President Donald Trump was optimistic that he could facilitate a ceasefire with one phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead, Trump seems to have bought the dictator even more time to continue his brutal war in Ukraine.
While Trump has repeatedly said that only he could produce a breakthrough via one-on-one talks with Putin, he has failed thus far to sway the Russian leader to make any substantive change.
In an op-ed Monday for The Washington Post, Max Boot — a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations — said that for all of Trump’s boasts of being a master dealmaker “in the face of Russian intransigence, he keeps violating the prime rule of successful negotiating: You must apply leverage.”
“Putin is playing him for a fool, and Trump doesn’t even seem to realize it,” Boot added.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump lauded his two-hour discussion Monday with Putin as “excellent” in tone and spirit, and suggested (without evidence) that he’d kickstarted negotiations between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In reality, though, Trump had no progress to report. The Russian president apparently rejected a U.S. proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire, which already had been endorsed by Ukraine and its allies.
“Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War,” Trump wrote. “The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.”
Trump also seemed to suggest the U.S. would play a more distant role in the process, approving the idea of having the talks hosted by Pope Leo XIV in the Vatican. The Vatican has not addressed Trump’s comment.
Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, assessed Trump’s post as “a veeeeery long way to say ‘no concessions on that phone call.’”
Indeed, despite Trump’s declaration that Putin wants to end the war, the Russian leader seems determined to drag out the process as much as possible.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday said “there are no deadlines and there cannot be any” when it comes to agreeing to a memorandum between Moscow and Kyiv about a future peace settlement previously floated by Putin.
“It is clear that everyone wants to do this as quickly as possible, but, of course, the devil is in the details,” Peskov said, according to Reuters.
Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence, told CNN “it’s really hard to see this [phone call] in any other way than Putin seemed to get exactly what he wanted.”
After rejecting a 30-day ceasefire plan backed by the U.S., Europe and Ukraine, Putin had called for direct talks between his country and Ukraine in Istanbul — an invitation that Trump pressured the Ukrainian leader to accept. Zelenskyy had one condition — he would only attend if Putin joined. But the Russian leader chose to not show up for Thursday’s meeting and sent a low-level delegation in his place. His delegation met with a Ukrainian team but the talks produced limited results.
Three days later, Russia also launched its biggest drone attack on Ukraine since its full-scale invasion started in February 2022.
Beyond Trump’s call with Putin, Vice President JD Vance reiterated that the U.S. can always just walk away — an outcome that would effectively punish Ukraine, which wants and needs the U.S. to remain engaged in negotiations.
“The U.S. is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes,” Vance said.
Meanwhile, Europe is stepping up by applying new sanctions on Russia to pressure it toward a ceasefire — an effort that Trump chose to stay out of.
“I think there’s a chance of getting something done, and if you do that, you can also make it much worse,” Trump told reporters, explaining his reluctance. “But there could be a time where that’s going to happen.”
Zelenskyy, who spoke to Trump twice on Monday, acknowledged that U.S. participation in the measure remains important.
“The European package will be there, and it will be strong,” Zelenskyy said, according to The Guardian. “As for the United States package, that is a different story. Here, we all need to work hard with the United States of America so that at some point, when they are able to, they will impose appropriate sanctions.”