Trump’s call with Putin ends U.S. efforts to isolate Russia

By saying Ukraine’s NATO membership is “impractical” and the return of Russian-occupied territories to Kyiv is “illusionary,” the Trump administration is giving its blessing to key items on President Vladimir Putin’s wish list — even before a potential settlement of the conflict.

Rarely was a policy change between Moscow and Washington so swift and drastic than President Donald Trump’s phone call with Putin, abruptly ending three-year U.S.-led effort to isolate the Russian leader over Ukraine.

And the fighting in Ukraine wasn’t the only issue the two leaders discussed in Wednesday’s call. They talked about the Middle East settlement, the role of the dollar, global energy markets and even artificial intelligence.

The broad agenda was exactly what Putin has long wanted – Russia and the U.S. sitting down to talk about global issues while the rest of the world stood by.

It’s unclear how the prospective Ukraine peace talks could evolve, but the call already has marked a watershed, immediately breaking the ice between Moscow and Washington.

Putin’s goals in Ukraine

Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, amid Kyiv’s bid to join NATO that he described as a “red line” for Moscow. He had cast the alliance’s eastward expansion as a major threat to Russia and sought NATO’s guarantees that it would never offer membership to Ukraine.

Putin expected a quick victory, but the steadfast Ukrainian resistance and a flow of Western weapons to Kyiv quickly thwarted Kremlin hopes. The fighting has produced heavy casualties on both sides, becoming Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II.

After suffering early setbacks, Russia gradually regained the initiative in combat, unleashing a series of offensives across the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line in slow but steady gains throughout 2024. It controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, taken in 2014

Putin has demanded that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the four regions that Russia has seized but never fully controlled, renounce its bid to join NATO, and protect the rights of Russian speakers. He and his lieutenants repeated all of that in recent statements, reaffirming Moscow’s maximalist approach.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected Moscow’s demands, but the grim battlefield situation and the latest statements from Trump set the stage for talks in which Kyiv could potentially be forced into painful compromises.

Trump signals openness to Russian demands

Trump described his call with Putin as “lengthy and highly productive” and thanked Putin “for his time and effort,” emphasizing their shared desire to halt the fighting without saying a word that it was Russia which sent troops into Ukraine.

He said he later spoke to Zelenskyy, but he remained noncommittal about whether Ukraine would be an equal participant in the peace talks — an apparent signal that Kyiv could be presented with a deal negotiated behind its back in a dramatic shift from the Biden administration’s policy of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Also on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting of Ukraine’s Western allies that Kyiv shouldn’t hope to get all its territory back from Russia and will not be allowed to join NATO.

And while Europe has demanded to be part of any talks about the Ukrainian settlement, Trump and his team have shown little interest in bringing the allies on board.

Hegseth insisted that NATO should play no role in any future military mission to police the peace in Ukraine and that any peacekeeping troops should not be covered by the part of NATO’s founding treaty that obliges all allies to come to the aid of any member under attack.

“For Russia, the fact that for now it looks like it’s going to be Russia and the United States outlining the scheme for cessation of hostilities and potential resolution of the conflict or turning it into frozen conflict will be happening between Moscow and Washington, and Kyiv and European capitals will be a sideshow here,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

Many in Europe seemed flabbergasted by Washington’s drastic policy change.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who co-chairs the European Council on Foreign Relations. said on social platform X.

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mocked what he described as the EU and NATO “stupor” after the Trump-Putin call, saying that “many in the West, starting with the EU leaders, were stunned when a normal, basic conversation between two well-mannered, polite people took place.”

“I’m very sorry, but the Western reaction shows that there are practically no such people left there,” Lavrov said.

Expanding a US-Russian agenda

Trump posted on social media that he and Putin both “reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many!”

Those words were music to Putin’s ears. He has made the enormous Soviet suffering and sacrifice during World War II a key ideological pillar and a rallying point for the country, as well as a justification of its claim of a superpower status.

“Trump borrowed a lot of Putin’s talking points about the role of Russia in World War II and all of the multiple casualties,” Gabuev said.

Putin, in turn, has been praising Trump even before the call, echoing his repeated claim that he would have prevented the hostilities in Ukraine had he been in office. Putin also has endorsed Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election.

Trump said his campaign motto of “COMMON SENSE” was cited by Putin in the conversation, adding that “we both believe very strongly in it.”

He said they “agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s nations” and added that they would “probably” meet in Saudi Arabia in the near future.

The various global issues that Trump said he discussed with Putin — including the Middle East, energy markets, the dollar and AI — reflected the broad agenda that the Kremlin leader has long sought to address, seeking to regain Moscow’s Cold War-era status of a superpower on par with the U.S.

“The way that Trump frames this new approach, the way that he talks about his first official on-the-record conversation with President Putin, is definitely seen as a symbolic win by Moscow,” Gabuev said. “It’s really a discussion on peer competitor or what Moscow sees as kind of peer great power. It is much broader than just Ukraine.”