Russia Immediately Dumps Cold Water on Trump’s Ukraine Wins

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his meeting with Donald Trump Monday may have been their “best” yet—not a particularly high bar—but that doesn’t mean that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to play ball.

During CNN’s News Night Monday, Josh Rogin, lead global security analyst for CNN, said that it had certainly been a “much better meeting than the last time.”

“But I think it’d be going too far to say that Putin has agreed to a meeting with Zelenskiy,” Rogin added. “In fact, the Kremlin put out a statement right after this meeting and they said, ‘No, we’ll have meetings at a high level,’ but they didn’t say with Putin and Zelenskiy.”

Trump reportedly called Putin in the middle of his meeting with several European leaders to begin making arrangements for a trilateral summit between himself, Zelenskiy, and Putin. But as Rogin pointed out, Russia hasn’t actually agreed to such a meeting. In a statement, Moscow said only that the leaders had discussed “the idea of raising the level of Russian and Ukrainian representation in the negotiations.”

Rogin continued, “And then they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re totally against NATO troops in Ukraine.’ So, the two big deliverables out of this meeting, Russia has already rejected, which kind of gets to the core of the issue, which is President Trump said 50 times today that he believes Putin wants peace. And I don’t know, call me skeptical. I don’t think that’s true. I just don’t buy it.

“And I’m basing that on all the evidence. Everything Putin says. Everything Putin does. Everything we know. And that’s what you see those European leaders doing. They’re testing that. They’re saying to President Trump, ‘If he gives you a ceasefire, he’s gonna stop killing Ukrainians at least for a couple days, then maybe he’s serious. And if he doesn’t, then he’s not serious.”

At the end of the day, the clearest signal that Putin could give that he wants to end the killing is, well, to stop killing. But he hasn’t done that.

Trump already appears to have agreed with Putin’s demands to permanently seize Crimea, and to block Ukraine from its long-awaited NATO membership. Moscow has demanded even more territory from Ukraine, while Zelenskiy has insisted that his country will not cede land to Russia.

Donald Trump believes he’s added yet another peace agreement to his roster.

Speaking with Fox & Friends Tuesday morning about his efforts to negotiate a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, the president claimed that he had settled seven wars.

“I’ve solved seven wars. We ended seven wars,” Trump said. “I thought this would be one of the easier ones, and this has turned out to be the toughest one.”

“India, Pakistan, these were big ones, also. All big ones. And some going for 31, 32 years. One for 35 years,” he continued. “I got them all done. But this one is the one that is the most difficult, and I thought it would be an easy one. I hope President [Vladimir] Putin is gonna be good, and if he’s not it’s going to be a rough situation. And I hope that President [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility also. The thing is a mess.”

Trump has so far claimed responsibility for peace in several international conflicts, including between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Rwanda, between India and Pakistan, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia, and for “doing the Abraham Accords.”

But his sudden claim to have ended seven wars is especially remarkable, considering it’s up a digit from Monday, when he boasted on Truth Social that his actions had settled “6 wars in 6 months,” including “a possible Nuclear disaster.”

“I’m only here to stop it, not to prosecute it any further,” Trump said, blaming the Ukraine-Russia war on former President Joe Biden. “It would have NEVER happened if I was president.”

What’s more incredible: Trump posted Monday that his self-fulfilled accomplishments would be done without people who had long-term knowledge or expertise of Russia and Ukraine’s history, referring to such individuals as “STUPID.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing, and I don’t need the advice of people who have been working on all of these conflicts for years, and were never able to do a thing to stop them,” Trump wrote. “They are ‘STUPID’ people, with no common sense, intelligence, or understanding, and they only make the current R/U disaster more difficult to FIX. Despite all of my lightweight and very jealous critics, I’ll get it done—I always do!!!”

President Donald Trump thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has operated with impunity since he invaded Ukraine, is somehow now ready to come to the table.

A hot mic caught Trump suggesting under his breath that Putin was willing to negotiate after the two leaders met in Alaska for a summit.

“I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand?” he said before his press conference with Zelenskiy. “As crazy as it sounds.”

It does sound crazy. Trump and Putin haven’t been able to make a deal for six months, and they certainly didn’t reach one last Friday.

Any “deal” that could come about would be without a ceasefire, something that has been a huge priority for Zelenskiy. It would also involve Ukraine ceding Crimea and promising to never join NATO, which would be more capitulation than agreement.

Putin has been lying outright to Trump, but one face-to-face meeting, likely accompanied by some surface-level flattery, has the president twirling his hair and hoping that Putin thinks fondly of him, all while the Russian president continues his assault on Ukrainian sovereignty.

Before his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, President Donald Trump made his goal clear: “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire,” he told Fox News. The president also warned Putin of “very severe consequences” if one wasn’t reached.

With the summit past and no ceasefire in sight, that objective doesn’t seem so important to Trump anymore.

“I don’t think you need a ceasefire,” he told reporters Monday, sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “You know, if you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires.”

This is a curious argument. For one, it relies on a dubious talking point about the president having ended “six wars in six months.” It’s also misleading, in part, because it includes temporary ceasefires—which Trump has indeed described, explicitly, as “ceasefires,” confusing them with lasting settlements.

When more European leaders came to the White House Monday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pushed back against Trump’s newfound dismissiveness toward a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire.

“I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire,” Merz said, adding that peace efforts depend on “at least a ceasefire from the beginning of the serious negotiations, from next step on, so I would like to emphasize this aspect and would like to see a ceasefire [by] the next meeting.”

Trump refused to budge, repeating his earlier argument.

“In the six wars that I’ve settled, I haven’t had a ceasefire. We just got into negotiations,” the president said. “If we can do the ceasefire, great,” he continued, before beginning a sentence that trailed off in quintessential Trump fashion: “And if we don’t do a ceasefire—because many other points were given to us. Many, many points were given to us. Great points.”

President Donald Trump wanted his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week to be a grand display of power in an attempt to pressure the Russian autocrat into a ceasefire. 

Instead, for some, it came off as an act of fealty to one of the world’s most detested leaders.  

“Look at what happened on Friday. U.S. military personnel, in uniform, literally were on their hands and knees rolling out a red carpet for the most murderous dictator of the twenty-first century,” Democratic Representative and former Army Ranger Jason Crow told Face the Nation on Sunday. “Somebody who has kidnapped and is holding prisoner tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. Somebody who started this whole war.…  This is a historic embarrassment and defeat for U.S. foreign policy,” he concluded. 

Those on the center-right reacted similarly. 

“I think Trump may have thought that having a B-2 flyover accompanied by F-22s, the aircraft that, of course, were involved in Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran, was somehow suggesting a show of force to Putin,” former ambassador and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman told The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol. “I don’t think that’s how Putin saw it. I think he saw it as a mark of respect, actually.… What it did was resuscitate him both domestically and internationally as a respected player on the international stage.” 

Russian politicians and media cast a celebratory light on the summit. 

“Putin gave Trump nothing, but still got everything he wanted. Trump finally listened to his demands,” an anonymous Russian foreign policy official told The Guardian.

“Western media are on the verge of completely losing it,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova declared, prior to the summit. “For three years they told everyone Russia was isolated and today they saw a beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the U.S.” 

The contradictory reactions to Putin’s visit—dismay from liberals and conservatives alike, rejoicing from pro-Putin Russians—only reaffirms that the Russian president has the leverage here, not Trump.