Putin Plays Tough in Opening Move With Trump

Vladimir Putin did not come running. He let his spokesman react on Wednesday to the outcome of the U.S. presidential race, proclaiming that the Kremlin has no plans to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory. If the U.S. wants the peace deal Trump promised during his campaign, the Russians signaled that he would need to earn it, and the price for Ukraine would be particularly high.

“The message is, if you want a deal, you’re going to crawl on your knees for it,” says Nina Khrushcheva, an authority on Russian politics and foreign affairs at the New School. “Putin feels he is starting out with Trump from a position of strength.”

That makes the Russian president an outlier among European leaders. On Wednesday, many of them issued flattering statements and promises to cooperate with the Trump administration. But the Kremlin noted drily that the U.S. and Russia remain at war, “both directly and indirectly," while Putin’s conditions for ending that war, his spokesman said, “remain unchanged, and are well known in Washington.” Indeed, over the last few years, Russia has issued a series of conditions for ending the war in Ukraine. Most of them were tossed aside by the Biden administration, which tended to see them as ultimatums rather than good-faith efforts to negotiate.

In December 2021, for instance, just a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden reached out to Putin with an offer to discuss a broad agreement on international affairs, ranging from nuclear and cyber security to the future of Europe and the NATO alliance. The response from Putin amounted to a middle finger. If Biden wanted a summit with Putin, the Kremlin said the U.S. should set the mood by pulling its military forces entirely out of eastern Europe, retreating to positions it held before Putin took power. As the lead Russian envoy put it at the time, “The U.S. needs to pack up its stuff and get back to where it was in 1997.”

The U.S. rejected that notion out of hand. Instead of a summit, the White House promised sanctions that would cripple the Russian economy. Since then, Putin’s occasional overtures to the Americans have varied widely in tone and substance, depending on how the war in Ukraine happens to be going at the time. During a low-point for the Russians in the fall of 2022, when they faced the third in a series of humiliating losses on the battlefield, Putin’s rhetoric grew notably softer. He even referred to the Ukrainians as his “partners,” insisting that Russia had always been open to negotiating a deal to end the war.

Such talk evaporated as the fighting turned in Russia’s favor last year. In an ultimatum issued in July, Putin demanded that Ukraine withdraw from four regions that Russia has partly occupied. He also called on the West to lift all sanctions against Russia. Trump, during his campaign for the presidency, signaled a willingness to consider that demand, saying that sanctions "should be used very judiciously" in order to protect the power of the dollar in the global economy. When he was asked whether he stayed in touch with Putin in recent years, Trump declined to answer. But it would be a “smart thing,” he said, for a U.S. president to talk to the Russians.

What Putin would hope to get from such talks is no mystery. Based on his statements in recent years, he wants to neuter Ukraine militarily, cut off all pathways for it to join NATO, and gain permanent control over its southern and eastern regions. Neither Trump nor his close advisers have declared a willingness to grant those demands. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance said on the campaign trail that a peace deal could turn the current front line into a “demilitarized zone” that would be “heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade Ukraine.”

The Ukrainians balked at that idea. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “too radical,” even though it would fall well short of what Putin has demanded. Others in Trump’s circle have outlined far tougher terms for Russia. Mike Pompeo, who served as the Secretary of State and CIA director under Trump, has called on the next administration to tighten sanctions, lift all restrictions on the use of American weapons in Ukraine, and create a “lend-lease” program worth $500 billion to help the Ukrainians buy the weapons they need from U.S. manufacturers.

“I hope we get the strategy right,” Pompeo told TIME during a visit to Kyiv in September. Although Congress has approved more than $174 billion in assistance to Ukraine since the start of the invasion, “President Biden squandered it,” Pompeo added. “Too slow, too little, too late, too restrained.” 

Given the range of views in Trump’s orbit, and the absence of a strategy for ending the war in Ukraine, the Russians are likely to wait and see where the administration lands on this issue. They are in no hurry to make a deal. All along the frontline, especially in the eastern Donbas region, Russian forces have made slow but steady gains this year, using artillery and aerial bombs to decimate towns before rolling over them. The U.S. estimates that Russia has lost more than 600,000 soldiers, dead and wounded. But Putin has shown a remarkable ability to absorb those losses and to recruit more soldiers without causing any serious backlash among the Russian population.

“There’s no pressure on him to negotiate,” says a former senior U.S. official who maintains high-level contacts in both Washington and Moscow. If Trump decides he wants to make a deal with Putin, “the Russians will be interested,” he says. “I’m sure they’ve got a lot of feelers out about the menu of options. But they are not going to respond until the U.S. decides what it wants to offer.” It will be up to Trump, in other words, to make the first move in Putin’s direction.

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