With just under a week to go until the supposed Easter deadline, it appears that Donald Trump is no closer to securing a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The President’s special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff travelled to St Petersburg yesterday for talks on ‘aspects of a Ukraine settlement’ with Vladimir Putin. The fact that neither produced a read-out of the four and a half hour meeting afterwards implies that, yet again, Trump’s representative has come away without having achieved much meaningful progress.
While the Americans may have hoped yesterday’s meeting would perhaps bring Putin closer to the negotiating table with Ukraine, the Russians were clearly under no such illusion. Ahead of the meeting, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated: ‘There is no need to expect any breakthroughs here. The process of normalising relations and searching for grounds for entering the trajectory of a settlement around Ukraine is underway.’
Trump is clearly growing frustrated with what he sees as Russian foot-dragging – Peskov’s convoluted and opaque statement of ‘searching for grounds for entering the trajectory of a settlement around Ukraine’ (whatever that means exactly) being a case in point. Never one to beat around the bush, the American President is getting impatient. Taking to his social media platform Truth Social while Witkoff was in St Petersburg yesterday, Trump wrote:
Russia has to get moving. Too many people are DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war – A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!
Having famously boasted during his presidential campaign that he would be able to end the war in 24 hours, Trump is now nearly three months into his administration. This year, Easter lines up on the same dates in both the Orthodox and Western Christian calendars – which would have made for some nice symbolism had the President succeeded in brokering a truce. But having quietly moved the goalposts with a fresh aim to try and secure Putin’s agreement to a ceasefire by mid April, the White House admitted earlier this month that this too now looked unlikely.
Sources close to the White House suggest that Trump may consider hitting Russia with further sanctions on its oil exports and ‘shadow fleet’ of illegal oil tankers if Putin doesn’t come to the negotiating table by the end of this month.
Trump’s decision to appoint Witkoff to lead negotiations with the Kremlin has caused alarm among Ukraine and its allies – including some Russia-sceptic Republicans back in the States. It emerged yesterday that last week Witkoff met with the President in the Oval Office. He reportedly advised him that the quickest way to end the conflict would be to recognise Russian sovereignty of the four Ukrainian territories (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson) it currently occupies illegally – a maximalist Russian demand that Witkoff first endorsed back in March. Ukraine has repeatedly stated it would reject such terms of a truce and never agree to cede territory to Russia in this way.
Witkoff’s meeting with Trump came less than two days after he hosted Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation currently sanctioned by the US, at the White House for dinner. The two met again yesterday. With Russia as concerned as it is with getting the sanctions in place against it lifted, this suggests that Trump and his advisors are at least as happy to entertain discussions of ‘normalising’ diplomatic relations between America and Russia as they are securing an end to the conflict in Ukraine. It may well be that they even see bringing Moscow in from the cold as the first, easy step to achieving an end to the war – a strategy many of Ukraine’s western allies would no doubt take issue with.
Yesterday marked Witkoff’s third meeting with Putin in Russia in as many months. The last time the two met in March, their discussion was followed by a phone call between the Russian President and Trump, in which Putin agreed to stop Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure – a promise Kyiv accused him of breaking mere days later. This time around, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov that a phone call between both presidents could well follow once again. No doubt we won’t have to wait long to find out what Trump’s next step will be.
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