Trump and Putin are to meet, possibly in Saudi Arabia, but the time and place for the first meeting between the US and Russian leaders since before this war is still to be decided, according to a Kremlin spokesman. The phone conversation and the start of negotiations means that the US has abandoned its prolonged campaign to isolate Russia, at least for the moment.
Whatever the outcome of peace talks, a new – and dramatically different – stage in the Ukraine conflict has now begun, though this does not necessarily mean its end is imminent. In the coming months, however, we are likely to see a new balance of power in Europe begin to emerge, but its contours are cloudy because, unlike the end of the Second World War in Europe in 1945, there is no decisive winner or loser in the war.
What had been intended as a demonstration of Russian military strength became a demonstration of weakness and, to a degree, this remains true. In order to show that it is still advancing, the Russian army announced on Thursday that it had captured the obscure town of Vodiane Druhe in East Donetsk, but such progress is snail’s pace and reportedly involves heavy Russian casualties.
Russia is far larger than Ukraine in population and economic resources, but Putin has never had the political self-confidence to fully mobilise these in the same way as the Soviet Union in 1942.
A tragedy of the war is that the present military stalemate has existed since the end of 2022, so it might have been feasible to arrange a ceasefire two years ago. In November 2022, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, outraged President Biden’s administration by declaring that nobody was going to win the war and the best moment to negotiate “a political solution” was then, when Ukraine was at peak strength compared to Russia. His call was derided by Western commentators at the time as appeasing Putin, but his analysis turned out to be all too accurate.
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Read MoreBut US-Russia negotiations do not necessarily mean agreement. Putin is in a stronger position in 2025 than he was two years ago. He needs to come away from the war with a victory which justifies starting the war in the first place and a draw is not enough. He will want to see Ukraine permanently diminished and neutralised as a political and military power.
This exaggerates the degree of European marginalisation in upcoming US-Russia negotiations, but for a long time European leaders, backed by an overwhelmingly pro-Ukrainian media, have lacked a credible policy on the Ukraine war.
Trump has now broken the diplomatic logjam. His realpolitik understanding of the war is greater than that of Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who had eschewed a diplomacy solution to the conflict and vaguely sought to get the military upper hand, though no military expert believed this possible. This ineffective policy stance may be explained by Biden’s deteriorating mental powers, a decline that reportedly set in before the war in 2021.
Yet both Ukrainians and Russians are war weary – and, despite all the obstacles, any momentum towards a ceasefire may be difficult to stop or put into reverse.
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