Timing in diplomacy is everything, and the Kremlin appears to have timed its latest, lengthy phone call with the White House – the eighth in the past eight months – to perfection.
As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to meet with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington and publicly assess the risks of supplying kyiv with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, Russian officials called their call “positive and productive” and “held in an atmosphere of trust.”
In fact, it was a nearly two-and-a-half-hour intervention by President Vladimir Putin – a last-minute attempt to put an end to all the dangerous talk about potentially game-changing U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine.
The Tomahawks – which have enough range to target major Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg – would have no significant impact on the battlefield, Putin reportedly stressed about Trump’s call. They would only harm U.S.-Russian relations, he added, to which he knows Trump places great importance.
According to a Kremlin aide, Putin also praised Trump as a peacemaker in the Middle East and beyond.
Economic deals were once again suspended and – crucially – an agreement was reached for a second face-to-face presidential summit, this time in Budapest, Hungary, where an end to the war in Ukraine could once again be discussed, if not agreed to.
This will inevitably raise comparisons with the failure of the Alaska summit a few months ago, when Trump gave Putin a red carpet but achieved no tangible results in his push for a peace deal in Ukraine.
But now, delighted by his successes in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages, Trump is suggesting that his success in the Middle East, against all odds, will help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
How remains uncertain. The Kremlin has given no indication that it is prepared to compromise. Despite rising battlefield casualties and increasing Ukrainian drone attacks on its energy infrastructure, causing fuel shortages across the country, Russia has consistently ruled out ending the war in Ukraine until it achieves its maximalist goals.
These include taking control of large swaths of previously unconquered annexed Ukrainian territory and imposing strict military and foreign policy limits on post-war Ukraine that would essentially subject kyiv to Moscow’s will.
Nothing in the latest Trump-Putin phone call suggested any of this had changed.
But over the last nine months of this second Trump administration, the Kremlin has also learned that offering personal commitment and offering the possibility of a short-term victory can be just as effective as any painful compromise.
Ukrainian officials, meeting in Washington, say it was the discussion over the Tomahawks that forced Putin to resume dialogue.
Maybe that’s true. But the calculation here in Moscow is that the mere prospect of progress in peace talks could be enough to prompt Trump, hungry for a deal, to abandon his military threats.
