Ukraine conflict ceasefire talks will probably fail
President Donald Trump is making promises to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he can’t keep and demands on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he can’t accept.
The Ukraine conflict ceasefire talks will probably fail. US President Donald Trump is making promises to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he can’t keep and demands on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he can’t accept.
"Zelenskiy’s trying to back out of the rare earth deal and if he does that he’s got some problems, big, big problems," Trump told reporters over the weekend.
Trump has put impossible conditions on this harsh rare earths mineral deal that no government would accept as it undermines the very sovereignty of the country. He is asking Zelenskiy to sign away the rights to the things are valuable in the country, including its metals, oil and gas. Zelenskiy has backed out as the deal jeopardises Ukraine’s EU accession bid and he gets nothing in return – no security guarantees, no commitment to arms or financial support assuming the war continues. Trump’s minerals deal is little more than a shake down. The Biden administration sent money to Kyiv as grants, that don’t have to be paid back, not as loans which do.
At the same time, Trump is making promises he can’t keep to Putin. As part of the new Black Sea grain deal on March 25, Trump seems to have promised to take financial sanctions off Russia’s agricultural bank, Rosselkhozbank. As bne IntelliNews reported in a deep dive into sanctions relief, he can’t do that without the agreement of the EU which has also sanctioned the bank, and SWIFT, which is based in Belgium, is under EU law.
Trump is doing broadbrush stroke deals that make great headlines but Putin is adding conditions that Trump can’t meet. The same was true for the 30-day ceasefire deal: Putin agree to it in principle but in practice said that there would be no deal until arms deliveries, including those from Europe, were halted and a monitoring system was put in place. Neither of those things have happened and strikes against energy infrastructure continue. It has been reported that "both sides have violated the agreements"; the agreements were never in place as the conditions were never met.
This mismatch between headlines and details will doom all Trump’s deals unless the US team goes the extra mile to thrash out detailed agreements on conditions as well.
“Trump’s self-conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia,” the Big Serge, a well-known commentator, said in a recent blogpost.
Trump’s approach is essentially superficial; he wants fast agreements on big issues and is willing to promise anything to get them. The Russian side, however, is focused on addressing the core issues that caused the war – its deep-seated security concerns – and is provisionally agreeing provided its conditions are met. As Alexandra Prokopenko, a political economy analyst, pointed out in a recent paper, Putin was prepared to continue the war before Trump won the election and he is prepared to continue it now if the ceasefire talks fail. Trump wants a ceasefire more than Putin so Putin is pushing to see how much he can get. But Trump is also willing to walk away and abandon Ukraine if a deal proves evasive.
Talk is already turning to failure. Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs Grigory Karasin, who was on the team, said after the second round of ceasefire talks in Riyadh that he didn’t expect a deal to be reached this year. He complained that the US side’s position was “chaotic” although the atmosphere was positive. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov followed up a few days later this weekend in an interview with Ria Novosti saying that the month-long ceasefire agreement is already close to collapse.
Unrealistic demands
Things are going equally badly for the Ukrainian side. They are not negotiating with the US team, but fielding outrageous demands for reparations, despite being the victim, not the perpetrator, of the conflict. The White House issued a fourth version of the minerals deal on March 28 with terms that are even harsher than the previous drafts. Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) has called in the lawyers and sent back an amended compromise version, in the hope of keeping the US on board, but hope is fading fast. Yet another version of the deal is unlikely to sit well with Trump, whose attention span is famously limited.
To make matters worse, the money and arms that Ukraine is currently receiving from the US are all still Biden allocations approved at the end of last year. Trump has signed off on no new allocations. He has in effect already cut Ukraine off, although it will take six months for the existing allocations to wind down.
Trump may still be talking about Ukraine, but as it becomes increasing apparent no quick and easy deal is going to happen, there are signs he is already getting bored of the topic and wants to move on to Iran.
Trump sent a letter calling on Tehran to sketch out the terms for talks. But again, Trump threatened Iran with “very, very bad” things if it fails to engage. The US has been moving powerful B-2 stealth bombers to its base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean that carry bunker-busting munitions and can strike targets in both Yemen and Iran.
The big difference between the US’ idea of the transactional multipolar world model and Russia and China's idea is that while Xi and Putin are very clear that they have no right to comment on or interfere in another country’s business, the US is acting as if it owns the world.
Its laws extend everywhere. It has kept the right to bombing or annex anyone without a UN mandate or reference to the UN Charter. Trump is blatantly using his leverage and power for US profit. The latest example was a letter to top European countries to comply with the US decision to end its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programmes if they want to keep their fat US government contracts.
Of course, the aggressive rhetoric may just be a negotiating position bluster, albeit an extremely crude one. At the same time US Secretary for Defence Pete Hegseth released a draft new foreign policy in mid-March that has downgraded Russia to a secondary threat and promises to complete withdraw from the international stage on every issue except Taiwan, where the US must prepare with war with China.
Likewise, Trump has threatened Putin with sanctions and tariffs if the Ukraine talks break down, and now he is threatening Zelenskiy with the same.
This is not the transactional model that Xi and Putin want to see. They have both complained about US efforts to maintain and use its military power and are calling for these disputes to be settled in the UN. But ironically both China and Russia are using the same tactics – China’s mooted invasion of Taiwan and Russia’s actual invasion of Ukraine.