Confident Putin keeps US dangling while making mischief in Europe
When President Trump’s representative Steve Witkoff arrives for talks in Moscow this week, he is likely to receive a warm welcome but precious little willingness to make concessions.
President Putin has said that he expects the version of the peace plan that emerged from US-Ukraine talks in Geneva to be the basis for “serious discussion”. At the same time, he said on Thursday that every one of the original plan’s 28 points was important to Moscow, even though it has been reported that the Americans have agreed to remove several and rewrite others.
The implication is that he is still clinging to a take-it-or-leave-it approach.
If so, this would be quite a humiliation for Trump, who has continued to talk up the prospects of a deal.
It also reflects how confident the Kremlin is feeling. It has some battlefield victories to proclaim, including recent advances in Pokrovsk, and its campaign of strikes against the Ukrainian power infrastructure continues, with rolling blackouts a regular occurrence across the country and thousands in Kyiv left without electricity after missile strikes on Friday.
A corruption scandal has also just forced the resignation of Andrii Yermak, President Zelensky’s right-hand man.
Meanwhile, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and one of Kyiv’s main cheerleaders in the administration, will be stepping down in January.
The opportunist
It is easy to assume that Putin is simply going through the motions, using this process to try to paint Zelensky as the obstacle to Trump’s ambitions and magnify tensions between the US, Ukraine and Europe. However, it is unlikely that he has definitively chosen to close the door on negotiations. Putin is an opportunist who seeks to keep his options open as long as he can.
Figures such as Yuri Ushakov, the presidential foreign policy adviser whose conversations with both Witkoff and the Russian business envoy Kirill Dmitriev were leaked last week, are encouraging him to be pragmatic.
Ushakov has become extremely important in these negotiations, having previously been ambassador to Washington for nine years. A US diplomat who dealt with him said: “He’s not a dove by any means, but he is the kind of man who would prefer 90 per cent of something to 100 per cent of nothing.”
The accountant
Putin has made it clear that he is willing to walk away from any deal because he feels he is winning on the battlefield. If Ukrainian forces do not retreat from the territory he is demanding, then, he told a press conference last week: “We will enforce this through force of arms. That’s that.”
This may be bravado, although it is also what he is being told by his chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, who has demonstrated a striking propensity to let his claims get ahead of the facts. However, Putin is also at least partly aware of the costs that continuing the war will accrue.
He shows no compassion or compunction about the estimated 1.3 million dead and wounded to date, but the human toll is also driving up wage costs as businesses compete with the “special military operation” for scarce workers. So far, Moscow is managing to continue to recruit 30,000 volunteers every month, enough to cover its losses, but the signing-on bonuses it is having to offer are rising, indicating growing reluctance. The capacity to avoid sending conscripts or mobilised reservists to fight — which would be monumentally unpopular — thus depends on the wider state of not just the federal but also regional budgets.
The remote region of Yakutia has just admitted that it cannot afford to pay the bonuses it had promised, although the federal authorities look set to step in and cover the shortfall.
As a former Kremlin insider admitted: “For a long time, Putin just assumed all he had to do was give the orders and everything would be done, without him having to worry about the cost. Now, reality is catching up with him; the war leader is also having to be something of an accountant” — and make cost-benefit analyses as to whether peace is better for him than more war.
The diplomat
Putin is therefore likely to take a tough line — his negotiation style is best characterised as bullying — while indicating on what he is and is not willing to compromise.
He is certainly less concerned with appearances than with realities on the ground. The old talking points about Zelensky not being Ukraine’s legitimate president because his term has officially ended — even though Ukrainian law precludes holding new elections in the present circumstances — are still being made, but Moscow is signalling that this is not an obstacle to a deal.
He has mocked an offer that Russia should rejoin the G8
Trump, who so often obsesses about status and overt gestures of respect (as Witkoff told Ushakov), regards such essentially token gestures as allowing Russia back into the G8 (currently G7) club of industrialised nations as a powerful incentive for Putin to make a deal. The Russian leader seems unimpressed, and when asked about it last week, mockingly wondered how this would work: “What, we turn up, say ‘Hallo’, and then we all just frown and stare at each other?”
Instead, Putin wants an explicit upfront guarantee that Ukraine will not join Nato, the promise of staged sanctions relief, and the remaining fifth of the Donetsk region that has not yet been occupied. Putin has signalled that he would be satisfied with acknowledgement of de facto control of the occupied territories, without absolutely demanding that this be recognised under international law — but the surrender of territory still held by its troops seems understandably unacceptable for Kyiv.
This is most likely to be the stumbling block to any deal. Yermak said last week that “not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory”.
The anti-European
If all else fails, Putin is also going to use the next round of talks to try to widen any transatlantic rift. While Trump — and, to a degree, Zelensky — are both trying to engage with the process, Putin’s assertion that European leaders are actively trying to sabotage it is getting some sympathy in Washington, and even in Europe itself.
After claims last week by the European Commission’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, that Russia was near “breaking point” and the size of its armies ought to be capped, a French diplomat grumbled to me that “she epitomises the worst of European diplomacy: all moral certainty, no sense of the realities on the ground”.
Putin has said that he has no problem formalising a guarantee not to attack Europe, and claimed that recent western assertions that Russia might challenge Nato as early as 2029 were spread by individuals “of not entirely sound mind or who are a certain kind of fraudster” either as lobbyists for the defence industries or to distract from Europe’s economic and social woes.
He is clearly keen to make mischief.
The more that European leaders, seeking to prevent Kyiv from being forced into an ugly deal, seem to be obstructing Trump’s agenda, the more opportunities it gives Moscow to play divide and rule, and avoid the blame if and when the negotiations fail.
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