The Kremlin is prepared for long negotiations with the United States, but Moscow currently holds the upper hand and there's little expectation of a wholescale "reset" in relations with Washington, a veteran U.S. Russia expert said.
Speaking in an interview days after returning from Moscow, Thomas Graham, who was the senior Russia adviser in President George W. Bush's White House, also said that any hopes by the current U.S. administration for a quick cease-fire to end the Ukraine war are misguided.
"The Russians have a maximal position at this point," Graham said in the February 24 interview. "They are making progress on the battlefield. I think that there's a high level of confidence in their position at this point and no obvious reason why they should back off those."
"I'm not saying that the Russians have absolutely no flexibility," he said. "But if I were in the Kremlin at this point going into negotiations, I wouldn't be signaling flexibility. And I don't think they are."
What Are the Expectations in Moscow?
Graham traveled to Moscow in an unofficial capacity just days before U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh on February 18 -- the first top-level talks since Moscow launched its all-out assault on Ukraine three years ago.
A former political adviser in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and Russia expert at the State Department, Graham was Russia director in the Bush White House National Security Council in the 2000s.
He later served for more than a decade as managing director for a political consultancy founded by Henry Kissinger, the famed and often controversial late U.S. secretary of state who traveled regularly to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin.
Graham, who recently published a book called Getting Russia Right, declined to discuss specifics on who he met with in Moscow or disclose details of his conversations. "I have developed a network in Moscow over the past 35 years, which I keep up."
"People in Moscow welcome the fact that the United States is prepared to talk to Russia again," he said, "but I think they have not excessive expectations for what will come of this. There are vast differences between the United States and Russia, not only on Ukraine but on a range of issues."
The White House press office did not immediately respond to an e-mail from RFE/RL seeking comment.
Is Ukraine Fully Cut Off From Negotiations?
At the February 18 talks in Riyadh, which featured U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and other top-level officials, the two delegations agreed to restaff their embassies in Moscow and Washington, which have been depleted after several rounds of tit-for-tat expulsions, primarily over accusations of espionage, sabotage, and election meddling.
They also agreed to set up a working group to start negotiating the terms of a cease-fire or potential peace deal to end the 3-year-old Russian war on Ukraine. Despite eyewatering casualties and equipment losses, Russian forces continue to grind down exhausted and outgunned Ukrainian troops across the 1,100-kilometer front line.
The fact that U.S. and Russian officials met face-to-face without Ukrainian officials present set off alarm bells in Kyiv and many of its European allies, who fear Kyiv's security concerns will end up taking a backseat to Russian demands.
Since before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian fears have been fanned by rhetoric from Putin and other Kremlin officials that have questioned the legitimacy of Ukraine's elected government -- and even the existence of an independent Ukrainian state.
European leaders have voiced the mantra "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" in recent days, in support of Kyiv.
"The Ukrainians are exaggerating the extent to which they have not participated in this," Graham said. "The Ukrainians were not at the table physically in Riyadh. To my mind, there's no reason to expect that they should be, given the nature of the conversation. But they haven't been cut out of discussions about how this conflict is going to end, and as I said, they have maintained contact with the [Trump] administration at all levels."
'The Russians Aren't Interested In A Simple Cease-Fire'
Russia's "maximalist" position is also partly reflected in the phrase "root causes" that the Kremlin used in its readout of Putin's phone call with Trump on February 12. For longtime Russia watchers, those causes include the Kremlin position that the expansion of the NATO military alliance into Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and mid 2000s was provocative and paved the way for the invasion.
"From the very beginning, as we know, Ukraine was about more than Ukraine," Graham said. "It was about the broader post, post-Cold War settlement, and the Russian view that that had been imposed upon them at a time of strategic weakness, and they wanted certain elements of that to be revised."
Graham said "there's skepticism on the Russian side" that the Trump administration fully understands. And the Ukrainians feel similarly, he said.
"If the Trump administration thinks that they can move everybody to a cease-fire, take a bow- and then forget about this, I think they're deluding themselves," he said. "The Russians aren't interested in a simple cease-fire. They want a broader set of discussions."
The Russian position partly blaming NATO as one cause of the conflict has showed up in rhetoric among some officials in the United States and elsewhere. In comments to CNN on February 23, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who also traveled to Russia recently and was part of the U.S. delegation in Riyadh, suggested Russia should not necessarily be blamed.
"The war didn't need to happen -- it was provoked," Witkoff said. "It doesn't necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians."
And on February 24, the United States broke with European allies by refusing to blame Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in votes on three United Nations resolutions.
"Those things are of concern. It does raise questions as to what the Trump administration really understands about the nature of the conflict and what it's trying to accomplish," Graham said.
"The argument that Russia was provoked is not simply a Kremlin argument. There are people in the West and in the United States that have made that argument," he said. "I don't believe those arguments."
Russian forces currently control around 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, and the Kremlin has proclaimed the annexation of four regions -- Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- including parts of those regions that are still under Ukrainian control. Russia has also claimed the annexation of Crimea, more than a decade ago.
"The toughest issue on the agenda is going to be the status of that part of Ukraine that is not physically controlled by Moscow at the end of this conflict," he said. "Moscow clearly wants Ukraine to be in Russia's orbit, and ideally they would like a situation in Ukraine that is roughly equivalent to the relationship they have with Belarus."
"The United States, at least until recently, would have argued that we have an interest in the preservation of an independent and sovereign Ukraine, and that all of that almost certainly means a Ukraine that is moving westward," he said. "And those are two very, very different visions of Ukraine's future."
"The question is," Graham said, "how would you reconcile those?"
