Putin has decided to talk peace with Trump while he dominates the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. His troops are closing in on Donetsk’s main urban centers, whose capture would give him total control of Donbas, where he already fully occupies the province of Luhansk. But it could be looking to get the best deal possible while he is ahead.
The prolonged sieges and intense urban warfare that capturing Donetsk’s cities of Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, and Sloviansk with a combined population of one quarter million and fortified by Ukrainian military engineers during months, risks dangerously overstretching his army and straining Russia’s overheated economy, whose oil revenues have dropped by 18.5 percent, due as much to sanctions as to persistent Ukrainian done strikes against refineries. (RELATED: Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb)
These factors, combined with the secondary sanctions that the White House has just announced against India to start blocking Russian oil exports through third countries, are what’s driving him to meet Trump in Alaska this Friday. It’s Putin who requested face-to-face discussions with Trump, according to U.S. officials who say that he instantly agreed to hold the summit on U.S. territory in an unexpected show of deference that indicates much eagerness on his part.
Putin is losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him.
When talk of peace talks began soon after Trump took office last February, The American Spectator noted a brief statement by Putin saying that negotiations would start in “six months.” That was how long he might have projected it would take for his army to enter Donetsk’s main urban centers, containing Ukraine’s military logistical hub in Donbas and important industrial facilities and rare earth mines. (RELATED: Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand)
Time is now up, and Russia has cut the main arteries connecting Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka to the surrounded citadel of Pokrovsk at the southern end of Ukraine’s defensive lines in Donetsk’s defensive lines, which are effectively broken.
Last week, Russia finally cleared the hilltop fortress town of Chasiv Yar, controlling strategic high ground above Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka — after a 16-month siege. Putin may be getting close to his objectives, but more intense fighting lies ahead as his generals increasingly opt for tactics of gradual encirclement rather than massed frontal assaults to spare the huge casualties that the army may no longer be able to sustain and adapt to a growing shortage of tanks.
Even as Putin moves on Kramatorsk from all directions, the heightened level of fighting anticipated as the U.S. starts squeezing Russia’s war machine with stepped-up sanctions has clearly incentivized Putin to get sincere with Trump after ignoring his previous calls for a ceasefire. He desperately needs to test whether Trump can arrange Ukraine’s handover of Kramatorsk in return for a cessation of hostilities, which is the U.S. president’s long-stated objective.
“It’s going to be very difficult,” said Trump, aware of the grim battlefield realities and President Zelensky’s doctrine of holding every inch of Ukrainian territory at all costs. Ukraine’s president has publicly opposed ceding territory to Russia as the latest plan gets unveiled, but Trump says that Zelensky should be included in future meetings with Putin, to which Vlad the Impaler has surprisingly agreed. (RELATED: Why Trump and Zelensky Don’t Get Along)
Trump talks about “land swaps” in which Ukraine might concede Donetsk in exchange for Russian withdrawals from other parts of eastern Ukraine. According to State Department sources familiar with the Moscow talks between Putin and White House special envoy Steven Witcoff, Russia would return the southern provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
This seems unrealistic, and Witcoff has walked back statements attributed to him concerning Putin’s willingness to abandon the territories providing vital land corridors linking Russia and the Donbas to the strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea occupied in 2014 and incorporated through a referendum. The most to which Putin could readily agree are limited withdrawals from empty land surrounding a nuclear power reactor located along the outer layers of Russian front lines. It has been operating under the protection of the U.N.’s IAEA since the start of the war.
Russia might also return areas it has recently occupied along the marshy Dnieper river delta, separating the Ukrainian-held part of Kherson on the west bank from the Russian-occupied east bank. Moscow is unlikely to have much of a problem in formally agreeing to divide the region with the waterway as the demarcation line in a prospective ceasefire.
Putin might also be expected to pull troops out of the northern province of Sumy, which he invaded in pursuit of Ukrainian forces expelled from Russia’s neighboring Kursk region last April. Zelensky gambled on holding Kursk for a big land swap with Putin but lost badly at great cost to his army, whose crack units got decimated.
Putin’s daily missile and drone barrages on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities also seem to be taking their toll on Ukrainian morale. According to the latest Gallup polls, 69 percent of Ukrainians favor conceding territory for a peace deal with Russia, the inverse of where public opinion stood six months ago. (RELATED: New York Times Commits Sin of Honesty)
Putin has Zelenskyy squarely on the backfoot but fears that a prolonged siege of Kramatorsk could exhaust his army, undermine his strategic position, and gradually weaken future negotiating leverage. Trump says that he wants to “stop the killing as soon as possible,” but may hold back on a deal with Putin and even up the ante economically and militarily to get concessions from him.
Aside from the sanctions that Trump is gradually implementing and will take some time to impact Russia’s war machine, there are reports that the administration is preparing to step up arms deliveries to Ukraine to enhance its defensive as well as offensive capacity.
According to unconfirmed reports, a $10 billion package is on its way to Kyiv that includes Patriot batteries scraped up from U.S. stocks over the objections of certain sectors of the Pentagon: large numbers of AMRAAM missiles for the 32 F-16s delivered by NATO allies allowing Ukraine to challenge Russia’s air superiority and new HIMARS systems and ATACMS missiles for added punch. (RELATED: While Trump Arms Ukraine, US Firms Arm Russia)
It’s telling that when Putin’s National Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev went on one of his customary rants about going nuclear against countries supporting Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian territory, Trump announced that he was moving two U.S. nuclear submarines closer to Russia. Trump also reportedly called Zelenskyy to ask if he could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg, according to what seems like a controlled leak to the Financial Times.
There are further reasons why Putin is suddenly jumping at the chance to talk to Trump. In the same week that the White House announced the Alaska summit, Trump met at the White House with the presidents of Russia’s neighboring Central Asian states of Azerbaijan and Armenia, which formed part of the former Soviet Union. He brokered a peace deal over a longstanding territorial dispute between them and established a U.S. strategic presence along Russia’s sensitive underbelly.
The agreement establishes rights of U.S. energy companies to manage a “South Caucasus transit corridor” for gas pipelines into Turkey and eastern Europe and lifts restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the U.S. In the aftermath of Putin’s manifest impotence against the U.S. and Israel in the war with Iran, closer ties between his Muslim neighbors and the U.S. are of serious concern to the Kremlin.
Putin seems to be losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him. Russia’s leader may be a dangerous sociopath but is not divorced from reality. Another major factor present in his mind is Trump’s deal with Europe for the purchase of $750 billion of American fossil fuels. This leaves Russia out of the European market, which has continued to consume Russian gas, eliminating Moscow’s economic leverage on America’s NATO partners. NATO’s agreement to raise its defense spending to 5 percent similarly vanishes any real chance Putin may have of reconstituting the Soviet empire and turning all of Ukraine into a vassal state.
As Putin tests Trump on getting him Donetsk so he can consolidate the only reconquest he is ever likely to make and sell it as a victory to the Russian people, Trump might gauge whether Putin could be scared enough to settle for a ceasefire demarcation line in Donetsk, somewhere east of Kramatorsk.
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