There is an odd contradiction in Russian attitudes to the current negotiations with the United States. On the one hand, a sense that the window of opportunity may be closing, on the other no real rush to take advantage of it, or at least to offer Donald Trump any concessions to show willing.
Mikhail Rostovsky, a columnist in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, put it best when he noted that the window is likely to close at the end of this month, which marks the end of the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term:
‘No one expected Trump to fulfil his boastful campaign promise and stop military actions during the first 24 hours of his presidency. But if the US president does not present any results on Ukraine in the period that begins on the eve of the most important Christian holiday of Easter and ends on April 30, this will be perceived unequivocally as a failure.‘
This seems to have become the prevailing view in Moscow, since implicitly confirmed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assertion that ‘we need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days,’ whether or not an agreement is ‘doable.’ Yet what then? The hawks who argue that Russia is on the verge of even greater triumphs in Ukraine regard this as a good thing. Others may not be happy, but think that Trump could never deliver any kind of real peace, and so a ceasefire would have been pretty much pointless.
This was, then, in the words of one former Russian diplomat, just a ‘moment of mirage – we could distract ourselves with the illusion of a peaceful oasis in the distance, even though we really knew we were in for a long march through the desert.’
Yet the Kremlin does not seem to have given up on the thought that the talks could get somewhere, even while unwilling to make any concessions or present Trump with the kind of meaningless but flashy win that he so clearly enjoys. Has it some last-minute rabbit to pull out of the hat, or does it really believe that it can trade intangible promises about future joint ventures in the Arctic or a major order of Boeing airliners for real gains? The Russian leadership is certainly giving no hint that it is softening its maximalist demands.
They continue to demand that Kyiv not simply accept Russia’s control of the 20 per cent of Ukraine currently occupied, but also hand over those parts of the five regions Moscow annexed – in direct contravention of international law – not yet conquered.
Trump’s negotiator Steve Witkoff, after his latest meeting with Putin, waxed enthusiastic about the prospects for a ‘permanent peace,’ but also made it clear that beyond ‘these so-called five territories…there’s so much more to it…There’s a security protocol, no NATO, NATO’s Article 5…There are a lot of details attached to this complicated situation.’
This, after all, may be the Kremlin’s real goal: not just chewing away a fifth of Ukraine and imposing limits on the sovereignty of the rest of the country, but some grand bargain with Washington that reshapes the security architecture of Europe and sees a normalisation of relations with the United States that also paves the way for sanctions relief. It is an audacious and frankly implausible design, yet consider the two sides. On the one hand you have an autocrat determined to make his mark in history (‘how will they be writing about me in a hundred years?’ is one of his favourite questions to ask scholars) and presumably well aware that a war-ravaged slice of Ukraine is unlikely by most Russians to be worth an estimated 900,000 dead and wounded – and counting.
On the other is a real-estate tycoon and, in Witkoff, a real-estate lawyer: men who want to believe that there is a deal to be made, that statesmanship is measured in dollar sums, and that, frankly, Ukraine and Europe are not worth defending, especially compared with the prospect of being able to proclaim peace in our time. Those who have prospered off well-spun dreams and glossy prospectuses are also the most susceptible to them, too.
So far, Putin is selling the sizzle, not the sausage – and the great value of the sizzle is that you can always and easily make more. This is presumably the calculation, that even if no deal can be struck by 30 April, all he needs to do is provide a little more sizzle and keep Trump’s mouth watering. It may work, it may not, but from Putin’s view, as his armies continue slowly to advance, as the West continues to unpick decades of unity, and with such a potential prize to be won, it’s worth a try. Rightly or wrongly, Putin still seems confident in his capacity to wrangle Trump – and that even if this initiative fails, he will be no worse off.
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