A Meeting with Putin: Step Toward Peace or a Trap?

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After the first trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, sources in the U.S. administration suggested that a face-to-face meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin could take place in the near future.

Political fiction? Perhaps. But the trilateral meeting itself seemed like political fiction until recently—and yet, it happened.

When we habitually say that Putin is not so much conducting negotiations as imitating them—that is, deliberately stalling—we must understand that even imitation requires an agenda. The key point is that the Russian president is clearly not interested in a confrontation with his American counterpart and is doing everything possible to avoid one.

And here, it seems, the Kremlin’s repertoire of tricks meant to hypnotize the audience has been exhausted.

Initially, in the first months after Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, there were numerous phone calls and conversations about the possibility of ending the war: the American president insisted on a ceasefire, while the Russian president politely refused.

Later, when Trump began speaking of “great phone calls” that produced no tangible results, Putin proposed “unblocking” the Istanbul process—without any real progress. A bilateral meeting took place in Anchorage, yet no agreements were reached there either, aside from subsequent references to the meeting’s “spirit,” which Moscow continues to interpret as the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from non-occupied areas of Donbas.

Then, in an attempt to prevent Ukraine from receiving long-range weapons, Putin arranged a meeting with Trump in Budapest. However, this summit collapsed after the foreign policy chiefs failed to agree on any potential framework. An irritated Trump responded by imposing sanctions on Russian oil giants.

This was followed by a so-called “peace plan” proposed by the Russian side to the White House. But to discuss it—and to demonstrate any seriousness of intent—a meeting was required. And now the process has reached this stage: Russia has agreed to a trilateral meeting to project a commitment to peace.  Yet Washington is likely to push Moscow toward further steps—potentially even a meeting between the presidents themselves. Such a summit would represent an undeniable diplomatic triumph for Donald Trump. After all, bringing Zelenskyy and Putin to the same table is far more difficult than, for example, arranging talks between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who met repeatedly before their respective visits to the Oval Office.

Does this mean we are approaching the end of the war? No—negotiations, even at the highest level, guarantee nothing of the sort. However, there is another, far more important formula: the real state of the Russian economy and Putin’s willingness to risk new Western sanctions.

If the Russian president concludes that his economic resources will not allow him to sustain the war for several more years and that additional sanctions would significantly worsen the country’s economic situation, he may agree to meet with Zelenskyy and halt the hostilities.

Can we already see signs of such a shift in intentions, even against the backdrop of the brutal bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and efforts to leave the civilian population without heat or electricity? To some extent, yes. One such sign is the trilateral talks themselves, as well as the composition of the Russian delegation, where the familiar “historian” Vladimir Medinsky is no longer present, and where we now see senior military figures, including the head of the Main Directorate of the General Staff, Admiral Igor Kostyukov. These are officials brought not for decoration, but to discuss genuinely serious matters.

This suggests that several possible сценарії for the future of the conflict are currently on Putin’s desk. It remains to be seen which of them the Kremlin leader will choose—and what, exactly, will compel him to opt for peace.

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