“Vladimir, STOP!” That Truth Social post by President Donald Trump put a fitting capstone on one of the least successful negotiations in recent memory.
For the past year or more, the conventional wisdom was that Vladimir Putin needed a deal on Ukraine. Russia’s economy was struggling under the weight of international sanctions, and its military had suffered staggering losses on the battlefield. Putin was supposed to be desperate for at least a pause in the fighting. That was one reason Trump claimed it would be a “very easy negotiation,” and that he could get the war “settled very fast.”
All that had to be done was to get Ukraine to back off its unrealistic demands for a return of all its territory, at which point Putin would seize the chance to buy time to repair his economy and replenish his troops and materiel. This was the assumption, not just of Trump and his advisers, but of a growing chorus of observers, including New York Times reporters and foreign-policy hands: A negotiated end of the war was the “only real viable option.” And in a negotiated settlement, as opposed to terms of surrender, both sides give up something. Ukraine would have to give up much, if not all, of the territory it had lost to Russian conquest, and in return, it would get some form of security guarantee against a future Russian attack. Surely Russia, desperate for a deal, would give up its opposition to such assurances. As The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen put it just a month ago, “Russia is incredibly weak, both economically and militarily, which means that in these negotiations, Trump holds all the cards.”
How then to explain why Trump, after three months of negotiations, has failed to win a single concession from Putin and now threatens to “walk away” from the whole problem? If Putin is weak and desperate, and Trump holds all the cards, why is Putin getting everything he wants and giving up nothing in return? The answer tells us something about Trump, but more important, it gives us an insight into the nature of the new era we have entered in international affairs.
Trump’s advisers and supporters have been clear for more than a year about the shape of the deal they anticipated. No one denied the risk that Putin might accept a deal and then restart the war as soon as the world looked away. During the 2024 campaign, then-Senator J. D. Vance acknowledged that, even if Ukraine was not admitted to NATO, it had to have some kind of security guarantee so that “the Russians don’t invade again.” He called for a “heavily fortified” “demilitarized zone” between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Trump supporters also envisioned significant provisions of economic and military aid to a postwar Ukraine. Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, proposed $100 billion from a special NATO fund and $500 billion worth of “lend-lease” loans to purchase weaponry.
Trump’s supporters, some of whom now work in the administration, explained how Trump was going to be able to get the deal done. Getting Ukraine to the table would be easy. “I think we have plenty of leverage” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mike Waltz, at the time a Republican representative from Florida, said in November. But the United States, he argued, also had plenty of sources of leverage with Putin. One was Russia’s dependence on energy exports. If Putin was intransigent, the United States could crack down on “Russia’s illicit oil sales.” And if Putin still refused to bend, Washington could “provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use.” Or as Trump himself put it, “I would tell Putin, ‘If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give them a lot,’” referring to Ukraine. “We’re going to give them more than they ever got if we have to.”
So what happened? The present deal is so one-sided in favor of Putin that the president and his team have had to manufacture Russian “concessions.” Thus Vice President Vance called it a concession that the Russians might have to “give up” some territory that “they currently own,” meaning Ukrainian territory that Russia has conquered, while President Trump called it a concession that Putin has (theoretically) agreed not to take the whole country, something he is currently unable to do. On the matter that even Vance once agreed was essential—security for Ukraine against another Russian invasion—Putin has conceded nothing.
That is important to keep in mind as Trump savages Ukraine for rejecting his proposal. The Russians have not accepted the proposal. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Russia is “ready to reach a deal” but that some aspects of the plan need to be “fine-tuned.” What that “fine-tuning” is about is no mystery. The American peace proposal contains no suggestion of U.S. aid to Ukraine after a settlement and no discussion of the size of Ukrainian armed forces. Putin and his negotiators have made clear throughout the talks that they want Ukraine demilitarized and all weapons supplies and economic aid from the West cut off. The plan leaves open the possibility of a European peacekeeping presence, if such a thing is even possible without American support. But the one demand Putin has absolutely insisted on, and his spokespeople have reiterated at every opportunity, is that he will not tolerate such a presence, which he considers indistinguishable from having a NATO force on his borders.
Further “fine-tuning” for Putin means ensuring that Ukraine is isolated, unarmed, and unprotected. He has not budged on those points even when the war was going horribly for him. Just in this past week, Putin’s spokespeople have made clear that Russia will not accept a cease-fire unless the West agrees to stop arming Ukraine, so that Ukraine cannot use the cease-fire to “reset and regroup.” And the Kremlin rejected any proposal to provide Ukraine a “security guarantee” with European or other peacekeepers on the ground in Ukraine.
So Trump is asking the Ukrainians to agree to give up territory and accept official recognition of Russian control of Crimea, even though Putin has made abundantly clear that he will not agree to any of the things Ukraine needs in return. Acknowledging Russian control of their territory is the Ukrainians’ ultimate concession. They can make it only once, and only as part of a final, comprehensive plan that guarantees their security. Trump is demanding that they give it up now, before Putin has agreed to anything.
What does all this tell us? One thing it tells us is that Trump is not quite the negotiator he thinks he is. Let’s stipulate that Trump was never interested in helping Ukraine. He wanted to get the issue off his plate as quickly as possible and couldn’t care less what happens to Ukraine—or to Europe as a whole, for that matter. He might have walked away immediately and probably now wishes he had. He could have said on day one what he is saying now: that Ukraine is Joe Biden’s war, just as Barack Obama regarded Iraq as George W. Bush’s war and Biden regarded Afghanistan as his predecessors’ war. But Trump boasted repeatedly throughout his campaign about making a deal and bringing the war to an end, so he may have felt in some way bound to give it a try. His likely intention was not to secure the permanent protection of Ukraine but to gain a “decent interval” before its surrender. After all, Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a settlement of the Vietnam War that he knew would not long delay the fall of Saigon. As he told Richard Nixon, the goal was only to hold things together “a year or two,” after which Vietnam would be “a backwater” and no one would “give a damn.” Trump may have had similar hopes, and indeed many seasoned analysts assumed that Putin would do Trump the favor of accepting a deal and waiting, perhaps until Trump was out of office, to complete the conquest of Ukraine.
Putin may never have been interested in pausing the war for that long, or perhaps at all. But Trump passed up any chance of finding out whether he was or not. As National Security Adviser Waltz, Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, Thiessen, and even Trump himself understood, Trump had leverage. In the long run, Putin is weak. But in the short term, Ukraine is weaker, and Putin is counting on Ukraine collapsing before his own forces do. He has all along believed that the war’s timelines favor him. To change that assessment, Putin would have to believe that Trump was committed to Ukraine for the long term and would provide it aid for as long as necessary, so that Putin would have to wonder how many more years he could keep this war going without fracturing his military or his society. Even then, he might have chosen to continue the war, but there was at least a chance that he could have given Trump what he needed—a decent interval that would allow the U.S. president to reap the rewards as peacemaker without having to suffer the indignity of an immediate Russian violation of whatever agreement he struck.
To get such a deal, Trump would have had to bluff convincingly that he was willing to help Ukraine if Putin balked. That was the biggest card Trump had to play, but he never played it. On the contrary, he made it perfectly obvious from the beginning not only that he had no intention of aiding Ukraine, but that he detested Zelensky and was willing to humiliate him publicly and even to deny Ukraine crucial intelligence in the midst of a war for its very existence. “I’ve had a hard time with Zelensky,” Trump told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in an Oval Office interview just last week. “You saw that over here when he was sitting right in that chair, when he just couldn’t get it.” Of course, the reason Trump has a “hard” time with Zelensky is that he is asking the Ukrainian leader to give away huge swaths of his country to a conquering army for nothing.
One “symbolic” meeting in the Vatican does not change the general understanding that Trump would walk away from Ukraine tomorrow if he thought he could get away with it. Trump has sometimes waved threats of more sanctions, as he did this weekend, but he has never gone beyond offhand statements or Truth Social posts, nor is it likely that Putin worries about further sanctions on his already heavily sanctioned economy. He has been willing to suffer further economic pressures so long as Ukraine appears to be on its last legs, and Trump has never given him reason to think it isn’t.
Trump instead seems to have put all his faith in his own powers of persuasion. Whether he really believes he has a “good relationship” with Putin is unclear, though he talks about it a lot. He also talks about the world viewing him as a tough guy, and he has claimed that Putin “respects” him in a way that he did not respect previous American presidents. Trump and his advisers appear to put great stock in the idea that, as Vance told the Europeans in Munich, there is a “new sheriff in town” and so folks had better get in line.
To say that Putin is unimpressed may be the geopolitical understatement of the century. I have wondered in the past which course Putin would choose with Trump: Would he appease him, in the interest of strengthening an American president who shares his desire to destroy the liberal world order, or would he be more interested in humiliating the American president as a way of demonstrating conclusively that the U.S. can’t protect anyone and the era of American global leadership is over?
Although Putin has done it with a smile and an outstretched hand, the humiliations have been consistent and plentiful. Days after Trump’s election, the White House staff leaked word of a phone call with Putin in which Trump warned the Russian leader not to escalate the war. Putin responded not only by launching the first hypersonic, intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missile at Kyiv (in response to Ukraine’s use of ATACM missiles against targets in Russian territory), but also by denying that any phone call had taken place—to the point where Trump himself had to demur when asked about the call.
Trump began demanding an “immediate cease-fire” in December and has repeated that demand many times since. And every time, Putin’s spokespeople have made clear that Putin has no interest in “freezing” the conflict. For weeks, Trump said that Putin wanted a meeting with him, while Putin’s people said they had received no proposal for talks but were ready to talk if Trump wanted to. The most blatant insult came last month, when the two leaders scheduled their first acknowledged phone call. At the time designated for the call, Putin was at a public event, and when one of his aides leaned over to remind him, he showed such dismissive unconcern that the whole audience laughed. He then kept Trump waiting for another hour.
But the greatest humiliation came last week. On the very day that Trump lashed out at Zelensky for not accepting the American proposal that Putin had also not accepted, Putin launched a devastating missile attack on a civilian target in Kyiv—the worst of the war. Trump’s response on Truth Social—“Vladimir, STOP!”—was not, we may be sure, a heartfelt appeal to spare Ukrainian civilian casualties, from the man who all but guaranteed civilian casualties when he cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine. It was a plea to Putin to stop humiliating him in front of the whole world. One does not have to have a very vivid imagination to picture the amusement on Putin’s face when he read Trump’s plaintive post.
Trump seems to want to get the Ukraine issue out of the way so that he can move on with the normalization of relations with Russia, but how normal can those relations be? Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who generally seems to channel Trump’s thinking, says he sees “a possibility of reshaping the Russian–United States relationship through some very compelling commercial opportunities,” some “enormous economic deals,” which will also bring “real stability to the region.” Putin will take the money, but if he wanted a cooperative relationship with the United States, he would have thrown Trump a bone, just as everyone expected him to, instead of answering his capitulation with a missile attack on a civilian target.
Maybe he figures Trump is so desperate for a relationship that he will tolerate any amount of bullying. But that’s not good news for Trump, and it is just a hint of the discord and conflict that will prevail in the multipolar world that Trump has inaugurated.