Trump Wants to End the War Fast. Russia Has Its Own Timetable.
Kremlin sees advantage in drawn-out Ukraine talks and using the battlefield to shape negotiations
By Thomas Grove and Alan Cullison The Wall Street Journal 2/23/25
President Trump’s high-speed effort to end the war in Ukraine is on a collision course with Russia’s negotiating tactics and President Vladimir Putin’s goals in the conflict.
After the first meeting in years between U.S. and Russian officials in Riyadh, the Kremlin is already preparing the ground for interminable talks ahead.
Putin tried to temper expectations last week about negotiations reaching a quick conclusion: “It will take some time. How much time it will take, I am not ready to answer now.”
For Russia, talks with the U.S. are a victory in themselves, because they help end the isolation imposed upon Moscow by the Biden administration, which had refused to engage with the Kremlin after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Kremlin has said it isn’t interested in a simple cease-fire because it is convinced the Ukrainians could use a pause in fighting to rearm. Instead, Putin wants to deal with what he calls “the root causes” of the conflict, which he has said include Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and an anti-Russian government in Kyiv.
Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground on the front line in Ukraine, and Moscow has a long history of using a grinding military advance to improve its position in negotiations. It is a strategy Moscow has employed from Syria to the talks at Yalta during World War II.
In recent days, U.S. policy appeared to be shifting decisively in Russia’s favor, with Trump blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war and calling him a dictator.
But translating that shift into agreements at the negotiation table will be challenging. Putin has aims that extend far beyond the territorial gains his forces have made in Ukraine. The Russian president wants to limit the size and power of Kyiv’s military, ensure the country’s permanent neutrality and control the direction of its political future. While Trump has said he thinks it is “impractical” for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the country’s constitution has enshrined that as a long-term goal.
“There’s a considerable amount of doubt inside the Kremlin that Trump and his people understand the difficulty or the complexity of the issues that have to be dealt with,” said Thomas Graham, a former White House adviser on Russia to George W. Bush who returned from a trip to Moscow earlier this month.
To achieve its aims, Russia might try to shape negotiations by pressing its offensive on the battlefield. Some of Moscow’s biggest diplomatic victories of the last century were clinched at the negotiating table while Russia was creating new military realities on the front line.
For years, Russia participated in negotiations over an end to Syria’s civil war while delivering to former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad small arms, air defenses and armored personnel carriers used against protesters and rebels. Moscow ultimately intervened on Assad’s side, clawing back territory for Damascus and cementing the Syrian leader’s grip on power, which collapsed late last year.
Similarly, in the final year of World War II, Joseph Stalin shifted to more hard-line demands in negotiations with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Soviet troops pushed Nazis out of Poland with increasing speed. The results had disastrous consequences for Warsaw and other Central and Eastern European countries the Soviets ruled over for nearly half a century.
“Stalin was able to improve his negotiating position vis-à-vis Churchill and Roosevelt because his troops were creating new realities on the battlefield,” said Sergey Radchenko, Cold War expert and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “You can see the way Putin thinks in similar terms.”
Ukraine is unlikely to be very different as negotiations continue. Indeed, the position of the Ukrainians, who are expected to join talks at some point, and potentially the Americans will only worsen as Russia continues driving further west, nibbling at Ukrainian territory. Those successes have likely emboldened more hawkish elements of Russia’s military and political elite.
“As Russia’s position improves on the battlefield, the Russians are only going to up the ante,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the U.S. think tank Rand. “I can only imagine the officers in the general staff are trying to convince Putin that now is the time to put their foot on the gas and push for maximum territorial gains.”
Meanwhile, Russia will likely be pushing for conditions similar to those that they negotiated in Istanbul at the beginning of the war. In those talks, Russia demanded that no foreign weapons would be allowed on Ukrainian soil and that Ukraine’s military would be pared down to a specific size, limiting everything from the number of troops and tanks to the maximum firing range of Ukrainian missiles.
Russia wants an end to the intelligence sharing between Washington and Kyiv, which remains unacknowledged by either side and has helped Ukraine strike at some of Russia’s most sensitive targets, said a person briefed on Russia’s positions.
As talks unfold, the U.S. has means to pressure Moscow, such as by tightening restrictions on Russia’s oil exports or sending yet more military aid to Kyiv. Trump hinted bluntly at such measures shortly after taking office, posting on his Truth Social platform that Putin had better “make a deal” and “we can do it the easy way or the hard way.”
But Trump has lately signaled that he prefers a polite conversation, and aides have been dialing back their mention of sanctions. As Trump tries to conclude a quick deal with the Kremlin, he will have two options to prod talks forward—pressure Moscow or pressure Kyiv, said Graham, now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump’s recent harsh criticism of Zelensky indicates that he has decided to pressure Kyiv, the easier target of the two, Graham said.
But, in addition to the complexity of negotiations, Putin doesn’t want the Trump administration to think that it can quickly dispatch Russia as a problem, move on and ignore relations with Moscow. The Kremlin perceived that was Joe Biden’s strategy when he assumed the presidency in 2021, something that only kindled resentment in Moscow, Graham said.
Under Biden and Barack Obama, the U.S. sought to punish Russia in part by limiting or severing contacts in an effort to isolate Moscow globally. The resumption of dialogue is by itself a victory for the Kremlin.
“They want to be engaged with the United States for some time,” he said. “They don’t want the United States or Trump to think that this is a matter of two or three months to get it all done, and now I just focus on China and forget about the Russians.”
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com