Over three years of war, Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused to stray from his stringent demands that would undo the current European security architecture and in essence turn Ukraine into a failed state.
In just a week, Donald Trump has agreed to almost all of them.
The US president has openly sided with Moscow, calling Putin to set up negotiations in Riyadh without inviting Kyiv or its European allies and adopting many of the Kremlin’s own talking points.
In the last day alone, Trump has blamed Ukraine for starting the war, accused President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of doing a “terrible job” and called him a “dictator”.
Trump’s move to normalise ties has left Putin “standing tall and proud”, said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The Russians and Americans are meeting on equal ground as partners — Putin is no longer the kid slouching at the back of the classroom,” he said.
The US president’s eagerness for a quick deal also plays to Putin’s advantage, he added. “It is Trump who is in a hurry and who is bound to make steps that may even be detrimental in the short term for US interests. And Putin can afford to wait it out,” Radchenko said.
Putin on Wednesday said he would meet Trump “with pleasure” but that any summit would require substantial preparation. “We need to find mutually acceptable solutions for both sides, and that’s not easy,” he said.
Putin praised the US negotiators in Riyadh as “totally different” from past mediators. “They were open to a negotiating process without any biases or judgments about what was done in the past,” Putin said.
US officials said the Trump administration saw the Riyadh talks as an opportunity to gauge whether the Russians are serious about ending the conflict. But the US did not want the negotiations to drag on while Moscow extended the war, they added.
The US has offered to include economic and geopolitical issues in the talks as a way to entice Russia to end the conflict, and to suggest there are benefits to re-engagement.
But the Kremlin is likely to see that outreach as a victory in itself, according to Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
“They’re not offering it as a prize — it’s already the direction of travel,” he said.
The Trump administration has not said what, if any, concessions it could extract from Russia in return for having already ruled out Ukraine ever becoming a Nato member or regaining its territories that are under Russian occupation. On Wednesday, Trump said that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left”.
Trump also called on Ukraine to hold a fresh vote, calling Zelenskyy a “Dictator without Elections” and echoing Moscow’s previous criticism of the Ukrainian president and his legitimacy.
Under martial law imposed in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion, Zelenskyy has stayed on as president beyond the end of his term in May last year. Putin has said he is prepared to hold talks with Zelenskyy, but that he could sign a final agreement with a different Ukrainian leader.
The Russian leader had still not abandoned his plans to install a puppet regime in Ukraine, a person who has discussed the war with Putin said in December.
Putin, who served in the Soviet Union’s KGB, “is still an intelligence officer — and that’s how he wants to sort it out”, the person said. Putin’s preference would be to end the war much as he did in Chechnya in the early 2000s, when he convinced warlord Akhmat Kadyrov to switch sides and take charge of the war-torn region, the person added.
Putin’s position in any talks would probably be tougher than in the negotiations carried out in the spring of 2022, when he was seeking a downsizing of Ukraine’s armed forces and a ban on its Nato membership, said a former senior Kremlin official.
“He’s gotten stronger since then. The stars are aligning in his favour,” the former official said.
Russia has said it does not object to Ukraine joining the EU, but it would probably demand that it did so on similar terms to Austria, which is not a Nato member and has exemptions from the bloc’s defence commitments because of its policy of neutrality.
Moscow would probably also discuss the cost of postwar reconstruction in areas under its control, the official added. The Kremlin will not agree to pay any reparations to Ukraine and is likely to demand access to funds set up for reconstruction and the unfreezing of assets immobilised in the west.
Putin could conceivably agree to swap Ukrainian-held territory in the Kursk border region for Russian-held territory in nearby Kharkiv and could acknowledge Kyiv’s “occupation” of other areas claimed by Moscow if Ukraine did the same, the former official said.
The US move to normalise relations with Russia has horrified European countries, especially after Trump’s envoys suggested that US security guarantees are “not forever” and that Moscow no longer poses an existential threat to the continent.
Europe also recalls doomed past efforts at outreach under former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as the failed Minsk peace process led by France and Germany.
“Given the dismal track record of past resets, I just don’t see why the American delegation should trust their Russian counterparts one bit. We need to keep up the economic and military pressure,” a European official said.
But Putin has so far proved adept at pushing Trump’s buttons, Gabuev said.
“Putin’s pitch is that we are two white Christian countries united by conservative values who can solve issues together, like arms control and the Middle East. Russia has unlimited resources of rare earth metals [to sell to the US] — you come up with some big numbers to impress Trump. American companies can come back to the Russian market,” he said.
“You create the image that major partnership and a reset with Russia is around the corner, and Ukraine is an obstacle to getting that big prize of better relations with Russia. And you blame the bad relations on Obama and Biden, playing up to Trump’s resentment of them.”
The US rush to embrace Russia may ultimately, however, run aground against fundamental imbalances in their relationship and intractable issues over the war in Ukraine.
“Any joint US-Russia investments in strategic sectors like technology would pose significant national security threats for the US as they do in the Chinese case,” said Maria Shagina, a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It’s not the cold war environment any more, where one country can be successfully walled off from the other to prevent technology transfers and information flows.”
Some US officials have also expressed hope that closer relations with Moscow could peel Russia away from its alliance with China, the key economic backer of the invasion.
“They have this view of Russia as a vassal of China, which is a terrible affront to Putin’s dignity that he wants to break out of,” Radchenko said. “Putin will pocket every concession and then turn back to China in order to improve his leverage. He’s not a fool.”
Additional reporting by Christopher Miller in Kyiv
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