Trump-Putin call on war is another blow to Kyiv and its allies

For Ukraine and its allies, who spent months trying to win Donald Trump over to their cause in the war started by Russia, it is back to square one. In a two-hour conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin late on Monday, the US president dropped his earlier insistence on an unconditional 30-day ceasefire that he hoped would kickstart what promise to be long and tortuous peace talks. Ukraine backed that proposal while Russia did not.

Trump also signalled that the war he once promised to end in 24 hours was no longer his to fix — a message that leaves Ukraine vulnerable and its allies worried. It is another blow to Kyiv, coming less than three months after Trump's public falling out with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Since then, Europe's leaders have scrambled to repair the relationship and regain the initiative.

In the weeks before the phone call, Trump had threatened to slap tougher sanctions on Russia if it did not show progress towards peace, a move Ukraine hoped would convince Putin to step back from his maximalist demands in any negotiations. That "stick" approach is gone for now, replaced by the "carrot" of economic partnership with the United States if and when the war ends.

"In the phone call on Sunday with European leaders, Trump had agreed on the proposed approach — ask for (an) unconditional ceasefire and apply sanctions if nothing is moving," said a European diplomat, speaking anonymously to be frank about Europe's disappointment. "But he obviously dropped this idea when he talked to Putin... It is impossible to trust him for more than one day. He does not seem to be interested in Ukraine at all."

Trump said Russia and Ukraine would immediately start negotiations toward ending the war, adding later that he thought "some progress is being made." When Trump spoke with European leaders including Zelensky after the Putin call, a person familiar with the discussion described the reaction to Trump's position as one of "shock."

Ukraine and its European allies have presented a united front since Monday's call, announcing new sanctions on Russia and vowing to continue to engage with the United States. They do not discount the possibility that Trump may change his mind again. But mistrust of Putin runs high. His army is bigger than Ukraine's, it has been eking out gains along a 1,000-km (620-mile) front line for more than a year and Russia insists that any deal should reflect realities on the battlefield.

"Putin is clearly playing for time. Unfortunately, we have to say Putin is not really interested in peace," German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday. Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at the London-based Chatham House think tank, agreed Putin was in no rush to negotiate a settlement. "For Russians, the battlefield and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin," she said.

"Putin gets the upper hand on the battlefield through procrastination in diplomacy and by denying Europe an opportunity to... organize itself." After speaking to Trump, Putin said Moscow was ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum about a future peace accord and that efforts to end the war that Russia began with its full-scale invasion in February 2022 were on the right track.

US support has been key to Ukraine's ability to stave off defeat, and Trump's lurch away from his predecessor Joe Biden's support for Kyiv has left it scrambling to keep him engaged. The United States has been the biggest single contributor to Ukraine's war effort through tens of billions of dollars in military aid, and Kyiv relies on US military intelligence to identify enemy targets and movements in real time.

What happens to that support once the aid agreed under Biden runs out over the summer is a crucial question that Ukraine is seeking to answer. The United States has not made its position clear. Europe has promised to maintain direct aid and arms purchases, but the United States would have to agree to sell its weapons and there are some US munitions that cannot be replaced, namely air defences and short-range guided missiles. There is also the economic pressure the US could bring against Russia, whose economy has weathered Western sanctions on the energy and banking sectors, but which is showing signs of strain from the enormous costs of the war.

As they have done since Trump returned to the White House, Ukraine's allies rallied around Zelensky after this latest diplomatic setback.

But the outcome of Trump's phone call with Putin will be particularly hard to swallow because they saw signs they were starting to win him over to putting pressure on Moscow. Several times in March and April, Trump expressed frustration at Putin's apparent foot-dragging, questioned whether he was being played by the Russian leader and threatened tougher sanctions against Moscow.

The stated positions between the US and Europe remained far apart on key points including territory, but Kyiv viewed Trump's pronouncements as positive after the disastrous White House meeting in February when Zelensky and Trump publicly fell out. A minerals deal signed by Ukraine and the United States last month was viewed as a further sign of progress, as were recent negotiations in Istanbul where officials from Ukraine and Russia met directly for the first time in nearly three years. The disappointment on Tuesday was palpable. "It's one step forward, two or 10 steps back." said another European diplomat. "We will continue to pass messages to the Trump administration and push, push for it to pressure Russia."