Putin scored a win with Trump. Now he may want more on Ukraine

Russian euphoria at Vladimir Putin’s phone call with Donald Trump is quickly giving way to hard calculations on how to make the most of the stunning breakthrough on Ukraine.

While there’s delight at the U.S. president’s willingness to sideline Ukraine and Europe and deal directly with Putin, the Kremlin doesn’t sense victory yet, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. Tough negotiations lie ahead and there’s no certainty of a quick agreement, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters.

“There is clear euphoria from the mere fact of the conversation,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. Still, “this is just the beginning of the game,” she said.

Former KGB agent Putin’s readiness to employ a strategy of quiet patience with Trump appears to be paying dividends for Russia. The Kremlin offered little response following Trump’s inauguration last month, for instance, when he threatened “big” sanctions and to crash the oil price to wreck Russia’s economy unless Putin made a quick deal to end the war.

It was more important to hold open the door for talks to begin with Trump, according to a person familiar with Kremlin discussions.

“Putin believes that Trump should be seduced, that he should be flattered from head to toe,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political consultancy R.Politik. “He is very invested in negotiations with Trump, but he’s also preparing for the scenario to deal with Ukraine without Trump and continue to bomb it into capitulation.”

Putin scored huge wins from the 90-minute phone call on Wednesday, the first publicly announced contact between the U.S. and Russian leaders since he ordered the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump abandoned his predecessor President Joe Biden’s policy of refusing to engage with Russia without Kyiv’s involvement, and reversed long-held U.S. positions supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity and ambitions to join NATO.

Putin has repeatedly demanded that Ukraine must never join NATO and that a deal to end the war should recognize the “realities on the ground” with his forces occupying large areas of territory in the country’s east and south. He’s also said negotiations should be held principally with the U.S., rather than with Ukraine, to resolve the conflict.

Trump announced he and Putin plan to meet in Saudi Arabia, and that the two leaders invited each other to visit their countries during the “highly productive” call. He later called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to inform him” of the conversation.

Putin’s call with Trump shows the western policy of isolating Russia “has collapsed,” Sergei Markov, a political consultant close to the Kremlin, said on his Telegram channel. “The West is clearly divided.”

While most of Trump’s foreign-policy team lack experience in negotiating with Russia, Putin’s surrounded by Kremlin aides with decades of practice in dealing with U.S. administrations and deep knowledge of Ukraine and its potential vulnerabilities. That’s likely to offer major advantages when the two leaders sit down to negotiate in person.

Russian hawks are jubilant. “Ukraine is just a pretext for a big dialogue between great nations about the beginning of a new era in the history of mankind,” said Konstantin Malofeyev, a nationalist tycoon and Kremlin confidant.

Russian stocks surged and European defense shares fell on the prospects of a deal to end the war. Some western officials arriving for the Munich Security Conference that begins Friday called it a sell-out, saying they feared the U.S. was giving in to Putin’s key demands without getting anything in return.

To be sure, Russian forces continue to advance in eastern Ukraine and nobody is talking about an imminent suspension of hostilities, still less a comprehensive settlement to Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.

Putin and Trump instructed their officials to “immediately” begin preparations for a meeting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday. While “we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves” in efforts to resolve the conflict, “we are much more impressed by the position of the current administration,” he said.

Russia regards the U.S. as its main counterpart in negotiations, though Ukraine will participate “one way or another,” Peskov later told Russian state television. Putin and Trump didn’t discuss European involvement, he said.

Trump’s announcement came only hours after the new U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO allies in Brussels that it was “illusionary” for Ukraine to return to its pre-2014 borders, before Russia annexed Crimea. NATO membership for Ukraine also wasn’t “realistic” and U.S. troops wouldn’t join any postwar peacekeeping mission in the country, he said.

European allies have been left reeling. “Any deal behind our backs will not work,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Brussels Thursday. “Any agreement will need also Ukraine and Europe being part of it.”

It may go down in history as “a dark day” for Europe, Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told the public broadcaster ERR on Thursday. “It sends the message that borders can be changed by force and that might prevail over justice.”

There are “no more fears and complexes regarding mutual sympathy between Trumpists and Russians,” Alexander Dugin, a political scientist in Moscow who advocates a “Russian World” ideology to justify expansion by the Kremlin, said on the X social media platform. “There is no such thing as Ukraine. Just ripples on the surface of Russian-American relations.”

It was “a day of good news” for Russia, though there’s still a long way to go, said Konstantin Kosachyov, who is deputy speaker of its upper house of parliament. “Neither side has the right to make a mistake,” he said on Telegram.

“Trump has effectively surrendered to Putin on Ukraine” before negotiations even start, John Bolton, who was U.S. National Security Adviser in his first term, said on the X platform. “The harm to U.S. security interests will extend well beyond Central Europe as our adversaries in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific can plainly see.”