It was the least he could get away with.
After 90 minutes on the phone to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin gave the smallest possible concession to easing Russia’s three-year onslaught against Ukraine with a promise to swap some prisoners and stop attacking power plants and other “infrastructure” for 30 days.
An hour after the call, Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine came under Russian attack again. Drone and missile bombardments will continue to rain down on residential buildings across the country, while the bloody front line in the East will remain a killing zone.
Putin stuck fast to what seemed like impossible red lines as conditions for a meaningful ceasefire, chief among them the end of all foreign military aid and Western intelligence sharing with Ukraine. European leaders and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will struggle to contemplate these terms — but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t eventually agree to them anyway.
“My phone conversation today with President Putin of Russia was a very good and productive one,” Trump posted on social media. “We agreed to an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure, with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War.”
A week ago, Zelenskyy and Trump agreed to put a proposal for an “immediate” ceasefire for 30 days to Putin, ending all fighting and attacks from the air, sea and along the entire front line. Trump said he wanted Putin to deliver a positive response, fast, and insisted he thought this would happen.
Instead, the Russian leader has claimed he supports the idea in principle but continues to hold reservations about how it would work. Russian and American “expert groups” will now meet in the Middle East to try to answer some of these “technical” points and make more progress towards a truce, according to the official accounts of the call.
The Trump trap
Matthew Shoemaker, a former U.S. intelligence officer and national security specialist, warned that Trump risks playing into Putin’s hands by allowing Russia to deploy the “classic Cold War-era Soviet tactics” of slow-walking the talks.
“During the Cold War, American leaders often resisted being drawn into such drawn-out processes, recognizing that they served as stalling mechanisms for the Soviets to regroup or exploit leverage,” Shoemaker told POLITICO. “Trump risks falling into this historical trap, as Putin’s delays could allow Russia to strengthen its position militarily and politically while eroding U.S. credibility and unity with allies.”
One potentially worrying sign for Ukraine and its European allies was the tone of the official readout of the call from the White House. Far from finger-wagging at the Russian reluctance to start a full ceasefire, the U.S. description of the call was positive.
In Trumpian language, the White House statement hailed the prospect of “enormous economic deals” between Washington and Moscow. “The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” it said.
The Kremlin version was even more effusive, seeking to cast Russia as an equally important superpower in geopolitical terms as the U.S. Washington and Moscow will make “joint efforts” in crisis hotspots in the Middle East, while establishing cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation and global security matters, it said.
“Mutual interest in normalizing bilateral relations was expressed in light of the special responsibility of Russia and the United States for ensuring security and stability in the world,” according to the Kremlin’s summary of the call.
Ice hockey?
Then came the weird part. The call had been billed as a crunch point in the negotiation of a truce between Russia and Ukraine, with Trump acting as the mediator. In fact, it seems he and Putin spent quite a lot of time discussing other things.
“A number of ideas were discussed that are moving towards the development of mutually beneficial cooperation in the economy and energy sector,” the Kremlin readout said. “Donald Trump supported Vladimir Putin’s idea to organize hockey matches in the USA and Russia between Russian and American players playing in the NHL.” The National Hockey League is the U.S. and Canadian ice hockey league, while the Kontinental Hockey League involves teams from Russia, Belarus, China and Kazakhstan.
Before the U.S. and Russian leaders spoke, Zelenskyy said on his nightly TV address: “It’s clear to everyone in the world — even to those who refused to acknowledge the truth for the past three years — that it is Putin who continues to drag out this war. For a week now, Putin has been unable to squeeze out ‘yes’ to the ceasefire proposal. He’s saying whatever he wants, but not what the whole world wants to hear.”
Zelenskyy’s half-right. It’s still not clear that Trump minds very much what Putin says about the ceasefire, when there are other deals to be done.
Veronika Melkozerova and Jamie Dettmer contributed reporting.