The announcement from the White House on Monday was bold, hopeful, and seemingly unanimous: the next step toward peace would be a historic, face-to-face meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
For a fleeting moment, a path through the storm of war appeared.
Then came the cold, coded, and deeply revealing response from Moscow.
There was no talk of presidents. Instead, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov, briefing reporters on a call between Donald Trump and Putin, spoke only of studying the “opportunity of raising the level of representatives.”
The language was deliberate, bureaucratic, and designed to pour cold water on the idea.
While Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later insisted Russia does “not refuse any forms of work,” he added the critical caveat that any top-level contact “must be prepared with the utmost care.”
In the arcane language of the Kremlin, the message was unmistakable: We are nowhere near ready, and this may never happen.
A question of pride and propaganda
To understand the Kremlin’s profound reluctance is to understand the very nature of the man who started this war. For Putin, this is not a conflict between two states; it is the correction of what he has called a historical mistake.
He has described Ukraine as “an inalienable part of (Russia’s) own history, culture and spiritual space.” To sit across from Zelenskiy would be to legitimize the very statehood he has sought to erase.
As Orysia Lutsevich, the director of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program, puts it, if this meeting happens, Putin “will have to accept the failure of sitting down with a president he considers a joke from a country that doesn’t exist.”
It would also require an impossible reversal of the narrative he has painstakingly crafted for his own people.
After years of state television brainwashing, how could he justify a meeting with the man he has relentlessly branded a Nazi and a puppet?
“(Putin) so much brainwashed Russians on state television that Zelensky’s a Nazi… that Zelensky’s illegitimate, why is he suddenly talking to him?” Lutsevich argued, as quoted by CNN.
This is a regime that rarely even refers to Zelenskiy by name, opting for the dismissive moniker of “the Kyiv regime.”
The Trump factor: a tool, not a broker
In the Kremlin’s strategic calculation, there is only one scenario in which a meeting becomes plausible: a guaranteed victory. Putin will not risk an “ambush” where his demands are rejected on a global stage.
According to Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Putin could still take the meeting, but only if “the key demands must be on the table and Zelensky must be ok to talk about it.”
And this is where Donald Trump enters the equation. Stanovaya argues that, in Moscow’s eyes, Trump is not a neutral mediator but a potential instrument of Russian will.
“Trump is seen as an enabler of (the) Russian vision of the settlement and for that the United States is supposed to work with Kyiv to push them to be more flexible, to be more open to Russian demands,” she told CNN.
Trump himself seems to be slowly grasping this reality. After boldly posting on Monday that he “began the arrangements for a meeting,” his tone had shifted by Tuesday morning.
“I sort of set it up with Putin and Zelensky, and you know, they’re the ones that have to call the shots. We’re, we’re 7,000 miles away,” he told Fox News, a clear step back from his role as the master dealmaker.
The view from a position of strength
From Putin’s perspective, there is simply no reason to acquiesce now. He has made zero concessions and has been rewarded with a grand summit in Alaska, the dropping of demands for a ceasefire, and the crumbling of sanctions threats.
If diplomatic pressure on Kyiv fails to yield results, he can simply escalate the nightly rain of drones and missiles.
The only wild card left is who Trump will blame when this peace effort inevitably fails. For now, Zelenskiy and his European allies appear to be playing a savvy game of their own.
By enthusiastically supporting direct talks, they are calling Putin’s bluff.
They are forcing him into a corner where he must either engage in genuine diplomacy or reveal himself to the world—and perhaps even to Donald Trump—as the true and only obstacle to peace.
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