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Putin takes a tough stance at the start with Trump
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Putin takes a tough stance at the start with Trump

vLadimir Putin didn’t come running. He had his spokesman react on Wednesday to the outcome of the US presidential election campaign and announce that the Kremlin had no plans to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory. If the US wants the peace deal Trump promised during the campaign, the Russians have signaled he must earn it, and the price to Ukraine would be particularly high.

“The message is: If you want a deal, you have to crawl for it,” said Nina Khrushcheva, an expert on Russian politics and foreign policy at the New School. “Putin feels like he’s starting with Trump from a position of strength.”

This makes the Russian president an outsider among European heads of state and government. On Wednesday, many of them issued flattering statements and pledged to work with the Trump administration. But the Kremlin noted wryly that the U.S. and Russia continued to wage war “both directly and indirectly,” while Putin’s terms for ending that war, his spokesman said, “remain unchanged and are well known in Washington.” In fact, Russia has in the In recent years, a number of conditions have been set for ending the war in Ukraine. Most of these were brushed aside by the Biden administration, which viewed them as ultimatums rather than good-faith negotiating efforts.

For example, in December 2021, just months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden reached out to Putin with an offer to discuss a comprehensive agreement on international affairs ranging from nuclear and cybersecurity to the future of Europe and the NATO alliance . Putin’s response amounted to a middle finger. If Biden wants a summit with Putin, the Kremlin said the U.S. should calm the mood by completely withdrawing its forces from Eastern Europe and retreating to positions it held before Putin came to power. As the senior Russian envoy put it at the time: “The US needs to pack up and go back to where it was in 1997.”

The US rejected this idea outright. Instead of a summit, the White House promised sanctions that would cripple the Russian economy. Since then, Putin’s occasional overtures to the Americans have varied greatly in tone and content, depending on how the war in Ukraine is progressing. During a low point for the Russians in the fall of 2022, when they suffered the third in a series of humiliating battlefield losses, Putin’s rhetoric softened significantly. He even referred to the Ukrainians as his “partners” and stressed that Russia had always been ready to negotiate an agreement to end the war.

Such talk evaporated when fighting turned in Russia’s favor last year. In an ultimatum issued in July, Putin demanded Ukraine’s withdrawal from four regions partially occupied by Russia. He also called on the West to lift all sanctions against Russia. During his presidential campaign, Trump signaled his willingness to consider this demand, saying that sanctions “should be used very judiciously” to protect the dollar’s power in the global economy. When asked if he had kept in touch with Putin in recent years, Trump declined to answer. But it would be a “smart thing,” he said, for a U.S. president to talk to the Russians.

What Putin would expect from such talks is no secret. Based on his statements in recent years, he wants to militarily castrate Ukraine, cut off all paths to NATO membership and gain permanent control over its southern and eastern regions. Neither Trump nor his close advisers have expressed willingness to comply with these demands. Vice President-elect JD Vance said on the campaign trail that a peace deal could turn the current front line into a “demilitarized zone” that would be “heavily fortified” to prevent the Russians from invading Ukraine.

Ukrainians resisted this idea. President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “too radical,” even if it fell well short of Putin’s demands. Others in Trump’s environment have formulated significantly tougher conditions for Russia. Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state and CIA director under Trump, has called on the next administration to tighten sanctions, lift all restrictions on the use of American weapons in Ukraine and implement a $500 billion “lend-lease” program $ to help Ukrainians buy the weapons they need from U.S. manufacturers.

“I hope we get the strategy right,” Pompeo told TIME during a visit to Kyiv in September. Although Congress has approved more than $174 billion in aid to Ukraine since the invasion began, “President Biden has squandered it,” Pompeo added. “Too slow, too little, too late, too reserved.”

Given the diversity of views in Trump’s orbit and the lack of a strategy to end the war in Ukraine, the Russians will likely wait and see where the administration lands on the issue. You are in no hurry to close a deal. Across the front line, particularly in the eastern Donbass region, Russian forces have made slow but steady progress this year, decimating towns with artillery and aerial bombs before overrunning them. The US estimates that Russia lost more than 600,000 dead and wounded soldiers. But Putin has demonstrated a remarkable ability to absorb these losses and recruit more soldiers without provoking serious backlash among the Russian population.

“There is no pressure on him to negotiate,” said a former senior U.S. official who has high-level contacts in both Washington and Moscow. If Trump decides to make a deal with Putin, “the Russians will be interested,” he says. “I’m sure they’re very aware of the range of options. But they won’t respond until the US decides what to offer.” In other words, it will be up to Trump to make the first move toward Putin.

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