A détente struggling to be born

Donald Trump’s strategy of focusing on a limited ceasefire in the Ukraine war as a means to kickstart broader peace talks has made some headway. The turning point came as Vladimir Putin, while rejecting a full ceasefire, signalled openness to a narrower truce focused on energy infrastructure and Black Sea. It resulted in two separate meetings of US officials with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Riyadh to hash out the details.

From the US state department readouts on the 12-hour talks, it seems the US and Russian delegations agreed on five areas: to ensure safe navigation, eschew the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea; to develop measures for implementing an agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities; to welcome third countries toward implementation of the energy and maritime agreements; to continue efforts to achieve a durable and lasting peace.

Most importantly, the US agreed to tweak the western sanctions that hinder Russia’s agricultural and fertiliser exports by lowering maritime insurance costs and enhancing access to ports and payment systems for transactions. In this low-hanging fruit of US-Russia détente that is struggling to be born, are we getting the first glimpse of a potential rollback of sanctions against Russia? Time will tell.

On the eve of the negotiations in Riyadh, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff made a number of compelling statements in a 90-minute interview by Tucker Carlson, which provided hints of a real possibility of the US reconciling with Russia’s operative framework of the war. Witkoff called the territorial issue “the elephant in the room”, but acknowledged, “They’re Russian-speaking [regions]. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”

Witkoff said, “The Russians are de facto in control of these territories. The question is, will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories? Can Zelenskyy survive politically if he acknowledges this? This is the central issue in the conflict.”Witkoff speaking for Trump implied that resolving the war could lead to broader US-Russia cooperation, and that the two countries were thinking about “integrating” their energy policies in the Arctic, sharing sea lanes, collaborating on artificial intelligence and sending LNG “into Europe together”.

Witkoff, whose ancestral homeland is Russia, asked: “Who doesn’t want to have a world where Russia and the US are doing, collaboratively, good things together?” He relayed an extraordinary level of commiseration between Putin and Trump. Economic deals are a priority for Trump, who has emphasised that improved ties between the two countries have a “huge upside”, including geopolitical stability.

But many hurdles need to be overcome. Putin has hardly any manoeuvring space to make territorial concessions. Contrary to his strongman image, the reality is that Putin is a great patriot who is known to be acutely sensitive to domestic public opinion, especially regarding Ukraine—where ‘time is just memory mixed with desire’, to borrow from a poet—and the perception of time also happens to be shaped by experiences and millennial aspirations.

There is vehement opposition within Ukraine, too, to ceding territory to Russia. Zelenskyy will find it impossible to meet the Russian demands. Besides, Europe and NATO are not in step with Trump. The Europeans are ridiculing Trump. And Europeans and Zelenskyy are working in tandem to sabotage the US-Russia reset and make sure Trump’s peace process won’t fly. They have convinced themselves that the war is far from lost.

The flag carriers in the European camp—British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron—have leverage over Trump because of his domestic opposition, with whom they are well-connected. They overvalue themselves in the world order, but the optics favour them at the moment to a disproportionate extent; whereas the reality is that Europeans are making themselves irrelevant because, in the final analysis, they are in no position to fight a continental war on a 2000-km frontline against the million-strong Russian army. Stalin would have asked, “How many divisions does Starmer have?” The chilling answer is just 60,000 soldiers.

Herein lies the great paradox of the Ukraine endgame. There is no question that Trump is eager to end the war because his opponents from the Deep State have regrouped and launched a massive counterattack against him and Elon Musk. He is simply not ready to withdraw unilaterally, fearing humiliation. This is precisely the trap laid by Joe Biden.

Therefore, Trump is prioritising and managing his political strings to achieve his overriding goal, which is a historic reset with Russia, a precondition for realising his vision of a new world order. Without ending the Ukraine war, Trump risks getting bogged down.

On the other hand, Russia stares at the reality that the war may end only with the capitulation of the Zelenskyy regime, which will be a wake-up call for Europeans. Putin, while addressing a conclave of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs in Moscow on March 18—his core constituency of conservative nationalists drawn from far-flung regions across 11 time zones—cautioned that a ceasefire is not to be expected anytime soon, the road ahead is difficult and Western sanctions will remain for the foreseeable future.

In a closed-door session later, unreported in the state media, Putin apparently held out assurances. The Kommersant’s Andrey Kolesnikov wrote: “The point at the discussion is that what has been achieved cannot be taken away from Russia and that Crimea, Sevastopol and four well-known territories (Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson) should be recognised as part of Russia… If this happens in the near future, Russia—the participants of the meeting told me—will not lay claim to Odessa and other territories (Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, etc) now belonging to Ukraine.

“But even this point may shift, because ‘they don’t have time to dig in’. At the same time, the participants of the meeting note that, in their opinion, Putin believes that it is possible to come to an agreement with Trump, and in general, he actually believes Trump.”

Something, for sure, has to give way.

M K Bhadrakumar, former diplomat