By Mark Trevelyan
LONDON (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin has edged closer to his goal of repairing Russia’s relations with the United States and driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, while offering only a slim contribution towards Donald Trump’s peace efforts in Ukraine.
Before Tuesday’s long phone call between the two presidents, the U.S. side had said it would seek Russia’s agreement to a 30-day ceasefire in the war – a proposal that Ukraine had accepted in principle – as a first step towards a full peace deal.
Instead, Putin agreed only to a much narrower ceasefire in which Russia and Ukraine would stop attacking each other’s energy facilities for a month.
He was careful to ensure that Trump did not appear to come away empty-handed: it was the first time in more than three years of war that the two sides had been persuaded to scale back hostilities even for a short time, and the White House said talks on a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea as well as a more complete ceasefire would begin immediately.
Pausing attacks on energy facilities and at sea would both be significant constraints on Ukraine, which since the start of the war has delivered major blows to Russia’s oil infrastructure – a key source of its funding for the war – and on its much larger navy.
But Russia for now is free to pursue its military offensive on the ground – in particular in its western Kursk region, where it is close to driving out Ukrainian forces who grabbed a chunk of Russian territory in a surprise incursion last August.
Putin restated Russia’s conditions for a wider ceasefire – that it must not be used by Kyiv to stock up on weapons and mobilise more soldiers. Ukraine rejects those terms.
Nigel Gould-Davies, a Russia specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said Putin had effectively rejected the wider truce and was unlikely to consider it seriously unless Trump made good on threats to intensify economic pressure on Russia with further sanctions.
“He’s said he’s interested (in the ceasefire) but he’s set a series of clearly unacceptable conditions for it. It’s a ‘no’ by any other name,” Gould-Davies said in a phone interview.
Trump aides cast the phone call as a success and an important step towards a ceasefire.
“Up until recently, we really didn’t have consensus around these two aspects – the energy and infrastructure ceasefire and the Black Sea moratorium on firing – and today we got to that place, and I think it’s a relatively short distance to a full ceasefire from there,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News “Hannity” program.
But Andrei Kozyrev, a pro-Western figure who served as Russian foreign minister in the 1990s and now lives abroad, told the Dozhd news channel that Trump had achieved nothing.
“It is entirely in Putin’s interests to continue the war and lead America by the nose,” he said.
A Russian source close to the Kremlin told Reuters: “Putin is trying to put pressure on Trump and will continue the war. The Ukrainians will retreat and slowly lose territory and people.”
DRONE ATTACKS
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Kyiv was ready to support a moratorium on energy strikes – but within hours, each side was accusing the other of launching new ones.
Even if a limited energy ceasefire were to stick, it would not represent a major concession by Putin, analysts said. In returning for halting the pounding of Ukraine’s energy grid, he would win a respite from frequent drone attacks on some of Russia’s biggest oil refineries, which since the start of this year have knocked out 3.3 million tons – or 4% – of Russia’s total refining capacity, according to Reuters estimates.
Kozyrev said Putin had given up nothing by agreeing to the energy ceasefire, which he said was in any case “very vague”.
“Secondly, this is, of course, not at all what Trump was talking about, and what he demanded, and what the Ukrainians agreed to, that is, a (complete) ceasefire. This is a ceasefire on selective targets. This is not what was asked for,” he said.
In its readout of the call, the Kremlin said the presidents agreed to continue their efforts to end the war “in a bilateral format” – an approach that alarms Ukraine and its European allies because they fear Trump could cut a deal with Putin that sidelines them and leaves them vulnerable in the future.
It said the two leaders also discussed wider areas for potential cooperation – in the Middle East, and on nuclear proliferation and security – in light of the “special responsibility” of Russia and U.S. to ensure global stability.
That fits with an effort by Putin to return Russia to the diplomatic top table as a peer of the United States, negotiating with it on an equal footing after years of U.S.-led attempts to isolate Moscow and punish it with economic sanctions.
“This is, of course, a great success for Putin, who is managing to remove bilateral relations from direct dependence on the Ukrainian conflict,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said.
Gould-Davies said it was clear that Putin, who has also dangled the prospect of lucrative business deals with American companies, “wants to deal with the U.S. and the U.S alone” in an effort to split Washington from its NATO allies.
“It leaves Europe having to mobilise very quickly the resources for its own defence and hoping it can somehow limit the decoupling that’s under way,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya in London; Editing by Ros Russell)
Comments