Timing in diplomacy is everything, and the Kremlin seems to have timed its latest, lengthy phone call with the White House – the eighth in the past eight months – to perfection.
With US President Donald Trump poised to meet Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, and publicly weighing the risks of supplying Kyiv with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, Russian officials described the call they initiated as “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 bid to halt in its tracks all that dangerous talk of potentially game-changing US weapons supplies to Ukraine.
Tomahawks – which have the range to target major Russian cities like Moscow and St Petersburg – would have no significant impact on the battlefield, Putin is said to have stressed on the Trump call. They would just damage the US-Russian relationship, he added, which he knows Trump values so highly.
According to one Kremlin aide, Putin also praised Trump as a peacemaker in the Middle East and beyond.
Economic deals were again dangled, and – crucially – there was an agreement for a second face-to-face presidential summit, this time in Budapest, Hungary, where ending the Ukraine war could once more be discussed, if not agreed.
That will raise inevitable comparisons with the failed Alaska summit just a few months ago, when Trump gave Putin a red-carpet reception but secured no tangible results in his push for a Ukraine peace deal.
But now, flushed with his achievements in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, and the release of Israeli hostages, Trump has suggested that his success in the Middle East, against the odds, will help end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
How remains unclear. The Kremlin has offered no suggestion that it is prepared to compromise. Despite mounting 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 has achieved its maximalist objectives.
These include gaining control over vast swathes of annexed Ukrainian territory not yet conquered, and imposing strict military and foreign policy limits on a postwar Ukraine that would essentially subjugate Kyiv to Moscow’s will.
Nothing in the latest Trump-Putin phone call suggested any of this had changed.
But over the past nine months of this second Trump administration, the Kremlin has also learned that offering personal engagement, and holding out the possibility of a short-term win, can be just as effective as any painful compromise.
Ukrainian officials, gathering in Washington, say it is the discussion of Tomahawks that forced Putin back into dialogue.
That may be true. But the calculation here in Moscow is that the mere prospect of progress on peace talks may be enough to lure Trump, hungry for a deal, into dropping his military threats.
Source: edition.cnn.com
