Vladimir Putin was enjoying himself. On stage at an annual meeting of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs in Moscow on 18 March, the Russian leader had been holding forth for close to an hour when the host, Alexander Shokhin, suggested it was time to wrap things up. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, had reminded him that he was due to speak to Donald Trump at that very moment, Shokhin said, looking nervously at his watch. “Never mind,” Putin said, waving away Shokin’s concern. “That’s his job.” The audience erupted in laughter. Putin clarified that he was talking about Peskov, but the joke was on Trump. The underlying message was clear: Putin was in no particular hurry to talk to the US president.
When the two leaders did speak an hour later, Putin’s nonchalance turned out to be justified. Where Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had been shouted down and kicked out of the White House after raising the question of security guarantees with Trump in February, Putin earned praise. Commending their “very good and productive” conversation afterwards, Trump announced on social media that they had agreed “an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure”, with the understanding that they would then be “working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War”.
In fact, what they had agreed, according to the Kremlin, was an “energy infrastructure” ceasefire, which was not an act of charity on Putin’s behalf given Ukraine’s recent success in striking Russian oil refineries. Moreover, in what sounded very much like a threat calibrated to appeal to Trump’s oft-repeated fears that the conflict could spiral into a Third World War, Putin warned that the only way to prevent the war from escalating was to end foreign military aid and intelligence-sharing with Kyiv. In other words, unless Ukraine is abandoned by its allies and forced to surrender, he intends to continue the war.
This is not because the Russian military is making rapid advances on the battlefield. While Russian forces – supported by North Korean troops – have made significant progress in recent weeks in reclaiming much of the territory Ukraine had held in the Kursk region of southern Russia since last summer, the offensive in eastern Ukraine appears to have stalled. But the geopolitical fault lines have shifted. With Trump now in power, Putin sees an opportunity to dismember Ukraine and divide Europe. At a minimum, he hopes to secure sovereignty over the four Ukrainian regions he claims to have annexed, but does not yet fully control – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – along with Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. He will likely demand Ukraine’s permanent neutrality – meaning it forswears membership of Nato, and perhaps also the European Union – along with restrictions on the size of its military. He wants to see new elections that he hopes will remove Zelensky and bring a more pliant leader to power. He will not accept the presence of European troops as part of any eventual peace deal because that would make it harder to resume the war should that be necessary. As Putin sees it, either Ukraine resumes its rightful place in Russia’s orbit, or it must be destroyed.
Even six months ago, these demands would have been fanciful. Russia appeared to be in serious danger of losing the war for much of the first year, and its subsequent gains have been incremental and hard fought. But the America that vowed to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes” during the Biden administration is gone. Past experience has taught Putin that Trump is highly susceptible to flattery and the allure of a lucrative deal. At the same time, Trump seems barely able to conceal his contempt for Zelensky, who he has called “a dictator”, and the European Union, which he insists was “formed to screw the US”. It would almost be autocratic malpractice for Putin not to press that advantage.
There are certainly reasons why Putin might welcome temporary respite in the form of a ceasefire, and a chance to rebuild his battered military. Over the past three years, UK defence intelligence estimates that around 900,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, with as many as 250,000 dead. Russia has lost almost 12,000 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, hundreds of aircraft, and more than 20 of its vaunted Black Sea Fleet, including its flagship, Moskva. While the Russian economy has weathered the storm of Western sanctions far better than many international observers once predicted, there are signs of significant strain.
Interest rates have reached 21 per cent, with annual inflation at 10 per cent, and prices for staple foods such as butter were up by as much as 30 per cent last year. There is an ongoing shortage of workers due to the number of Russian citizens who have fled abroad and men who have been mobilised to fight. But this doesn’t mean Putin is desperate for an end to the war. The recent moves to shift the country’s economy on to a war footing, embracing what some scholars have called “military Keynesianism”, appears sustainable, at least in the short and medium term.
The Russian soldiers who are fighting in Ukraine come, disproportionately, from the country’s poorest regions. There, the lucrative contracts offered to fight – and the payouts given to the families of the fallen – have contributed a grim form of stimulus, with a sharp increase in the funds flowing to areas historically neglected by Moscow. Meanwhile, the decrepit factories and industrial cities that once fuelled the Soviet Union’s powerful military have been resurrected, churning out new tanks and artillery shells.
The renewed Russian military-industrial complex, a sector long synonymous with corruption, offers new opportunities for the wealthy elite around Putin to enrich themselves. This is bad news for the Russian economy as a whole, but as long as there is money to pay new recruits and reward his courtiers, the sheer cost of this war is unlikely to be determinative in the Kremlin’s calculus.
The regime’s confidence is buoyed by the steady flow of military hardware from North Korea and Iran. Russia is building a new factory to mass-produce Iranian Shahed-136 drones. Beijing also continues to supply the crucial components needed to make Russian missiles and drones. Despite Western sanctions, the revenue from sales of Russian oil and gas, including to democracies such as India and Brazil, continues to flow. Putin would surely prefer that international sanctions are eased and Russia is invited back into international forums, such as the G7. He might also like to be able to travel without the fear of arrest on an outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court for his alleged war crimes. But crushing Ukraine and restoring Russia’s sphere of influence matter more.
On the domestic political front, recent public opinion surveys conducted by the independent Levada Centre find growing support for an end to the conflict. Around 60 per cent of respondents in a February poll said they were in favour of negotiations to stop the fighting, but not at any cost. Seen through the prism of Kremlin-controlled media and war bloggers on social media, roughly three-quarters said that Russia was winning on the battlefield and so they did not support making major concessions. Nearly 80 per cent said that Russia should continue the war even if that meant that Western sanctions continue. Meanwhile, Putin’s approval rating is close to an all-time high at 88 per cent.
In fact, the most concerted domestic pressure on Putin since the war began has come from the nationalist hardliners to his right, who have urged him on to ever greater aggression. It will not be lost on Putin that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion in 2023 – when the late Wagner Group leader marched on the Russian capital with his mercenary troops – began with his grievances about the lack of ammunition and demands to escalate the war.
There are dangers for Putin, too, in the prospect of demobilising more than half a million troops, particularly if the returning veterans have reason to question whether their sacrifices were justified. “A near-constant state of military mobilisation is therefore one of the least politically risky configurations for Putin,” concluded Kateryna Stepanenko in a February report for the Institute for the Study of War. As well as reducing the threat to his own hold on power, this dynamic will also “allow him to sustain a protracted or future war against Ukraine and/or prepare for a confrontation with Nato”.
It would be one thing if Putin was confronted by a Western alliance that was demonstrably united. If Donald Trump had pre-empted his outreach to Moscow by travelling to Kyiv to announce a surge in American weaponry, for instance, and declared that the US commitment to Nato was ironclad, then Putin might have been more inclined to give a little ground. Instead, he sees an American leader who seems to have bought wholesale his narrative that the Russian invasion was justified by Nato’s expansion, and that the real barrier to peace is Zelensky. “You see the hatred he’s got for Putin,” Trump remarked during his conversation with Zelensky at the White House in February. “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”
Trump has already cut off weapons and intelligence to Kyiv once since returning to power, and there is little prospect of another significant package of military aid passing the US Congress, where the Republicans hold the majorities in both the House and the Senate. Ukraine has stepped up its own weapons production, with the capacity to produce around one million drones per year, and major European players, such as France, Germany and the UK, have pledged more support. But a European Union initiative led by the bloc’s new top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, to rush through €40bn worth of support to Ukraine this year, appears to have been scuttled by intra-EU bickering.
At the same time, Trump appears determined to normalise relations with Russia, apparently enthralled by the prospect of future business deals. “We’d like to have more trade with Russia,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News after his call with Putin on 18 March. “They have a big chunk of real estate, the biggest in the world. They have things that we could use.” Those “things” could include deposits of rare earth minerals in Russia and the Russian-held regions of Ukraine, where Putin has proposed joint exploration projects with US companies, a deal to work together on aluminium production in Siberia and perhaps even cooperation on Arctic shipping routes.
Putin has also embarked on a predictable charm offensive. In his first remarks after Trump won the election in November, he praised him for acting “like a real man” after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer. He has repeated Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, and that the war in Ukraine would not have started if he had been the president.
Putin recently presented the US envoy Steve Witkoff with a portrait of Trump that he claimed to have personally commissioned. Trump was “clearly touched by it”, Witkoff reported, adding that, “this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to re-establish through, by the way, a simple word called communication”. Perhaps. But another word might have been “manipulation”.
One danger Putin faces is that Trump might eventually tire of the lack of progress towards ending the war. He might grow frustrated with the Kremlin’s penchant for prevarication and endless delay. After reports emerged from the White House on 23 March, for instance, that the Trump administration hoped to reach a truce between Russia and Ukraine by Easter, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, pushed back, stressing they were “only at the beginning of this path”. Trump could yet walk away from negotiations, as he did with Kim Jong Un during their summit in Hanoi in 2019, when he judged that the North Korean leader had no real interest in a compromise. Or he might simply lose interest, judging that his best shot at winning the Nobel Peace Prize – reportedly an obsession – lies elsewhere.
Hence the imperative for Putin to maintain the impression of forward momentum. On 25 March the White House announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop fighting in the Black Sea, still far short of a full ceasefire. Russia could also offer imaginary acts of clemency. Earlier this month, for example, Kremlin propagandists spread the narrative that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were encircled in Kursk. Trump was moved by their apparent plight, posting on Truth Social on 14 March: “AT THIS VERY MOMENT, THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN TROOPS ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY THE RUSSIAN MILITARY, AND IN A VERY BAD AND VULNERABLE POSITION.” He said he had asked Putin to spare their lives, a request the Russian president granted when they spoke on the phone four days later. “The Kremlin is willing to throw Trump a few insignificant or even fictitious bones,” noted Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, to preserve “the trend toward the normalisation of bilateral relations”.
Putin also knows that Trump’s time in office is limited. Short of a change in the US constitution, he will be out of power within four years. He could lose control of Congress in less than two. The Russian leader will take every concession that Trump is prepared to offer, but he has shown no sign so far of conceding anything of value in return. He has little incentive to jeopardise Russia’s deepening relationship with China, as some of Trump’s more credulous supporters have suggested.
Putin knows the next US president could reverse course, and he is unlikely to bet his own security on the vagaries of American democracy. Instead, he will endeavour to make the most of Trump’s presidency, seeding the path ahead with breadcrumbs of victory and tantalising deals – perhaps he will even throw in a ceasefire or two – while focusing on his endgame of forcing Ukraine to accept its inevitable future as a bigger, more prosperous version of Belarus. For the first time since the start of the war, Putin might assess that such an outcome is finally within his grasp. It is only a matter of time and American indifference.
[See also: Nato on the brink]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame