Peace with Ukraine, with a ceasefire to herald it, is Vladimir Putin’s call. It is clear the Russian President has not been overly enthused with Donald Trump’s mediation. He may have boasted — when not in office — that he could stop the war and bring peace to Ukraine within a day in the White House. But the deal-making US President could only nudge his counterpart in the direction of peace.
The impossible conditions that Mr Putin may have placed on the Ukraine President Zelenskyy — one of which was to withdraw troops from large swaths of Ukrainian territory — may have rendered the negotiations a somewhat passive one in which the only good result was a swapping of 1,000 prisoners. A two-hour Washington-Moscow phone call appears to have barely scratched the surface of what Russia may have been expected to do as the invader to bring about an elusive peace.
A near three-and-a-half years of striking at Ukraine, its cities and its people, and its power infrastructure does not seem to have satiated Russia whose leader might be nursing far bigger ambitions about keeping large parts of Ukraine and the whole of the country if only his army could take over Ukraine. Trump’s offer of commerce to both Russia and Ukraine sounds a childish appeal from a personality who is known to love two things — profit and peace for whom peace is only a means to profit.
Direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine began last week in Istanbul even before Trump’s long-distance calls and Mr Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plea to Trump not to take any decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine being involved in it sounded reasonable enough. The prospects of trade benefits and rebuilding appear doubly distant when drones are raining down on Ukrainian cities even as Trump talk of a mediated ceasefire fills the air.
The only positive to emerge from all this is the aggressor and the victim are talking even as Ukraine is hoping if world leaders can secure a ceasefire as a prelude to a lasting peace. But we know the Ukraine of today is negotiating from a weak position, with its territorial conquests in Kursk all but wiped out while 20 per cent of its territory is now occupied by Russia, besides having lost Crimea 11 years ago.
