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By Bloomberg News
Russian President Vladimir Putin believes he has a strong hand going into his phone call with Donald Trump, while European leaders are trying to prevent the US president from rushing through a deal, speaking to him on the phone twice over the past three days.
Putin and Trump will speak about 1am on Tuesday (AEST), after Putin failed to attend peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul last week. Trump, who was visiting the Middle East, had said he would be willing to travel to Istanbul for the talks if the Russian President attended, but Putin sent Kremlin officials instead.
The talks – the first held face-to-face since early 2022 – lasted less than two hours and failed to yield a breakthrough on a potential ceasefire.
A person familiar with Putin’s thinking, who asked not to be named, told Bloomberg that the Russian president was confident his forces can break through Ukraine’s defences by the end of the year to take full control of four regions that he has claimed for Russia.
That means the Russian president is unlikely to offer any meaningful concessions to Trump when the two leaders speak on the phone overnight. European officials are worried that Trump may try to force through a settlement regardless.
During a phone call on Friday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tried to make it clear to Trump that Putin had been stringing him along, according to one senior European official. They are hoping that Trump will realise that he risks looking like a loser if he forces a bad deal on Ukraine, the official added.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in Rome, on Sunday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also on the Friday phone call but he seemed despondent and exhausted by the week’s developments, the official said. Zelensky and his European allies believed they had a commitment from Trump to hit the Kremlin with fresh sanctions if Putin refused to observe a ceasefire from last Monday, but that hasn’t materialised.
The US president has been pushing for a quick end to a war that is now deep into its fourth year and has backed himself to unlock a deal in a direct conversation with Putin.
The Russian leader, for his part, has given no indication that he’s ready to stop fighting as his troops slowly grind forward on the battlefield and that has fuelled concern in Kyiv and other European capitals that Ukraine could be pushed into giving up more ground.
“Unfortunately, where we are in the war, you don’t see strong incentives for Russia to agree to a ceasefire,” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said at a conference in Tallinn, Estonia, on Sunday.
There’s a growing sense that US efforts to impose a ceasefire are culminating and officials in Europe are unsure whether Trump will ramp up pressure on Russia or simply move on to the next challenge if they fail. Trump has promised to brief Zelensky and some of his NATO allies once he has finished speaking with his Russian counterpart.
Despite all the talk about ending the fighting, Putin is ready for a protracted war if that is what is required to achieve his goals and he is sanguine about the prospect of further US sanctions, according to two other people close to the Kremlin.
“Trump wants Putin to agree to a truce but he absolutely doesn’t want to,” Sergei Markov, a political consultant with close ties to the Kremlin, said. “But Putin isn’t interested in a collapse of the talks. He’s trying to manoeuvre so that these negotiations continue alongside the military offensive.”
“Putin has been emboldened by his ability to make maximalist demands of Ukraine without experiencing any serious pushback from the Trump administration,” Bota Iliyas, a senior analyst at Prism, a strategic intelligence firm in London, said.
“Putin doesn’t trust Trump. But he will push Trump to align with Russia’s vision for a ceasefire.”
Russia on Sunday unleashed one of the biggest drone barrages against Ukraine since the start of the war as Zelensky was engaged in a flurry of diplomacy on the sidelines of a mass at the Vatican to celebrate the enthronement of Pope Leo XIV.
He met with US Vice President JD Vance for the first time since their infamous blow-up in the Oval Office in February. It was all smiles as the two men shook hands at the Vatican and later sat down with senior aides at the US ambassador’s residence.
Trump, meanwhile, held a follow-up phone call on Sunday with Merz, Starmer, Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The leaders discussed the need for an unconditional ceasefire and for Putin to take peace talks seriously, according to a spokeswoman for Starmer.
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, firefighters put out the fire following Russia’s drone attack in the Kyiv region on Sunday.Credit: AP
Putin’s confidence about Russia’s prospects on the battlefield is at odds with Western assessments. Having incurred massive casualties during more than three years of fighting, Russia lacks the capabilities to fulfil Putin’s goals, according to European officials.
“The probability of Russia achieving its objectives of conquering those four regions by the end of this year is very low,” Ben Barry, a senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said. “If Ukrainian defence collapses, then it would be very easy to gain such an advantage, but at the moment such a scenario seems very unlikely.”
That scepticism is also shared by many in the Russian military who are fighting in Ukraine, according to a person close to the Defence Ministry in Moscow. In particular, the person said, Ukraine’s drone forces have made it costly and ineffective for Russia to mount large-scale offensives.
All the same, Russian negotiators set out Putin’s hardline position in Istanbul on Friday at the first face-to-face talks with Ukrainian officials in three years. They demanded Ukrainian forces withdraw from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions that Russia claims as its territory but has never fully controlled.
US President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.Credit: AP
The risk for Putin is that he overplays his hand and prompts Trump to make good on his threat of more sanctions to end what the US president has called the “bloodbath” in Ukraine.
US officials have privately signalled to European counterparts that Trump is considering allowing a sanctions bill prepared by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham to progress if Russia doesn’t budge and he may tell Putin he cannot prevent that, according to European officials familiar with the matter.
“We’ve advised the Russians repeatedly now for almost two months that this was coming if no progress was made,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “So I think that’s just coming to fruition now.”
Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who spent a day playing golf with Graham and Trump in March, said at the Tallinn conference that he is “carefully optimistic” that Graham will put forward his bill next week.
“It depends on how the conversation goes with Putin and Trump on Monday,” he said.
Bloomberg
