President Trump has convulsed the political landscape of the world with his 90-minute phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin during which they agreed to begin negotiations on a ceasefire in the three-year-old Russia-Ukraine war that has already killed or wounded one million soldiers.
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.
At the same time as the Trump-Putin conversation, US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth was shocking Nato leaders by stating that Ukraine could not realistically expect to regain its pre-2014 borders or join Nato. He was criticised by European leaders for making concessions and appeasing Russia before negotiations begin.
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.
Putin sent the Russian army into Ukraine on 24 February 2022 in the expectation of an easy victory, but the invasion failed dismally as Russian columns failed to reach Kyiv or even Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city a few miles from the Russian frontier.
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.
Putin succeeded in stabilising the Russian military position after initial defeats in early 2022, and withstood Western economic sanctions with surprising ease. A much-heralded Ukrainian ground offensive in 2023 got nowhere, despite heavy losses. Russia has since been grinding forward in a modern replay of First World War trench warfare, but its numerically superior forces have yet to achieve any decisive breakthrough.
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.
Paradoxically, the Ukraine war boosted the price of crude oil, Russia’s principal export, which it has gone on selling at a discount despite Western sanctions, enabling Putin to give high pay to his soldiers, recruit more, and compensate generously the families of the dead. Ukrainian drone attacks on refiners and tighter sanctions on the Russian shadow tanker fleet have an impact, but not sufficiently so far to seriously reduce state revenues.
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 MoreSince then, the military and political balance on the battlefield has swung inexorably, though not yet decisively, towards Russia. As the leader of Nato, President Biden did not have a convincing plan to end the war, except by the unlikely military defeat of Russia or regime change in Moscow. Meanwhile, political enthusiasm for Kyiv has ebbed in the US, especially among Maga Republicans. Trump has done exactly what he always said he would do in talking to Putin.
But 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.
Whoops of triumph emanating from Moscow after the Putin-Trump conversation may be a sign of hubris. “Frigid spinster Europe is mad with jealousy and rage,” writes Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president on Telegram, saying European leaders had neither received a warning of the Putin-Trump call nor were they consulted about its content. “It shows its real role in the world”, he sneered. “Europe’s time is over.”
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.
At different moments, a handful of advanced weapons, such as heavy tanks or medium range missiles were publicised as game changers on the vast plains of Ukraine. In practice, these “super weapons” always disappointed and predictably failed to redress the fundamental strategic fact that Russian ground forces are inside Ukraine and Nato forces are not.
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.
Trump has frequently declared that he wants “to see people stop dying in Ukraine”, a humane objective (though one that apparently does not apply to Palestinians in Gaza). Putin may calculate that developments are moving in his favour both militarily and politically – so he should fight and talk at the same time.
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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