Flying back from Florida on Wednesday night on Air Force One, Donald Trump was asked if he trusted Russia to negotiate in good faith when it came to settling the war in Ukraine.
“I do. I think the Russians want to see the war end, I really do,” the US president said during a 14-minute long briefing with reporters.
Trump bluntly insisted that Moscow had the upper hand in the conflict. “They’ve taken a lot of territory,” he said of Russia. “So they have the cards.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump consistently claimed that he would seek to end the war in Ukraine as soon as he took office in the White House again in January.
But even so, the speed with which Trump has rushed over the past 10 days to set up direct negotiations with Russia has been dizzying — stunning America’s western allies and opening the prospect that Nato unity will be torn apart. Ukraine has so far been left out of the negotiations.
The steps taken by Trump have included a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a high-level meeting between his diplomatic national security officials and their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia, and the dispatching of Treasury secretary Scott Bessent and Keith Kellogg, a retired general, to Kyiv to put pressure on Ukraine to start making concessions.
Trump has also added fierce public criticism of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him a “dictator” who is clinging to power, and blaming him for Russia’s aggression in the first place.
This approach marks a stunning U-turn on US policy towards Ukraine since Russia’s full-blown invasion began three years ago. Under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, Washington pursued a strategy that combined staunch support for Ukraine combined with diplomatic isolation and financial punishment of Putin’s government.
In effect, the US is now treating Moscow as a great power in international relations in a way that it has not done for at least two decades — perhaps since before Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, its southern neighbour, started to raise alarm bells in the west about his intentions.
The shift not only has ramifications for US ties with Russia and Ukraine, but for America’s relationship with Nato and the EU. The pillars of transatlantic relations for decades are now being severely tested.
In the weeks after Trump was re-elected, America’s allies in Europe, Republicans in Congress and the Washington foreign policy establishment were reassured by pledges that he would pursue an approach of “peace through strength”.
Instead, as Trump has swiftly moved much closer to Moscow, they are scrambling to understand what his new approach means for the war in Ukraine — and for America’s position in an increasingly multipolar world.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the transatlantic security programme at CNAS, says it has become apparent that Trump’s priority is “bringing an end to the war at any cost” without regard to the ramifications.
“The thing that makes me so worried is that Putin is essentially going to extract concessions from the United States in a way that only strengthens his position for more aggression in the future,” says Kendall-Taylor. “It’s only been an invitation for Putin to escalate further.”
Jason Crow, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Colorado, tells the FT that, “like most wars”, the Ukraine conflict would probably end at the negotiating table, but that Trump was not going about it the right way.
“To start negotiations by meeting with the adversary . . . as opposed to our partner, Ukraine, sent exactly the wrong message and got this off on the wrong foot,” he says.
US policy on Russia and Ukraine seemed to be “erratic” and inconsistent, shifting “by the day and by the tweet”, Crow adds. “[Members of the administration] obviously are issuing contradictory statements, and doing work at times at odds with each other.”
The whirlwind rapprochement between the US and Russia began when Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, began secret negotiations with Russian officials to arrange a prisoner swap for American teacher Marc Fogel, who had been detained in August 2021 for trying to enter Russia with a small amount of cannabis. Witkoff went to Moscow to bring Fogel home earlier this month, and met there with Putin for more than three hours.
“It had a lot of knock-on effect. I would think that it was a show of good faith on the part of President Putin . . . and it’s led to a lot of positivity,” Witkoff says.
Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio was already scheduled to be in Riyadh this week for talks on the Gaza war, so the Saudi capital was a logical place to begin negotiations with Russia about Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the Saudis hosted senior American and Russian officials in the ornate Diriyah Palace, where the teams spoke for four and a half hours, including a working lunch of steak, scallops, lamb, fish and caviar.
Afterwards, US officials said they felt that Russian officials came with open minds, raising historical grievances but not lecturing for hours on end.
“I came away today convinced that they are willing to begin to engage in a serious process to determine how, how quickly, and through what mechanism, can an end be brought to this war,” Rubio said after the talks. “Whether we can ultimately reach that outcome will obviously depend on every side in this conflict’s willingness to agree to certain things.”
In a party that still features a number of national security hawks, some Republicans are growing nervous about Trump’s Russia policy. “To the extent that the White House said that Ukraine started the war, I disagree,” says John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana. “I think Vladimir Putin started the war. I also believe through bitter experience that Vladimir Putin is a gangster.”
But administration officials have emphatically defended the overture to Russia and sought to nip any criticism from within their ranks in the bud — arguing that they are trying to resolve a conflict that has been dragging on for three years.
“How are you going to end the war unless you’re talking to Russia?” JD Vance, the vice-president, asked on Thursday. “You’ve got to talk to everybody involved in the fighting if you actually want to bring the conflict to a close.”
“Peace is in the interest of Russia, it’s in the interest of Ukraine. It’s in the interest of Europe,” he went on. “But, most importantly, peace is in the interest of the American people.”
Before Witkoff’s Moscow trip, Trump and his team had seemed far more concerned that Putin appeared less interested than Zelenskyy in coming to the negotiating table. They even warned they might ramp up US sanctions on Russian energy to put more pressure on Moscow.
But by this week the dynamic had changed dramatically. US officials say Ukraine’s rejection of a deal on critical mineral rights offered by Bessent, guaranteeing the US half of all revenues, soured Trump’s mood towards Zelenskyy.
“President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelenskyy, the fact that he hasn’t come to the table, that he hasn’t been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered, I think he eventually will get to that point and I hope so very quickly,” the president’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told reporters at the White House on Thursday.
Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, says he believes that Trump came to the conclusion he had to do “something dramatic” to break the “inertia” in the conflict on both sides, and decided it was better to take on Ukraine than Russia. “Considering both his relative distaste for Zelenskyy and the potential economic cost of going after Russia with meaningfully tightened oil sanctions, he picked Ukraine,” Bishop says.
The personal criticism of Zelenskyy has been particularly jarring to some. “He thinks he and Putin are friends, and he doesn’t like Zelenskyy,” says John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and a former US ambassador to the UN. “Trump is repeating things that the Russians would like the rest of the world to believe that simply aren’t true.”
He adds, “Every time you turn around, Trump is giving Putin a bigger advantage.”
Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says the US is “essentially selling out a democracy fighting for its freedom against an authoritarian dictator that is one of our oldest and longest adversaries”.
“The problem I see is, what does the US get out of this?” he says. “What concessions is Russia making? What do we get from Russia?”
Most Republicans — including those who have attacked Putin in the past — are still giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Senator Rick Scott of Florida tells the Financial Times that in his conversations with the president, Trump “wants Russia to lose, he wants Ukraine to win, and he wants the war to end. So he’s going to hold Putin accountable.”
“I do not trust Putin. He’s a despicable person,” Scott adds.
On Wednesday, John Thune, the Senate majority leader, told reporters, “What I’m in support of is a peaceful outcome and result in Ukraine, and I think right now the administration, the president and his team are working to achieve that.”
“You’ve got to give them some space,” he added.
Bolton says the damage done by the lurch towards Russia could still be reversed. “To take Trump as a reflection of a permanent change in American policy is a mistake,” he argues. “There’s no majority in Congress for this. Although people are intimidated and won’t say it publicly, I don’t think there’s a majority support for it in the country as well.”
“We had Russia totally isolated and had Russia on the run — severely on the run — and this is just giving Putin a lifeline,” says William Pomeranz, a senior scholar and Russia expert at the Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank.
Whether a deal actually happens will largely depend on how much of its territory Ukraine is willing to concede, and the existence of security guarantees to deter further aggression from Moscow. Ukraine will be pushing for the strongest guarantees from its allies in the west, but Moscow may balk at most, if not all, of those demands.
Anja Manuel, a former state department official in the George W Bush administration, now at the Aspen Security Forum, says just “giving up on Ukraine” would be a disastrous policy, but she still sees scope for a deal.
“You could imagine a Ukraine that gives up a little bit of land in exchange for a democratic, western-looking, prosperous regime that is totally viable,” she says. EU and even Nato membership could eventually be possible, she continues.
For now, though, Trump has again left the world rattled and reeling by his rapid return to engagement with Putin. “It points to a direction of a much more realist, multipolar world,” says Bergmann. “But I think it’s one where the United States is much more lonely.”
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