Kremlin response to Ukraine ceasefire hints at Putin’s dilemma
There were “certainly reasons to be cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of peace in Ukraine, the Kremlin said Friday, after President Donald Trump’s envoy met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
The comments by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov after Putin met with Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff echoed those of the Russian president, who said Thursday that he in theory accepted the ceasefire proposed by the United States and Ukraine — but only on terms tantamount to a victory over Ukraine.
It was an emphatic “yes, but.”
“We agree with the proposals to stop the hostilities,” Putin said in a speech. But only if it leads “to long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of this crisis.”
That term — “root causes” — is a reference to long-held Russian grievances about what it sees as NATO’s eastward expansion. Western officials and analysts reject this, saying Putin wants to subjugate Ukraine, drawing it into Russia’s sphere of influence and away from its European tilt.
Despite flirting with the Trump administration, there is little evidence Putin has shifted from his core war goals: cementing his land grabs in Ukraine and stopping it from ever joining NATO. Even so, Trump on Thursday called Putin’s remark “a promising statement.”
In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump called his administration’s discussions with Putin “very good and productive,” expressing optimism “that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end.”
Switching to all caps, Trump highlighted the stakes of the ceasefire, while positioning himself as a peacemaker by noting that thousands of Ukrainian troops are “completely surrounded by the Russian military, and in a very bad and vulnerable position.”
“I have strongly requested to President Putin that their lives be spared. This would be a horrible massacre, one not seen since World War II. God bless them all!!!” he added.
Many officials and experts across Ukraine and Europe are far less impressed.
During his nightly address Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Putin’s words “manipulative.”
“Putin often does this — he does not say ‘no’ directly, but he does it in such a way that practically everything only delays it and makes normal decisions impossible,” he said, adding, “Putin, of course, is afraid to tell President Trump directly that he wants to continue this war, that he wants to kill Ukrainians.”
Indeed, hours after Putin spoke, his military fired 27 drones at Ukraine overnight into Friday, Ukraine’s Armed Forces said.
Some were shot down, according to Ukraine’s military, but one hit a civilian hospital in the western village of Zolochiv, setting fire to the building and injuring one staff member.
In the southern city of Kherson, NBC News found a scene of destruction after Russia’s latest bombing, which occurs most nights.
Rescue workers were clearing rubble and fixing power lines in a residential area where several homes were blown apart in what they said was a Russian glide bomb attack the day before.
Mykola Vorobjovskii, 69, said he was inside his house when it was destroyed.
“Putin is a liar,” Vorobjovskii told NBC News, choking back tears as he stood next to the wreckage of his home. “He calls black white and white black. He said he is liberating Ukraine. He liberated me from my house, job and car.”
Some Western experts believe the Russian leader is in a tight spot and that his evasive response was an attempt to balance two competing realities.
First, the Kremlin has no reason to accept a truce unless it delivers him a favorable outcome; and second, he wants to achieve a settlement with the White House while it is led by a president amenable to Moscow, said Jonathan Eyal, a director at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.
“It’s not in Putin’s interest to get a ceasefire now,” Eyal said Friday. “However, he cannot afford to annoy the American president, and expose and humiliate him with an outright rejection.”
The deal on offer to Putin is not going to improve, Eyal said, adding that the Russian president has “got an amazing opportunity to return to the global stage and [escape] from his isolation — with the help of the United States,” he added. So “he’s got to try to grab this deal without making too many concessions on Ukraine, and that’s his dilemma.”
Officials in Kyiv will be hoping to use Putin’s “evasive” response to “help convince their American colleagues that the Kremlin dictator is not genuinely interested in ending the war,” wrote Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian think tank.
While Putin may entertain a truce with terms favorable to Moscow, he will not accept an independent Ukrainian state on Russia’s border, Bielieskov wrote for the Atlantic Council.
“This does not mean that current U.S.-led peace efforts are entirely futile, but it is vital to recognize that freezing the conflict along the current front lines will not be enough to end the war.”
