Putin keeps the end of the war in Ukraine on repeat

MoscowMore than 300 days, dozens of summits, calls, ultimatums and peace plans, but no results. A timeline of Donald Trump's efforts to end the war in Ukraine It resembles the profile of a mountain bike stage, with brief moments of climax and hundreds of kilometers of anticlimax, but all of it covered on a stationary bike. Since February, the US president's negotiating frenzies have erratically opened apparent windows of opportunity to find a negotiated solution to the conflict. Vladimir Putin has closed them all. Now, when it seems we have never been closer to an agreement, everything indicates that the same thing will happen again, and that we will be where we were 300 days ago, but with tens of thousands more dead.

The emergence of Trump's controversial peace plan appeared to have precipitated eventsBut the outburst of a week ago has already subsided, and the positions of both sides remain irreconcilable. "We are ready to fight to the last Ukrainian," Putin said. "No one with half a brain would sign a document to give up territory," Zelensky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, responded on Friday, shortly before resigning due to a corruption case.

This is not the first time that Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, has traveled to Moscow with a peace plan in hand. In April, he already presented a proposal that seemed unacceptable to Ukraine: international recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, freezing the border at the front line, and accepting de facto The occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia were declared Russian territory. Then he returned to Washington with his tail between his legs, after being slammed in the Kremlin's face.

Now the scene is repeating itself, and Trump's envoy might be tempted to offer even more: international recognition of Crimea and the entirety of Donbas, including the parts under Ukrainian control, which the Russian army could take years to conquer. Witkoff is certain that it all boils down to a land transaction, and Putin himself has stated that, If Ukraine withdraws from Donetsk, the war will end (and if not, it will take it by force)But it's not clear that territorial concessions will suffice for the Russian president, nor that Zelensky is willing to go down in history as the leader who surrendered the last cities of Donbas without resistance. Kyiv has already made clear what the other red line is, beyond territorial integrity: future security guarantees. That is, not closing the door to joining NATO, receiving international military support, and maintaining an army capable of defending the country. The problem for Trump and his negotiator is that for Putin, these are also existential issues. If Russia feels even slightly threatened, it will not sign any agreement and will prefer to continue bombing Ukrainian cities and sending thousands of soldiers to die on the front lines to advance mere kilometers. The Russian president believes that the more he demonstrates superiority on the battlefield, the more leverage he will have at the negotiating table and the more he can coerce a Zelensky pressured by Trump. and a weakness for corruption that makes him accept a surrender on his termsHe is convinced that as soon as he eases off the gas, he will be at the mercy of international diplomatic pressure and will have lost all his advantage. For this reason, he has so far rejected all ceasefire offers, sidestepped ultimatums, and tried to entice Trump with summits and tailor-made truces, while remaining firm in his maximum demands.

Putin's game

In March, Putin dismissed a 30-day ceasefire for fear that Ukraine would use it to rearm. A few days later, he took the US proposal for a truce on attacks against civilian infrastructure, unilaterally reformulated it into a truce on energy facilities, and spent a month accusing the Ukrainians of violating it. And finally, he expressed support for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, provided the sanctions were lifted.

When he noticed that Trump was growing tired of his game and irritated by the lack of progress, he pulled two cosmetic truces out of his hat to win back favor: the first, a 36-hour Easter truce, announced without consulting him just minutes before Victory Day was due to take effect. to make sure that Zelensky did not spoil the visit of more than twenty world leaders to Moscow.

Those glimpses of self-serving pacifism also failed to impress the White House, so Putin was forced to convene the first direct talks with Ukraine since 2022. But in Istanbul, instead of discussing peace, the Russian president stood up Zelensky, who had challenged him to a face-to-face meeting with the Ukrainian delegation, threatening to conquer the Kharkiv and Sumi regions if his troops did not withdraw from the provinces annexed by Russia.

The Alaska summit between presidents in August was the Kremlin's penultimate attempt to avoid a major clash with Washington.Now Moscow is trying to exploit the vagueness of what was discussed there to claim that there are grounds for an agreement. In doing so, it encourages the US president to keep pedaling on the stationary bike of a war with no peace in sight, a war that will only end when Putin has had enough.