May 20, 2025
Yves Smith
Because the fake diplomacy game of the Ukraine-EU side (often but not always joined by the US) talking past the Russians has developed the feel of Groundhog Day, it’s easy to overlook the slow and continuing erosion in Ukraine’s position. Mind you, the latter is inevitable given the certainty of either a Ukraine military defeat or capitulation.[1]
But the EU (both key national leaders and the European Commission), aided and abetted by US Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, have made enough noise about supporting Ukraine in the Anglosphere, and more importantly, the European press, to enable Zelensky to remain in Kiev after his sell-by date. The intense messaging has kept up the fiction that Europe can meaningfully support Ukraine, either now or in anything less than many years. And the latter assumes voters in those states won’t turf out governments that put fighting the bogeyman of Russia over social expenditures, particularly when households are already undue budget stress due to high energy costs, and are likely face a new higher level of food prices due to climate change.
We just had the much-ballyhooed Trump-Putin talk, after Trump failed to persuade Putin to meet him in Istanbul.[2] Trump not only is trying to hype but apparently actually believes that protracted international disputes can be resolved mano-a-mano, when the complexity of creating even kinda-sorta agreements entails lots of work by experts before detailed terms can be devised and agreed.3 Russia has been in the awkward position of having to tell Team Trump “no” or the functional equivalent thereof while not embarrassing the Big Man. Having some level of communication with the US, even if little comes of it in the end, is vastly better than the dangerous cutoff under the Biden Administration.
Even though the general view among Russia-Ukraine war watchers is that not much came out of the Trump-Putin phone call, there actually were some real shifts, but like the slow Russian grind on the battlefield, they don’t look like much when viewed from a distance.
This process is analogous to price discovery in a bankruptcy or a financial crisis, here a mark to reality. We’ve had some over the course of this conflict, like the press more and more admitting that Ukraine will lose the war, and that the Russian military is dominant on the continent and only getting better.
So yes, on the surface, as Simplicius and others point out, Putin one more time had to repeat his mantra of no end to hostilities until the root causes were resolved. And just as the sun comes up in the east, Zelensky reiterated his maximalist demands of no surrender of territory and no demilitarization.
But there’s already been one visible, even if not terribly important, change. As former British diplomat Ian Proud described, one yapping across-the-pond dog that thought he could manipulate Trump, Keir Starmer, has been marginalized, via being excluded from Trump’s post-Putin-call to European leaders.
Below are some additional shifts in the stances of the various parties.
One is that the Russian position that there will be no ceasefire ex in the context of a settlement of the underlying causes of the conflict4 seems finally to be recognized among Western leaders as insurmountable. Lavrov, in a presentation earlier this week after the Istanbul talks but before the Trump-Putin chat (at 19:21), remarked, “By the way, as you know, over the past three or four days, the West has somehow pushed the word “ceasefire” into the background.”
Consistent with that, despite widespread expectations that Trump would press Putin on a ceasefire, Trump again ran into the Russian, “What about ‘no’ don’t you understand?”. There is no readout from either side, so we can’t be certain. Putin immediately talked to the media so as to get in front of US efforts to spin what went down. He made it sound as if he deflected Trump’s demand, although the actual discussion may have been more, erm, pointed:
The President of the United States shared his position on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective ways towards achieving peace.
I take the Trump Truth Social post as an admission that the call did not go well:
Trump misrepresents the state of play to pretend he got a win, as in progress on his hobbyhorse of a ceasefire. “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations towards a Ceasefire.” WTF? They are negotiating already, even though the first session confirmed that there was no bargaining overlap between the positions of the two sides. Everyone was apparently pleasant despite that and the parties agreed to meet again to present written versions of their positions. They did agree to a big prisoner swap, so it is not as if nothing was accomplished.
A second bit of reality discovery is that Trump seems to finally be pulling the US out of the negotiations. The Financial Times agreed with this assessment, in its lead story, Donald Trump leaves Russia and Ukraine to settle war in talks. Admittedly the pink paper had insider detail to bolster our impression:
But two people briefed on the call with the European leaders said Trump was clear that he would pull the US back from engaging with the conflict and leave Ukraine and Russia to directly negotiate a ceasefire. He also made no promise of future US sanctions against Russia should Putin refuse any peace attempts.
One person familiar with the conversation said the leaders were stunned by the US president’s description of what was agreed. They added it was clear Trump was “not ready to put greater pressure” on Putin to come to the negotiating table in earnest.
Bloomberg has a similar take:
After two hours talking with Putin, Trump said on social media that Ukraine and Russia would “immediately start negotiations” toward a ceasefire — but possibly without the US. There was no sanctions threat, no demand for a time-line, and no pressure on the Russian leader.
After months of failing to move Putin closer to peace, they [European leaders] fear Trump is pulling back from his efforts to end the war, leaving Ukraine and its allies on their own.
One European official, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations, said leaders fear that Trump is disengaging from the diplomatic effort. Another said Trump had made it clear he didn’t want to impose more sanctions at this stage and was retreating from his own proposal for a ceasefire. The official added that leaders in Kyiv and elsewhere in Europe disagree with his plan for Russia and Ukraine to talk directly.
The US has been threatening to reduce support of Europe generally, as well as with respect to Project Ukraine, since the Munich Security Conference to leave the Europeans to their own devices with respect to Ukraine, but has remained very much involved. Alexander Mercouris has maintained for some time that the Russia-Ukraine negotiations would shift, as the Vietnam War negotiations did, to the US taking charge of talks in place of its proxy.
But there are several reasons to see why it was not likely to go this way. Despite the US and NATO driving this war, they do not have their own militaries on the ground (save as trainers or in sheep-dipped roles, like operating Patriot missile batteries). Not having lost 50,000 men means a much lower degree of exposure, even with the eyepopping expenditures and the draining of weapons stocks. In addition, the Trump Administration has no patience. Trump wants only showy, fast wins. It does not have the stomach or stick-to-itness that this sort of negotiation demands. And as many have pointed out, they don’t have the negotiators. Witkoff is as good as it gets, and he’s only one man who is ignorant of the history and of many many issues that come up in trying to settle a conflict.
Admittedly Trump has kept the US involvement in play. That may have been a function of Trump loving to have options and keeping everyone guessing as to what he will do to maximize his perceived importance.
Trump received European leaders multiple times, giving them a smidge of hope that he’d fall for their lame schemes to somehow corner him into more bigger US participation. He weirdly didn’t marginalize Keith Kellogg, but that appears to be because Kellogg had the only scheme that has the potential to get Trump his speedy claim of success. That was to get the Europeans to advocate for Kellogg’s and then Trump’s 30 day ceasefire scheme…with the threat of yet more (ineffective) sanctions if Russia did not fall into line. There apparently really is still a cohort that believes the Russian economy is a house of cards.
And Trump is famously mercurial. So perhaps he’ll be back to insisting the US be in the Ukraine jaw-jaw mix. And he can’t really escape US involvement. Biden entered into long-term contracts with arm-makers that will keep Ukraine on a drip feed. As Russia ramps up, these commitments are likely to amount to pouring money into a burn pit. But Trump can’t get out of that without risking Congressional ire (one supposes he could try declaring yet another emergency to divert them to China). And he similarly can’t cut off intel-sharing.
But Trump trying to fob negotiations off on the Pope sure looks like an effort to distance himself from the end game.
The third bit of reality discovery is no mention at all of the other expected big Trump ask, of a summit with Putin. Perhaps Trump is finding the meticulous Putin to be no fun.
Fourth is that what Putin graciously depicted as a concession of sorts to Trump is another Russian ratchet, an ask on which Ukraine will choke. From the Putin press talk:
We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements be reached.
This is too funny. Russia to propose that Russia and Ukraine work on a joint agreement? Or a joint statement of principles? Remember that after the initial Russia-US meeting in Riyadh, where they met for 12 hours the first day? The parties put off drafting a joint statement because they were too tired and announced they would do that the next day. But no such statement was ever issued because Ukraine, which was not a participant, nixed the draft text!
Now if there ever were to be a negotiated settlement, there would need to be a joint agreement, so on paper, what Putin is proposing is bog standard. But absent a regime change in Kiev, this is na ga happen. So this looks to be a show of being amenable, by using a completely orthodox recommendation to again show there is no deal to be had (mind you, I expect the gridlock to become official after the two sides present their conditions at the next round).
Nevertheless, all of these very incremental developments confirms what some commentators, such as Mark Sleboda (and yours truly) have been saying for some time: The bid-asked spread is yawning. There will be no deal. This war will be settled on the battlefield, when Russia deems fit. How far it has to go in terms of expenditure of men, materiel, and capture of territory before Ukraine cracks or capitulates is still very much an open question. But the general shape of what is coming is obvious, even if many in the West keep their heads stuck firmly in the ground.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
1 Capitulation is a not-sufficiently discussed endgame. Zelensky has demonstrated considerable survival skills. I’ve said a government in exile, say in London, might be in his future. But what happens to the actual government, the one running things in Ukraine, if Zelensky decamps? Admittedly, the answer in part depends on how many top Banderites also flee to declare themselves the true Ukraine.
2 This started with Zelensky demanding that Putin come to Turkiye to negotiate with him (as in a condition of having a negotiating session), but Trump had suggested a Putin meeting during his Middle East tour.
3 One example from the business world (which means this should not be unfamiliar to Trump) is that the normal process of settling on a non-binding letter of intent then leads to the negotiation of a definitive agreement. If both sides are competent, there is a great deal of wrangling. I’ve seen almost every line be argued in some negotiations.
4 I don’t take seriously the long list of “here is what we would need to enter into a ceasefire while negotiating” from Putin. Not that Putin does not mean what he says, that the Russias would agree if the West complied. But first, odds favor that by time the details, particularly monitoring, were sorted out, Russia could be in Paris. Second is that even if they were miraculously agreed, Ukraine would violate them, which means the war would still be on.
www.nakedcapitalism.com
Yves Smith
Because the fake diplomacy game of the Ukraine-EU side (often but not always joined by the US) talking past the Russians has developed the feel of Groundhog Day, it’s easy to overlook the slow and continuing erosion in Ukraine’s position. Mind you, the latter is inevitable given the certainty of either a Ukraine military defeat or capitulation.[1]
But the EU (both key national leaders and the European Commission), aided and abetted by US Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, have made enough noise about supporting Ukraine in the Anglosphere, and more importantly, the European press, to enable Zelensky to remain in Kiev after his sell-by date. The intense messaging has kept up the fiction that Europe can meaningfully support Ukraine, either now or in anything less than many years. And the latter assumes voters in those states won’t turf out governments that put fighting the bogeyman of Russia over social expenditures, particularly when households are already undue budget stress due to high energy costs, and are likely face a new higher level of food prices due to climate change.
We just had the much-ballyhooed Trump-Putin talk, after Trump failed to persuade Putin to meet him in Istanbul.[2] Trump not only is trying to hype but apparently actually believes that protracted international disputes can be resolved mano-a-mano, when the complexity of creating even kinda-sorta agreements entails lots of work by experts before detailed terms can be devised and agreed.3 Russia has been in the awkward position of having to tell Team Trump “no” or the functional equivalent thereof while not embarrassing the Big Man. Having some level of communication with the US, even if little comes of it in the end, is vastly better than the dangerous cutoff under the Biden Administration.
Even though the general view among Russia-Ukraine war watchers is that not much came out of the Trump-Putin phone call, there actually were some real shifts, but like the slow Russian grind on the battlefield, they don’t look like much when viewed from a distance.
This process is analogous to price discovery in a bankruptcy or a financial crisis, here a mark to reality. We’ve had some over the course of this conflict, like the press more and more admitting that Ukraine will lose the war, and that the Russian military is dominant on the continent and only getting better.
So yes, on the surface, as Simplicius and others point out, Putin one more time had to repeat his mantra of no end to hostilities until the root causes were resolved. And just as the sun comes up in the east, Zelensky reiterated his maximalist demands of no surrender of territory and no demilitarization.
But there’s already been one visible, even if not terribly important, change. As former British diplomat Ian Proud described, one yapping across-the-pond dog that thought he could manipulate Trump, Keir Starmer, has been marginalized, via being excluded from Trump’s post-Putin-call to European leaders.
Below are some additional shifts in the stances of the various parties.
One is that the Russian position that there will be no ceasefire ex in the context of a settlement of the underlying causes of the conflict4 seems finally to be recognized among Western leaders as insurmountable. Lavrov, in a presentation earlier this week after the Istanbul talks but before the Trump-Putin chat (at 19:21), remarked, “By the way, as you know, over the past three or four days, the West has somehow pushed the word “ceasefire” into the background.”
Consistent with that, despite widespread expectations that Trump would press Putin on a ceasefire, Trump again ran into the Russian, “What about ‘no’ don’t you understand?”. There is no readout from either side, so we can’t be certain. Putin immediately talked to the media so as to get in front of US efforts to spin what went down. He made it sound as if he deflected Trump’s demand, although the actual discussion may have been more, erm, pointed:
The President of the United States shared his position on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective ways towards achieving peace.
I take the Trump Truth Social post as an admission that the call did not go well:
Trump misrepresents the state of play to pretend he got a win, as in progress on his hobbyhorse of a ceasefire. “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations towards a Ceasefire.” WTF? They are negotiating already, even though the first session confirmed that there was no bargaining overlap between the positions of the two sides. Everyone was apparently pleasant despite that and the parties agreed to meet again to present written versions of their positions. They did agree to a big prisoner swap, so it is not as if nothing was accomplished.
A second bit of reality discovery is that Trump seems to finally be pulling the US out of the negotiations. The Financial Times agreed with this assessment, in its lead story, Donald Trump leaves Russia and Ukraine to settle war in talks. Admittedly the pink paper had insider detail to bolster our impression:
But two people briefed on the call with the European leaders said Trump was clear that he would pull the US back from engaging with the conflict and leave Ukraine and Russia to directly negotiate a ceasefire. He also made no promise of future US sanctions against Russia should Putin refuse any peace attempts.
One person familiar with the conversation said the leaders were stunned by the US president’s description of what was agreed. They added it was clear Trump was “not ready to put greater pressure” on Putin to come to the negotiating table in earnest.
Bloomberg has a similar take:
After two hours talking with Putin, Trump said on social media that Ukraine and Russia would “immediately start negotiations” toward a ceasefire — but possibly without the US. There was no sanctions threat, no demand for a time-line, and no pressure on the Russian leader.
After months of failing to move Putin closer to peace, they [European leaders] fear Trump is pulling back from his efforts to end the war, leaving Ukraine and its allies on their own.
One European official, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations, said leaders fear that Trump is disengaging from the diplomatic effort. Another said Trump had made it clear he didn’t want to impose more sanctions at this stage and was retreating from his own proposal for a ceasefire. The official added that leaders in Kyiv and elsewhere in Europe disagree with his plan for Russia and Ukraine to talk directly.
The US has been threatening to reduce support of Europe generally, as well as with respect to Project Ukraine, since the Munich Security Conference to leave the Europeans to their own devices with respect to Ukraine, but has remained very much involved. Alexander Mercouris has maintained for some time that the Russia-Ukraine negotiations would shift, as the Vietnam War negotiations did, to the US taking charge of talks in place of its proxy.
But there are several reasons to see why it was not likely to go this way. Despite the US and NATO driving this war, they do not have their own militaries on the ground (save as trainers or in sheep-dipped roles, like operating Patriot missile batteries). Not having lost 50,000 men means a much lower degree of exposure, even with the eyepopping expenditures and the draining of weapons stocks. In addition, the Trump Administration has no patience. Trump wants only showy, fast wins. It does not have the stomach or stick-to-itness that this sort of negotiation demands. And as many have pointed out, they don’t have the negotiators. Witkoff is as good as it gets, and he’s only one man who is ignorant of the history and of many many issues that come up in trying to settle a conflict.
Admittedly Trump has kept the US involvement in play. That may have been a function of Trump loving to have options and keeping everyone guessing as to what he will do to maximize his perceived importance.
Trump received European leaders multiple times, giving them a smidge of hope that he’d fall for their lame schemes to somehow corner him into more bigger US participation. He weirdly didn’t marginalize Keith Kellogg, but that appears to be because Kellogg had the only scheme that has the potential to get Trump his speedy claim of success. That was to get the Europeans to advocate for Kellogg’s and then Trump’s 30 day ceasefire scheme…with the threat of yet more (ineffective) sanctions if Russia did not fall into line. There apparently really is still a cohort that believes the Russian economy is a house of cards.
And Trump is famously mercurial. So perhaps he’ll be back to insisting the US be in the Ukraine jaw-jaw mix. And he can’t really escape US involvement. Biden entered into long-term contracts with arm-makers that will keep Ukraine on a drip feed. As Russia ramps up, these commitments are likely to amount to pouring money into a burn pit. But Trump can’t get out of that without risking Congressional ire (one supposes he could try declaring yet another emergency to divert them to China). And he similarly can’t cut off intel-sharing.
But Trump trying to fob negotiations off on the Pope sure looks like an effort to distance himself from the end game.
The third bit of reality discovery is no mention at all of the other expected big Trump ask, of a summit with Putin. Perhaps Trump is finding the meticulous Putin to be no fun.
Fourth is that what Putin graciously depicted as a concession of sorts to Trump is another Russian ratchet, an ask on which Ukraine will choke. From the Putin press talk:
We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements be reached.
This is too funny. Russia to propose that Russia and Ukraine work on a joint agreement? Or a joint statement of principles? Remember that after the initial Russia-US meeting in Riyadh, where they met for 12 hours the first day? The parties put off drafting a joint statement because they were too tired and announced they would do that the next day. But no such statement was ever issued because Ukraine, which was not a participant, nixed the draft text!
Now if there ever were to be a negotiated settlement, there would need to be a joint agreement, so on paper, what Putin is proposing is bog standard. But absent a regime change in Kiev, this is na ga happen. So this looks to be a show of being amenable, by using a completely orthodox recommendation to again show there is no deal to be had (mind you, I expect the gridlock to become official after the two sides present their conditions at the next round).
Nevertheless, all of these very incremental developments confirms what some commentators, such as Mark Sleboda (and yours truly) have been saying for some time: The bid-asked spread is yawning. There will be no deal. This war will be settled on the battlefield, when Russia deems fit. How far it has to go in terms of expenditure of men, materiel, and capture of territory before Ukraine cracks or capitulates is still very much an open question. But the general shape of what is coming is obvious, even if many in the West keep their heads stuck firmly in the ground.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
1 Capitulation is a not-sufficiently discussed endgame. Zelensky has demonstrated considerable survival skills. I’ve said a government in exile, say in London, might be in his future. But what happens to the actual government, the one running things in Ukraine, if Zelensky decamps? Admittedly, the answer in part depends on how many top Banderites also flee to declare themselves the true Ukraine.
2 This started with Zelensky demanding that Putin come to Turkiye to negotiate with him (as in a condition of having a negotiating session), but Trump had suggested a Putin meeting during his Middle East tour.
3 One example from the business world (which means this should not be unfamiliar to Trump) is that the normal process of settling on a non-binding letter of intent then leads to the negotiation of a definitive agreement. If both sides are competent, there is a great deal of wrangling. I’ve seen almost every line be argued in some negotiations.
4 I don’t take seriously the long list of “here is what we would need to enter into a ceasefire while negotiating” from Putin. Not that Putin does not mean what he says, that the Russias would agree if the West complied. But first, odds favor that by time the details, particularly monitoring, were sorted out, Russia could be in Paris. Second is that even if they were miraculously agreed, Ukraine would violate them, which means the war would still be on.
Russia's Attritional Approach to Ukraine Negotiations Shows Gains in Trump-Putin Phone Call | naked capitalism
Despite the tendency to see the Trump-Putin call as a nothingburger, it added to the exposure of uncomfortable truths for the West.
