desire to build ties with President Trump and, by extension, the United States after three years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov has been telling reporters almost every day that Putin is ready to take a call from Trump. “We are waiting for a signal,” he said on Friday. “Everyone is ready.”
And Mr. Putin himself has lavished praise on Mr. Trump twice in the past week, a proven way to win Mr. Trump’s favor.
On Monday, President Trump’s inauguration day, he held a televised meeting of the Russian Security Council. These meetings usually take place on Fridays and are mostly private. He said Trump had “shown courage” and achieved a “clear victory” by surviving an attempt on his life.
On Friday, just as the stage was going on, Putin stopped to answer a national TV reporter’s question about President Trump. The Kremlin immediately posted the video on its website.
“Based on today’s realities, it would probably be better to meet and have a calm dialogue on all areas of interest to both the United States and Russia,” Putin said. He dismissed Trump’s threat of sanctions, called him “smart” and “pragmatic,” and invoked the president’s language by saying the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
Like President Trump, President Putin has hinted that he would like to discuss a much broader range of issues with Trump than just the war in Ukraine. In an interview with state television on Friday, Putin said the Kremlin and the Trump administration “can jointly find solutions to today’s major problems, including strategic stability and the economy.”
The ‘strategic stability’ reference hinted at the Kremlin’s potential interest in arms control talks, which it briefly began with the Biden administration in 2021. “We discussed a range of arms control and non-proliferation issues, from AI in weapons to New START updates. Wendy Sherman, a former deputy secretary of state who conducted the meeting for the U.S. side, said in an email: (New START is a disarmament treaty that Russia has partially suspended, expiring in February 2026.)
Ms. Sherman noted that the talks were halted ahead of “President Putin’s terrible invasion.”
Putin’s invitation to the wide-ranging meeting underscores his continued optimism about President Trump despite his tough comments on Russia last week and the fact that the president has imposed numerous new sanctions on Russia during his first term. It’s the same. .
Trump also went after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week, essentially accusing him of failing to reach a deal with Putin that could have avoided war.
“I could have made that deal very easily, and Zelensky decided, ‘I want to fight,’” Trump told Fox TV host Sean Hannity.
He has made it clear that he is not interested in Biden’s approach to supporting Ukraine for as long as necessary. But with his tough rhetoric against Putin last week, Trump is trying to show that he is not a pushover for Putin, while also bracing for the possibility that he will not be able to persuade Putin to strike a deal that will work for all sides. You may be doing it. .
“To keep President Putin off balance, President Trump must show President Putin that a deal is possible only if it makes sense for Ukraine and our allies,” Sestanovich said.
Even though Putin welcomed the meeting with President Trump, Russian officials are not backing away from their overall message of viewing the United States as a malign force. This is a sign of how risk-averse the Kremlin is preparing for a meeting with President Trump. It’s not going well.
Ms. Sherman, who has extensive experience negotiating with Russia, warned that the Trump administration must be prepared if talks with Russia begin. “Putin will want what he always said he wanted. “As much territory as possible, no Ukraine joining NATO, no Western nuclear weapons in Europe that could target Russia.” Given this, she is confident that actually negotiating a follow-up to the New START treaty is “likely low on his list.”
