US President Donald Trump ended a phone call with Vladimir Putin on Monday expressing confidence that the Russian leader wants peace, but few appear to share that optimism. Many senior Western figures were reportedly unimpressed by Putin’s vague references to a “memorandum on a possible peace agreement” and believe he is still playing a stalling game. “Putin is clearly stalling for time. Unfortunately, we have to say that Putin is not really interested in peace,” commented German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius.
Trump’s latest call with Putin also raised new questions about how the US leader is handling the fragile peace process. Britain’s The Economist mused on Trump’s “strange reluctance to get tough with Putin,” while Washington Post columnist Max Boot led the chorus accusing the Kremlin dictator of manipulating his US counterpart. “While Trump’s lack of success at peacemaking may not doom Ukraine, it certainly undermines the president’s pretensions to being a world-class mediator,” Boot argued. “Putin is leading him by the nose, and Trump doesn’t even seem to realise it.”
The mood in Moscow was very different, with Kremlin-controlled media trumpeting the call as a major success for Russian diplomacy. In his daily press roundup, the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg reported that many leading Russian news outlets were “gloating” over the content of the conversation between Trump and Putin. “Russia appears to have won the latest round of world poker,” one newspaper commented. “Donald Trump’s position could not be more advantageous for Moscow,” another noted.
Unsurprisingly, there is growing unease in Western capitals over U.S. efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Since Trump first initiated peace talks in February, Ukraine has agreed to an unconditional ceasefire and signaled that it is willing to make major territorial concessions. By contrast, Russia has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire, offering new terms of its own and creating various obstacles to any meaningful progress. At one point, Putin even claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lacked the legitimacy to sign a peace deal and suggested handing Ukraine over to the United Nations.
Recent diplomatic developments have further underscored Russia’s reluctance to end the war. When the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Poland presented Putin with an ultimatum to cease fire in early May, the Russian ruler responded by calling for the first bilateral talks with Ukraine since spring 2022. But Putin then decided not to attend the bilateral meeting in Istanbul that he had proposed, choosing instead to send a low-level delegation. This was widely interpreted as a “slap in the face” to Ukraine and the collective West.
Putin’s negotiators in Istanbul last week sought to underscore Moscow’s unwillingness to compromise, calling on Kyiv to formally cede to Russia four entire provinces, including a number of major Ukrainian cities, that the Kremlin has so far failed to seize militarily. If Ukraine refused to do so, they warned, Russia would increase its demands to include six Ukrainian provinces. “We fought Sweden for twenty-one years. How long are you prepared to fight?” the head of the Russian delegation reportedly commented, referring to the 18th-century Great Northern War. “Some of those sitting here at this table may have lost more than their loved ones. Russia is prepared to fight forever.”
Although Putin rarely makes such thinly veiled threats, he continues to insist that any settlement must focus on addressing what he calls the “root causes” of the war. This is usually understood as Ukraine’s international neutrality and disarmament, as well as the restoration of Russia’s former imperial dominance over all areas of Ukrainian public life, from language and education to national memory and religion. Any Ukrainian leader who agreed to such terms would be signing his country’s death warrant.
Trump’s efforts to tout the prospects of a negotiated peace and his attempts to tempt Putin with commercial incentives point to a fundamentally flawed understanding of Russia’s military objectives in Ukraine. The US leader seems to genuinely believe that Putin can be persuaded to end his invasion with promises of limited territorial gains and future economic prosperity. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Putin is not fighting for Ukrainian soil; he is fighting for Ukraine itself. He views the current war in the broadest historical sense, and sees the destruction of the Ukrainian state as a sacred mission that will define his entire reign and shape Russia’s future for decades to come. It is laughable to suggest that he can be distracted from this messianic vision by mundane talk of trade deals and sanctions relief.
Putin’s thirst for historical revenge can be traced back to his traumatic experience during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Putin did not personally experience the abject poverty endured by millions of his countrymen in the 1990s, Russia’s national decline nonetheless left a deep impression on him. Since then, he has been haunted by fears of further imperial collapse and driven by a determination to reverse the 1991 verdict. It has fueled his revanchist brand of Russian nationalism and helps explain his otherwise inexplicable obsession with Ukraine.
Throughout his rule, Putin has made no secret of his bitter resentment at the collapse of the USSR, which he has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and “the disintegration of historical Russia.” Crucially, he views Ukraine as a central and indivisible part of this fabled “historical Russia.” Indeed, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv occupies a place of honor in his imperial mythology as the “mother of all Russian cities.”
For Putin, the emergence of an independent Ukraine is a symbol of Russia’s post-Soviet humiliation and a potential catalyst for the next stage of his country’s retreat from empire. According to this twisted imperial logic, if a typically Russian province like Ukraine is allowed to break away and establish itself as a modern European democracy, the entire Russian Federation will be in danger of disintegrating. Likewise, Putin is convinced that if Ukraine can return to its rightful place within a Greater Russia, the injustice of 1991 will be undone and Russia will regain its standing among the world’s great powers.
Putin has been trying to bring Ukraine back into the Kremlin’s orbit since the 2004 Orange Revolution, which he personally helped spark by clumsily interfering in Ukraine’s presidential election. The violence of this effort has grown in direct proportion to modern Ukraine’s consolidation of its own national identity. Putin first pursued his imperial goals in Ukraine through control of the country’s political, business, cultural, and religious elite. When that failed, he ordered the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. Once it became clear that even this partial occupation of the country would not undermine Ukraine’s national consolidation, Putin made the fateful decision to launch a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The growing wave of Russian aggression against Ukraine has been accompanied by increasingly radical anti-Ukrainian rhetoric. For years, Putin has publicly insisted that Ukrainians are Russians (“one people”). On the eve of the current invasion, he published an entire essay denying Ukraine’s right to exist. Putin and other senior Kremlin officials have repeatedly called Ukraine an artificial country built on stolen Russian soil, a Nazi invention, and an intolerable “anti-Russia” created to undermine Russia itself. Ukrainians who insist on their national identity are routinely portrayed as traitors deserving no sympathy or mercy.
This inhumane propaganda has laid the ideological foundation for the crimes currently being committed by the Russian occupation army in Ukraine. Wherever the Kremlin is able to establish control, Ukrainian patriots and community leaders are routinely detained and imprisoned in a vast network of prisons and camps. Although the number of victims remains unknown, UN officials have concluded that the scale and systematic nature of the disappearances amount to a crime against humanity. Those who remain are terrorized and forced to accept Russian citizenship, while subjecting their children to ideological indoctrination. Meanwhile, all traces of Ukrainian national identity, culture, and statehood are ruthlessly erased. Many experts believe that these actions amount to genocide.
Russia's ongoing campaign to destroy Ukraine as a state and a nation is happening before the eyes of the world and is a complete travesty of the US efforts to broker some kind of compromise peace. After all, what compromise can there be between Russian genocide and Ukraine's survival?
Putin is, predictably, happy to take advantage of the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for peace talks. It buys him time, divides the West, and reduces the flow of weapons into Ukraine. But it is already abundantly clear that he has no interest in stopping his invasion. Indeed, he dares not stop. Any peace agreement that ensures Ukraine’s survival as an independent state will be viewed in Moscow as a major defeat. Instead of taking his place alongside Stalin, Peter the Great, and Ivan the Terrible as one of Russia’s greatest rulers, Putin will go down in Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine. He would rather fight on forever than accept that fate.
Trump deserves much credit for seizing the initiative and trying to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. At the same time, his current approach is clearly not working. Now is the time to stop seeking compromise with the Kremlin and start speaking to Putin in the language of force. That means tightening sanctions on Russia and targeting the many countries that continue to fuel Putin’s war machine. Above all, it means significantly increasing military aid to Kyiv and improving Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield. Putin has staked his entire reign on destroying Ukraine. He will not back down unless forced to do so. Peace will come only when Ukraine is too strong to be subdued.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service.
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