Last month, US President Donald Trump had stern words for Vladimir Putin suggesting the Russian leader was stalling for time, or “tapping” Trump along, amid the White House push to halt Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which is now in its fourth year.
Shuttle diplomacy was in high gear; Kyiv had agreed to an immediate, unconditional, 30-day cease-fire; Moscow had not; Ukraine and Russia continued to pound one another with drones and missiles.
“Vladimir, STOP,” Trump wrote on social media on April 24, after an exceptionally deadly Russian missile strike on Kyiv. Two days later, after a Vatican meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump wrote about Putin: “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war.”
As recently as May 8, Trump threatened sanctions on Moscow if it didn’t sign onto to the cease-fire proposal.
On May 19, however, Trump and Putin spoke by phone -- their third conversation since Trump took office five months earlier.
For Trump, the two-hour-plus call was an eyebrow-raising shift, in both substance and tone: there was no demand for Putin to sign onto an immediate cease-fire. And the White House was pulling back from its efforts to halt the fighting.
“Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Cease-fire and, more importantly, an END to the War,” Trump wrote on social media. “The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.
The two leaders even addressed each other by their first names, a top Kremlin aide told reporters.
It was, in the end, what Putin wanted.
Stall Tactics
“Trump basically gave his blessing to Putin's proposal to hold these talks on a framework document that would guide the peace talks,” said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“If we want to use Trump's words, Putin is still ‘tapping’ him along, and Trump unfortunately conceded to that today,” Hardie told RFE/RL.
“Vladimir Putin has a clear objective: to continue military operations. He is ready to negotiate with Trump on anything except Ukraine,” Ivan Preobrazhensky, a Russian political commentator, told Current Time. “Trump is happy to withdraw and pretend that he did everything he could."
Even before he came into office in January, Trump had made ending the Ukraine war a top foreign policy priority. His lead envoy, Steve Witkoff, traveled three times to Moscow to try and nail down a deal.
The lack of progress -- despite reams of meetings and negotiations -- had publicly frustrated Trump. His top advisers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance signaled that US patience was wearing thin.
The Kremlin has shown little willingness in bending its positions. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Istanbul last week for the first face-to-face talks since the early weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
There were even hopes Zelenskyy and Putin could meet, something the Ukrainian leader was open to. But Putin was a last-minute no-show. His negotiators -- a low-level delegation -- repeated Moscow’s maximalist demands that were on the table in 2022, until those talks fizzled out.
Root Causes
In his own comments to reporters after the phone call -- made before Trump commented publicly -- Putin described the call as "constructive" and "frank."
He also returned to his mantra about the war’s “root causes” – a term that essentially amounts to questioning Ukraine’s right to exist, not to mention the wider post-Cold War international order.
“Russia’s position is clear,” Putin said. "The main thing for use is to eliminate the root causes of this crisis."
“There is no indication of any kind of shift in Russia’s position,” said Stephan Kieninger, a nonresident fellow at the American-German Institute.
“Trump’s statement does not include any hint of pressure on Russia. It is clear that Trump is not willing to confront Putin,” he told RFE/RL.
If it truly comes to pass, withdrawal from the peace efforts would be a fulfilled promise for Trump -- even if it comes at the expense of Ukraine.
It would also dovetail with Trump’s own transactional foreign policy, reflecting a businessman’s approach to dealmaking. In his post-phone-call social media post, Trump included that pitch to Moscow: “There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth.”
“Donald Trump would very much like to make business deals. He genuinely sees business as a means of resolving any crisis -- absolutely. Whether it’s preventing or ending wars,” Aleksandra Filippenko, an expert based in Lithuania, told Current Time.
That business thinking also partly motivated Zelenskyy last month to strike a deal giving US companies privileged access to Ukraine’s valuable mineral resources. The White House previously had conditioned continued US weapons supplies to Kyiv on reaching such a deal.
Despite the White House’s shift, Zelenskyy, who spoke separately with Trump before the call, appeared to back the US president’s proposal.
“This is a defining moment,” he wrote in post on Telegram. “The world can now see whether its leaders are truly capable of securing a cease-fire and achieving real, lasting peace.”
Zelenskyy rebuffed Trump’s proposed withdrawal from the peace talks, calling for Washington to stay engaged because “the only one who is interested in that is Putin.”
European countries in support of Kyiv have been bracing themselves for this moment: the possibility that the White House might try to strike a deal directly with the Kremlin -- cutting out either Europe or Ukraine from the process.
On the eve of the Putin call, Trump spoke with leaders of Britain, Germany, France, and Italy about the war. The Europeans reiterated support for a cease-fire and warned of more sanctions if Russia doesn’t halt its aggression.
“The Europeans have to react,” Kieninger said. “To what extent they are prepared without the United States to confront Putin with new sanctions is unclear.”
