The ceasefire plan in Ukraine puts Putin in a bind: Anger Trump or anger Russian nationalists

No one in Russia expected two months ago that Donald Trump would announce so many concessions to the Kremlin and humiliate Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy on live television. But the perfect idyll between the U.S. president and Vladimir Putin has suddenly been shattered with Washington’s proposal of a 30-day truce and a re-armed Kyiv. Many Russians are now once again convinced that the reviled United States remains the same enemy as ever. The Kremlin will take its time to respond. But it will be difficult to simultaneously please Trump, who urgently wants to put the Ukraine issue behind him, and the hundreds of thousands of Russians who have sacrificed their lives for Putin’s crusade in Ukraine.

“We are open to dialogue with the new U.S. administration regarding the Ukrainian conflict. The most important thing is to address the root causes of this crisis. We will fight for the interests of Russia, of the Russian people; this is the goal and meaning of the special military operation,” the president said on February 23, the day before the third anniversary of the war. “We will not give up what is ours,” Putin promised the widows and mothers of his soldiers again last week. The president made a surprise visit to a command center for his forces in the Kursk region on Wednesday. He did so dressed in a military uniform, an unusual sight for the president, just as the offer of a ceasefire is on the table. There, he ordered his army to crush what remains of the Ukrainian forces that invaded Kursk in August, according to the news agency Efe, and where Russia claims to have regained control of 86% of the occupied territory.

Russian authorities and their propaganda have cautiously taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Washington. Only a few politicians have dared to point out that Trump’s proposal contradicts, a priori, the Kremlin’s rhetoric of recent months in favor of achieving each and every one of its objectives in Ukraine. “Any agreement will be on our terms, not American ones,” emphasized Konstantin Kosachev, Vice-President of the Federation Council and Senate, before arguing that Russian troops hold the initiative on the battlefield.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova hinted that Moscow will decide what is appropriate without taking into account the other parties in the conflict. “Russia’s position is not formed abroad through agreements or efforts by other parties. Russia’s position is formed within the Russian Federation,” she said in an interview.

Russian government sources cited by Reuters and Bloomberg believe it is unlikely that Putin will accept a ceasefire that would benefit Ukraine more than Russia. “Putin is in a strong position because Russia is on the offensive,” said one of Reuters’ contacts. “They have disguised the resumption of rearmament as an offer of a ceasefire,” added another source.

Putin long ago prepared his economy for a long war. Political scientist Ivan Preobrazhensky believes the Kremlin is seeking concessions in this phase of negotiations, such as hampering Ukraine’s defensive capabilities or getting Kyiv to recognize the occupied territories, but it will not give up on its ultimate goal of having Ukraine within its sphere of influence. “I think Putin hasn’t yet decided whether he will initiate full-fledged peace negotiations. He’s probably unsure whether to end the war,” the analyst told this newspaper last week.

‘Yes, but’

“Russia’s response to the ceasefire proposal should not be ‘no,’ but ‘yes, but,’” former Putin adviser Dmitry Markov wrote on his Telegram channel. “That is, accepting the 30-day ceasefire on the condition that an embargo on arms supplies to Ukraine is introduced for the same period,” the expert explains.

Markov remains undecided on which choice the Russian president will make. The expert emphasizes that several factors are working against a ceasefire. Among them, Russia’s advances on the front, “there is no trust in the West,” and Putin and all Russian leaders “have said many times that Russia needs a lasting peace, not a truce.” In favor of a ceasefire, according to the analyst, would be the lifting of sanctions and the fact that Trump “wants peace and deals can be made with him.”

The Russian president has always spoken abstractly about the objectives of his “special military operation” so that he can justify his victory in the future, regardless of its scope. His major 2022 offensive threatened Kyiv, Odessa, and Kharkiv before its failure. Today, his troops are dislodging Ukrainian forces from Kursk, Russian territory, while the campaign in eastern Ukraine has stalled for months and has not reached Pokrovsk. In any case, Putin has hinted that he wants the total demilitarization of Ukraine and a Kremlin-friendly government—what he calls denazification, despite considering the elections won by Petro Poroshenko in 2014 and Zelenskiy in 2019 legitimate.

The issue for the Kremlin is that with Trump, it suddenly has at the helm of the White House a politician who, to some extent, shares his 19th-century worldview: great powers treat other countries as if they were pieces on a chessboard, not sovereign states. Ukraine, like Greenland, Panama, the Arctic, or Eastern Europe, is part of the Great Game, the expression Rudyard Kipling used to define the contest between the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom to colonize Central Asia.

The Kremlin doesn’t want to anger Trump. And the negotiations have been divided between discussions about the future of Ukraine, on the one hand, and Russian-U.S. relations, on the other. The U.S. president announced this Wednesday that a delegation was heading to Moscow. Six members of the Russian government told the independent newspaper The Moscow Times that Russia wants to arrange a personal meeting between Trump and Putin in a third country in April or May. “Washington could lose motivation [toward Moscow]. Opponents of rapprochement with us have become more active in the White House, and the Europeans are trying to dissuade Trump,” one of the sources told the newspaper.

However, the United States remains the enemy Putin has blamed so far for the war unleashed against Ukraine. Rhetoric against Washington, Russia’s return to the status of a nuclear power that challenges the Americans head-on, has been the leitmotif of unity around Putin. A new “betrayal” by Trump after making concessions would greatly damage the Russian leader’s image among nationalists. It’s worth remembering that Trump was hailed by the Kremlin in 2016 and later reviled for tightening sanctions.

A couple of months ago, the Kremlin instructed its propaganda outlets to applaud the new U.S. administration’s approach, according to several employees who spoke to the independent outlet Viortska. However, the U.S. ceasefire proposal has proved too much for nationalism, and Z channels, Russian bloggers, and war correspondents have fiercely criticized the idea.

“Shove your peace initiatives up your ass now. Last year, the conditions for a ceasefire were met, and you responded with an invasion,” Kyiv correspondent Alexander Kots told his half-million followers. “Later, we’ll say we were tricked,” added another war correspondent, Boris Rozhin.

“Washington is resuming its military support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In other words, it is once again directly declaring its participation in the war against Russia,” noted pro-war blogger Alexei Zhivov. Other influential channels called the truce a “strategic mistake” because it would do nothing to benefit the Russian military and would allow Ukraine to strengthen its presence in the Donbas.

Beyond the weapons issue, some Russian military analysts fear that a truce will allow Ukraine to rebuild its personnel. “The White House wants to give the Ukrainian Armed Forces time to recover their losses and have the opportunity to attack again,” the Archangel Spetsnaz channel warns its 1.1 million followers, adding: “They have suffered losses in both Donbas and the Kursk region. How can Zelenskiy demand peace on his own terms when the initiative has long been in our hands?”

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