Offering the diplomatic bare minimum, the Russian leader said he would hold off striking at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days — a self-serving concession as that will save Russia’s energy system from being hit by the Ukrainians, who have just dramatically increased the range of their powerful Neptune subsonic cruise missiles from 200 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers.
All in all, Trump and his motley crew of special envoys, family members and presidential pals seem keener to converge with Russia on broader geopolitical issues than really press him hard on Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s read-out from the call was long on the idea of a broad Washington-Moscow reset — on topics ranging from economic cooperation to ice hockey — and short on anything that looked like a meaningful peace deal for Ukrainians.
In a sign that a real breakthrough is a remote prospect, Russia stuck firmly to its maximalist guns on demanding an end to military aid and intelligence to Kyiv, while wanting a fix to the “root causes” of the war — Kremlin shorthand for eviscerating democracy in Ukraine and thwarting the country’s political trajectory toward NATO and the EU.
Going along with Volodya
The Trump camp is showing it is all too ready to go along with Putin as he purposely mixes discrete stages of the Ukraine negotiations, changing the sequencing either to ensure any final settlement is firmly in Russia’s favor or to avoid acceding to a full ceasefire altogether.
The Russian leader and his top aides have been emphatically outlining their red lines for a peace deal over the past weeks — conditions that would, in effect, rip the state of Ukraine to shreds. They want guarantees Ukraine will never join NATO; that it will remain geopolitically neutral and unable to command its own fate, with severe limitations on weapons. Moscow also wants Crimea and the four eastern oblasts they claim as part of the Russian Federation to be internationally recognized as such. And they’ve ruled out the deployment of European troops to monitor any peace deal that’s agreed.
