Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted a U.S. offer for a partial ceasefire in the war against Ukraine after a lengthy phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump. If Ukraine agrees to the terms of a partial ceasefire now, both countries will halt attacks on energy infrastructure for a 30-day period. During the high-stakes call, Putin also pledged to begin talks on a possible maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea.
The White House report after the Trump-Putin call was fairly upbeat, but the results were far from what was expected. A week earlier, Ukraine had unconditionally backed a U.S. initiative for a full 30-day ceasefire, which was widely seen as a breakthrough toward a potential peace deal. So far, Russia has refused to reciprocate. Instead, Putin has tried to insert a series of conditions that indicate an unwillingness to compromise on the core issues that prompted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Today’s phone call appears to have been no exception. While Putin made some minor concessions, he also made clear that he had not abandoned his maximalist goal of subduing Ukraine. Crucially, the Kremlin’s statement after the call emphasized that Russia’s key condition for any progress toward peace was “a complete halt to foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Kiev.” In other words, Putin continues to insist that peace will only be possible once Ukraine is disarmed and at his mercy. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the kind of peace Putin has in mind.
Putin’s insistence on ending all Western military support for Ukraine is not new. From the earliest days of the invasion, he warned the West not to arm Ukraine. He has also consistently identified the complete demilitarization of Ukraine as one of his main war aims.
During the failed peace talks in the spring of 2022, Russian negotiators demanded that the Ukrainian army be reduced by about 95 percent, leaving it with a skeleton force of just 50,000 soldiers. Over the past three years, the Kremlin has repeated these calls for a radical reduction in the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, including strict restrictions on the types of weapons Ukraine can possess.
Russian officials have also frequently pressured Ukraine’s Western allies to cut off all military aid, boasting to domestic audiences that doing so would soon force Kyiv to capitulate. Speaking at the annual Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi in October 2023, Putin predicted that Ukraine would have “a week to live” if the country’s Western partners stopped supplying weapons. “Imagine if supplies stopped tomorrow. They would have a week to live until they ran out of ammunition,” he said.
The Kremlin has also insisted on the need to isolate Ukraine internationally and deprive the country of potential allies. In addition to banning all Western arms sales, Moscow is demanding that Ukraine voluntarily abandon its NATO ambitions and adopt forced neutrality. Putin argues that this is necessary because NATO expansion poses a military threat to Russia. However, he himself has said that Russia has “no problem” when neighboring Finland announced plans to join the alliance in 2022.
Most recently, Russia flatly rejected the idea of NATO peacekeepers deployed to Ukraine to monitor any future ceasefire agreement. This rejection is especially telling given that the same NATO troops are already present in six countries bordering Russia without sparking World War III. Of course, it would seem that Putin’s real problem is Ukraine, not NATO.
Putin told Trump today that he wants a lasting peace, but his negotiating stance suggests otherwise. The Kremlin dictator’s preferred peace terms envision a disarmed and defenseless Ukraine with virtually no army of its own and no chance of receiving any meaningful military aid from the international community. If he achieves that goal, it is surely only a matter of time before Putin renews his invasion and completes his conquest of Ukraine.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service.
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