Russia Brushes Off Trump’s Threats on Ukraine

President Trump’s initial attempts to lure Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table on Ukraine have been met with what essentially amounts to a shrug.

“We don’t see anything new here,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday, a day after Trump took to Truth Social to warn he would be willing to increase the economic pressure on Moscow after a raft of sanctions were applied following its invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.

Putin’s inner circle has reason to regard Trump’s threat as hollow. While the war has drained the country’s resources and manpower, the Kremlin believes it has successfully stood up against sanctions and that Moscow has the capacity to withstand at least another year of the conflict while Russians continue to sign up to serve on the front line.

To be sure, Russia’s economy is showing some stress-related cracks and is being hammered by inflation as it drives billions of dollars into the country’s defense industry. Inducements for Russians to sign up and benefits for the families of those who have been killed or injured are biting into its budget. Western officials say Russia has suffered about 700,000 casualties in Ukraine.

But while it is losing cash and men, analysts say Russia has enough of both to continue fighting for now and has the upper hand. Russian forces have slowly chewed westward through Ukraine, threatening cities and towns that are important logistics hubs for the Ukrainian military. They now control almost one-fifth of the country.

“We have imbalances and inflation, but it’s not so acute to demand the stop of all hostilities,” said Vasily Kashin, director of the Department for World Economy and International Affairs at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics. “We are in a position to press on with our demands…and if Ukraine’s defense continues to collapse as it is now, it would be wiser for the other side to agree to our terms.

With another U.S. aid package for Ukraine off the table, Trump’s warning appears to be too little to force a change in Russia’s basic demands, which include de facto recognition of the land they have gained, an end to NATO-Ukraine ties and a vastly reduced Ukrainian military.

Rather, the Kremlin is inclined to see Trump’s statement on Truth Social as posturing ahead of any talks, as opposed to part of the negotiations themselves. Moscow is still waiting for a more substantial overture from Washington or a telephone call that Trump has suggested would happen soon.

“Putin’s ready, we’re waiting for signals,” Peskov said on Friday about a possible call with Trump. “Everyone is ready.”

Some Russian officials have voiced cautious optimism since Trump’s November victory in the U.S. presidential election. Putin has angled for a summit with Trump in which the two leaders could hash out a settlement amenable to Moscow, analysts say, shutting out a Ukrainian leadership he has dismissed as illegitimate.

Kyiv, meanwhile, has conceded that regaining all the territory lost to Russia during the war is an unrealistic goal, but it is asking for security guarantees that will make it impossible for Russia to regroup forces after a cease-fire and attack it again. Russia has said Ukraine must take into account “the new territorial realities,” in effect permanently ceding the land it has lost in battle.

In the broader scope of the yearslong public back-and-forth between officials in the U.S., Ukraine and Russia, analysts say Putin is likely to treat the latest warning by Trump as little more than a ploy by the new U.S. president to shore up his base and demonstrate the tough stance he has promised in regard to U.S. adversaries.

“Putin sees these statements as part of a political game. He doesn’t take them seriously,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Paris-based political scientist who maintains contacts with people close to the Kremlin. “He’s ready for any scenario and has no illusions that a deal will come quick.”

Stanovaya argues that the strain on Russia’s economy, while a concern for Putin, will have little effect on his calculus vis-à-vis Ukraine. For the Russian president, who has been in power for 25 years, the war is a historic opportunity to unify the two Orthodox Christian countries and arrest what he has long denounced as a creeping Western expansion into Russia’s backyard.

Russia preceded its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by setting out a series of unrealistic demands that were rejected by the West, including forcing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization out of Eastern Europe and securing a promise from the West that Ukraine would never become a member of the military bloc.

The ambitious settlement currently favored by Putin contains elements of that earlier vision. For the Russian leader, Stanovaya says it would ideally involve a sweeping geopolitical arrangement of the kind agreed upon in Yalta, Crimea, by leaders of the U.K., U.S. and the Soviet Union toward the end of World War II, which presaged a postwar reorganization of Eastern Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence.

“Of course Putin wants to stop the war, but he wants it exclusively on Russian terms,” said Stanovaya. “The war in Ukraine is a way to bring the West to the negotiating table about a Yalta 2.0.”

A draft peace treaty drawn up by Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul in April 2022 is an indication of the sort of deal Putin may be after.

The blueprint would effectively turn Ukraine into a neutered state permanently vulnerable to Russian military aggression, bar the country from rearming with Western support and leave Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, under Moscow’s control. Putin has cited the Istanbul formula as a basis for talks on Ukraine.

Trump, for his part, has conceded that it could take far longer to end the war than he suggested on the campaign trail, when he said he would get a deal done within 24 hours of returning to the White House. After his inauguration, the president acknowledged that Ukraine “wants to make a deal” while Russia might not.

Political analysts suggest Trump’s threat of new sanctions reflects his realization that a deal could take some time—and could also drive Russia further from the negotiating table.

“The Russians always want to be spoken to directly; the Kremlin was already annoyed by his messaging style in the first term,” said Oleg Ignatov, Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and resolving conflict. “It’s not how you deal with Russians.”