It’s hard to avoid Putin’s determination that there is nothing he can do that would exhaust Trump’s patience with Moscow.
On Monday, the Trump White House announced that it had reached separate but contingent agreements with Ukraine and Russia to pause their respective attacks on each other’s maritime and civilian energy targets. In exchange, the White House agreed to provide Russia with sanctions relief. Ukraine, by contrast, got little more than constraints on its ability to execute some of its most effective asymmetrical operations against Russian targets. But that agreement, if there ever was an agreement, was not to last.
In a Friday statement from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Moscow announced that it reserves the right to resume strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The statement was unnecessary. Russia had already resumed its attacks on Ukrainian civilian energy installations. Moscow insists it is merely responding to the shelling of a gas-metering station near the front lines in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, but Kyiv denies the claim and insists its firepower is used “exclusively against military targets of the Russian occupation army.” Regardless, the limited cease-fire, such as it was, is off.
America’s allies in Europe had warned Trump to expect as much. “The collective view is that Russia is playing games, that Putin is back to his old playbook,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters this week. Still, he and the rest of the 27 European leaders who gathered in Paris to present a united front in opposition to Moscow’s territorial expansionism put on a brave face. “President Trump is waiting for a clear answer from the Russians,” French President Emmanuel Macron posited. “If he has the clear message the Russians are not coming [to the negotiating table], he will feel deceived, betrayed. And he would have to react.”
That’s an optimistic outlook. If the administration experiences any frustration when confronted with Russian recalcitrance and duplicity, that emotion has consistently produced only additional pressure on Ukraine. The latest example of that tendency is particularly egregious.
For weeks following Trump’s second inauguration, his administration muscled Ukraine into accepting an onerous agreement compelling Kyiv to provide the U.S. with at least 50 percent of the revenue it derives from the exploration of its mineral and hydrocarbon deposits — now and in the future. “That,” Vice President JD Vance explained, “is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” Kyiv agreed, although with deep and understandable reluctance (politics happens in other countries, too).
Over the weekend, though, the United States suddenly insisted that the deal it had muscled into existence was no longer good enough. According to the Financial Times, Washington’s new proposal would compel Ukraine to submit “all mineral resources, including oil and gas, and major energy assets across the entire Ukrainian territory” to a joint investment fund with the United States, over which Washington retains control and veto power. Again, Washington withheld the promise of security guarantees even if Ukraine complied with this monumental demand.
The Ukrainian sources with whom FT’s reporters spoke bristled at the deal, calling it “unfair” and the equivalent of “robbery.” They suspect that the proposal — a recipe for a slightly milder form of colonialism than the one on offer from Russia — is designed to be rejected. Why would the Trump administration erect obstacles before Ukraine’s compliance with the peace deal the White House insists it so desires if not to scuttle the project while securing a plausible narrative that allows the administration to blame Kyiv for its failure?
All this suits Moscow just fine. Indeed, sensing its new freedom of action, Vladimir Putin’s regime has only grown bolder. “Just recently, I said that we will push through,” Putin said while reviewing Russian troops on Friday in Archangelsk. “There are grounds to think that we will finish them off,” he said of the Ukrainians. Indeed, Putin is already speculating openly that the process over which Trump is presiding should give way to a United Nations–administered provisional authority governing the whole of Ukraine. “Only then” should there be “peace negotiations,” the Russian autocrat averred.
That’s a big ask, but why shouldn’t the Kremlin press its advantage — both on the battlefield and in negotiations with its pliant American counterparts? It’s hard to avoid Putin’s determination that there is nothing he can do that would exhaust Trump’s patience with Moscow. In his pursuit of a lopsided peace in Europe that favors Russia, Putin has ample evidence to conclude that Washington is on his side.