Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing
Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.
Reporting from Berlin
A red-carpet welcome for the Russian leader in Alaska had done nothing to bring peace. A planned summit in Budapest had fallen apart. Mr. Trump had started to acknowledge that Mr. Putin might just be playing him, with no intention of making peace. Faint Ukrainian hopes glimmered of a Trump-Putin break.
But the Russian president was playing a longer game.
Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.
On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would buy Russian diesel, asking for no concessions from Mr. Putin in return. The Trump administration went on to pressure Ukraine to stop striking oil refineries — Kyiv’s most powerful lever — and suspended Russia sanctions that Mr. Trump had just signed into law. Mr. Trump declared that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”
The diesel deal was in part a political calculation by Mr. Trump before the midterm elections, as he tries to lower fuel prices. But that action and others that followed also reflect the president’s long-evident affinity for Mr. Putin, which the Russian leader has assiduously cultivated even while continuing the war and denying Mr. Trump a coveted prize.
Ever since Mr. Trump returned to office, Russia has sought to separate the conflict in Ukraine from potential business agreements and closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The Trump administration held back, even as it slashed aid to Ukraine, largely continuing a Biden administration policy of refraining from economic deals with Russia until Mr. Putin stopped the war.
The White House now says such deals will help Russia see the benefits of peace. The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Mr. Putin, meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, had agreed to talks with Ukraine and the United States next month. But they would involve relatively low-level representatives, and a Russian official played down the Kremlin’s openness to forging a comprehensive agreement now.
Playing to Mr. Trump’s style of personal diplomacy, Mr. Putin has portrayed actions that benefit Russia — like selling diesel to the United States — as favors to the American leader. That includes the release on Wednesday of Stephen James Hubbard, 74, a Michigan teacher whom the State Department called “wrongfully detained” by Russia.
Mr. Trump described the release — which was not part of any prisoner swap — as a sign of Mr. Putin’s high regard for him. Referring to himself in the third person, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that “the United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return.”
But later on Wednesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that Russia would not have let Mr. Hubbard go if sanctions had remained in place. The stage was also set, analysts said, by the diesel agreement and the potential for other business deals, giving Mr. Putin the sort of diplomatic victory he is craving after Western nations piled sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
“Even this small amount of normalization helped Putin to really deactivate Trump and the U.S. as potential helpers or enablers of Ukraine,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
Newly emboldened, Moscow is moving to assert itself as a global power equal to the United States and China, promoting a trilateral summit among them in November.
In my personal view, victory has already been achieved,” the pro-Putin journalist Marina Akhmedova wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is not just a matter of the 20 to 25 percent of territory we have liberated,” she added, referring Russian-occupied land in Ukraine. “It is also about how the United States now engages with Russia.”
Many analysts call the economic incentives offered by Mr. Trump the wrong solution to a war being waged over political and security questions. Still, during his visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, Mr. Witkoff said that the diesel deal was “another example of what we can achieve by working together.” Mr. Putin, in turn, suggested a deal on Russian fertilizer.
Other potential agreements are on the horizon. Russia and the United States have discussed the sale of the international assets of the Russian energy giant Lukoil to an investor group that includes the U.S. government, The New York Times reported. The Times also reported that American negotiators have pitched the idea of Europe resuming purchases of large quantities of Russian gas piped through Ukraine.
After the St. Petersburg meeting, Mr. Putin’s economic envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, said that there was “no question” that Russian-U.S. economic cooperation “will strengthen.” He said that Mr. Putin had talked not only about a potential fertilizer deal with Mr. Witkoff, but also about “different projects such as data centers, many projects in energy and energy cooperation.”
The diesel deal bolstered an argument Moscow has made that the Western countries that imposed sanctions on Russia would suffer without cheap Russian energy and other business ties. Mr. Putin has sought to engage with Washington to prove that Russia has too much heft to be ignored, analysts said.
Russia “tried all of last year to establish the idea that you can do stuff bilaterally with the U.S. short of settling the war in Ukraine,” said Hanna Notte, the author of “We Shall Outlast Them,” a book about Russia’s wartime foreign policy.
“It wasn’t just the economic deals,” she added. “They also wanted to talk about the Middle East. They wanted to talk about the Arctic. They wanted to talk about nuclear arms control.”
Russia’s goal, she said, was to advance “this whole idea that you can compartmentalize the relationship with the United States and do stuff together even while you’re still prosecuting the war.”
The Trump administration’s offering of carrots to end the war is likely to fail, Ms. Notte predicted.
Sam Charap, a Russia analyst at the RAND Corporation, and other analysts noted that an irony of Russia’s rapprochement with Washington was that it may no longer be a silver bullet to a settlement of the war on Moscow’s terms.
Europe has taken on a bigger role in providing Kyiv with economic and political support, and relations between Mr. Putin and many European leaders have completely broken down.
“Winning the Americans isn’t the prize it once was,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It was the whole game two years ago. Now it’s a much smaller piece.”
The Kremlin is also aware that Mr. Trump could change tack again after the midterms, Mr. Shapiro said. Russian decision makers, he said, see the U.S. president as “very inconsistent” and feel little security about his approach to Russia.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Maoscow.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.