One hour into Donald Trump’s phone call with Vladimir Putin on 18 March, a White House aide reported that the conversation was “going well”. The following hour, with the two leaders still talking, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, announced that, as a result of the dialogue, the world had “become a much safer place today!”. Channelling the Trumpian vernacular, he pronounced the results: “Historic! Epic!” But when the call ended and the two sides released the details, it became clear that they had agreed to little of substance at all.
First, the good news. According to the Kremlin’s summary, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange 175 prisoners of war on 19 March. Putin also “responded positively” to Trump’s suggestion of a 30-day halt to attacks on energy infrastructure and “immediately” ordered his military to comply. This was not an act of charity on the Russian leader’s behalf. While Ukraine will undoubtedly welcome a pause in Russian air strikes against its power grid, its own forces have targeted Russian oil refineries and energy storage facilities using long-range drones in recent months, including an attack on a major refinery outside Moscow on 11 March. (There was also some discrepancy as to what, exactly, had been agreed – while the White House readout said the two leaders had agreed an “energy and infrastructure ceasefire,” the Russian version merely referred to an “energy infrastructure ceasefire.”)
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “technical negotiations” would now begin immediately in the Middle East on the “implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.” But it was not clear what that meant or who would be negotiating. The Kremlin said that the US and Russia would set up expert groups to discuss a settlement but there was no mention of an equivalent group from Ukraine.
Predictably, Trump lauded his “very good and productive” conversation with Putin in a self-congratulatory post on Truth Social. As he framed it, the temporary energy infrastructure ceasefire was agreed on the understanding that “we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War”, which he insisted, as he always does, “would have never started if I were President!”. Trump claimed that many elements of a “Contract for Peace were discussed”, but he declined to say what this might involve, merely lamenting the number of soldiers who were being killed on both sides and insisting that both Putin and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, were keen to bring the war to an end.
Yet Putin has given no such indication. Unsaid, but apparent from the respective readouts, was the fact that the Russian president is clearly uninterested in Trump’s proposal for an immediate, unconditional 30-day ceasefire, which Ukraine had agreed in principle on 11 March after the US suspended intelligence sharing and military aid. Then, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had announced that the ball was now in Russia’s court. “If they say no then we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here.” Of course, Putin is savvy enough to avoid angering Trump by rejecting his ceasefire proposal outright, but the effect of his remarks, in which he outlined a “series of significant issues” and “serious risks” regarding the enforcement of any deal, amounted to the same outcome: Russia intends to continue the war.
In fact, Putin laid down his own demands “to stop the conflict from escalating” – which might reasonably be interpreted as a threat – and as a condition for any eventual settlement. He told Trump there must be an end to foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, as well as the “unconditional necessity to remove the initial causes for the crisis and Russia’s legal security interests”. In other words, Putin is not backing down from his original objectives in this conflict that Ukraine must be forced to significantly disarm and Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture be revised.
When Zelensky attempted to reason with Trump during their ill-fated encounter in the Oval Office on 28 February, he was publicly scolded, ejected from the White House, and told to come back when he was “ready for peace” – but the US president seems determined to see the best in his Russian counterpart. While apparently making minimal progress towards peace in Ukraine on Tuesday, the two leaders discussed the “huge upside” of normalising US-Russia relations, according to the White House statement, and the “enormous economic deals” that lie ahead. Trump also seems to have agreed to Putin’s suggestion that they organise ice hockey matches between their respective professional teams in the US and Russia, even as the latter continues its assault on Ukraine and the Russian leader is still wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of committing war crimes.
The only upside for Zelensky, who at the time of writing was still waiting to be told the details of “what the Russians offered the Americans or what the Americans offered the Russians”, is that Trump does not yet seem to have agreed a grand bargain with Putin to carve up Ukraine. Trump’s remarks in recent days that he intended to discuss “land” and “power plants” and “dividing up certain assets” with Putin had triggered alarm in Kyiv, and many European capitals, that the US planned to force Ukraine into a deal to end the war on Putin’s terms.
While the Ukrainian leader nominally welcomed the talks and indicated that his forces would abide by the energy-infrastructure ceasefire, he held his own calls with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the outgoing German chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, which has been forced to retreat recently from most of the land it has held in the Russian region of Kursk since last summer, attempted a new offensive in the neighbouring region of Belgorod. Despite all the hype now emanating from the White House, it is clear to Ukraine and its European allies that Putin has no serious interest in peace and that they must prepare to fight on.
Indeed, within hours of the call between Trump and Putin, Russia was accused of breaking the nascent ceasefire with a large-scale drone attack that reportedly hit a hospital and an energy substation in Ukraine. “You see?” remarked Zelensky in comments to reporters that night. “Putin’s words are very much at odds with reality.” Shortly afterwards, Ukraine hit back.
[See more: Putin’s Trump dilemma]
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