President Vladimir V. Putin has long said he wants to sit down with President Trump.
The reason: He believes that such a meeting, rather than just progress on the battlefield, is his best chance for securing a victory in his war against Ukraine.
Analysts who study Mr. Putin, as well as people who know him, have said since the early days of the war that the Russian leader’s overarching goal is primarily to secure a peace deal that achieves his geopolitical aims — and not necessarily conquering a certain amount of territory on the battlefield.
And it is the U.S. president, they say, who is best positioned to deliver on those aims — which include keeping Ukraine out of NATO and preventing the alliance’s future expansion. That helps explain why Mr. Putin has appeared so focused on placating Mr. Trump and avoiding a break with Washington, even as Mr. Trump has shown growing impatience with Mr. Putin’s refusal to agree to a cease-fire.
“Putin wants to keep Trump as a resource for a possible transition to peace,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst in Moscow. “Trump is needed to achieve Russia’s conditions.”
“It is probably better for us to meet,” Mr. Putin said of Mr. Trump in January, “and, based on today’s realities, talk calmly about all areas that are of interest to both the U.S. and Russia.”
The Kremlin confirmed on Thursday morning that Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump planned to meet in the coming days, but did not set an exact date for the sought-after summit.
The Trump administration had been holding out on agreeing to a meeting, looking for a sign from the Kremlin that Mr. Putin was in fact serious about a real cease-fire on the battlefield.
The White House’s sudden commitment to hold a summit has raised questions about what, if anything, Mr. Putin agreed to on Wednesday during his talks in Moscow with Mr. Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
Exactly what the two men discussed is unclear. The Kremlin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said Mr. Putin had conveyed certain “signals” to Mr. Witkoff on Ukraine, but did not go into detail.
One possibility is that Mr. Putin signaled more flexibility on the issue of how land could be divided up or traded in any settlement between Russia and Ukraine.
For months, Russian envoys have insisted in talks with U.S. counterparts that Moscow be given the entirety of the four regions that the Kremlin claimed to have “annexed” from Ukraine in late 2022 even though vast swaths of the territory remained under Ukrainian control. U.S. negotiators viewed that position as unreasonable and saw it as a sign that Moscow wasn’t serious about negotiating an end to the war.
Some analysts suggested that Mr. Putin had told envoys during talks this year to stick only to the hardest-line position, in order to force a meeting between him and Mr. Trump. Russian officials may be hoping that a one-on-one summit will give Mr. Putin an opportunity to sway Mr. Trump, long sympathetic to Russia, back to supporting the Russian leader’s views on what he calls “the root causes of the conflict.”
People close to the Kremlin, as well as political analysts, say that Mr. Putin’s demands — to exclude Ukraine from NATO, limit Ukrainian military capabilities and lay the groundwork for a more Moscow-friendly government in Kyiv — are more important to him than the specifics of what territory Russia ultimately controls.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, pointed out that Moscow, from the start, hasn’t formally demarcated the borders of the four “annexed” regions — which she said shows there has always been some flexibility on the land issue. She didn’t exclude the possibility Moscow would be open to exchanging certain territories.
“The most important thing for Putin is NATO and these ironclad guarantees that Ukraine will not be in NATO and that NATO countries will not develop a military presence inside Ukraine, plus a set of political demands on Ukraine itself,” Ms. Stanovaya said. Other demands, she added, might be open to negotiation.
“One quality of Mr. Putin is that he doesn’t keep a pre-prepared plan,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “He lives for today, he knows what he wants to get in the end.”
In this case, she said, what Russia’s leader wants is for Ukraine to stop being what he sees as an “anti-Russia project” and to return to Moscow’s sphere of influence.
“So, either he achieves this through NATO guarantees, that is, guarantees from the West, or he achieves this through political control within Ukraine,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “One or the other, or both. Then, we’ll see how it goes. Territory is very secondary.”