Kyiv fears a peace deal stitch-up if the two leaders meet – but the US claims it is the only way to achieve a breakthrough

Donald Trump speaks to Vladimir Putin at a 2017 summit in Vietnam during the US president’s first term  Credit: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP

Adrian Blomfield

16 May 2025 5:39pm GMT+01:00

Vladimir Putin seems to be on the cusp of getting what he has always wanted.

European leaders had hoped the Russian president’s failure to attend peace talks with Ukraine in Istanbul – the very negotiations that he himself had demanded in lieu of a ceasefire – would finally cause Donald Trump’s patience to snap.

Far from it. Instead of signalling his desire to join Europe in imposing far tougher sanctions on Moscow, the US president has chosen to reward his Russian counterpart with the one-on-one meeting he has desired for so long.

“Nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together,” Mr Trump said, thereby effectively scotching the talks in Istanbul before they had even begun.

In Putin’s eyes, face-to-face talks with the US president – a meeting to which Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, would not be invited – would cement Russia’s great power status. It would recall the superpower summits of the Cold War when Moscow and Washington would meet as equals to discuss the fate of the planet.

It is also the outcome Ukrainian officials most lose sleep over. At such a meeting, Putin would have Mr Trump’s undivided attention with no go-between to plead their cause.

The upshot, they fear, is that the susceptible Mr Trump, whose instincts often seem more sympathetic to Russia, would agree to a stitch-up that would then be presented to Ukraine as a fait accompli.

“Putin has snubbed President Trump,” said one Ukrainian politician. “We very much hope that he will not reward Putin’s intransigence by agreeing to meet him.”

Mr Trump would presumably reject such characterisations. In his logic, the only way to understand what Putin wants and how far he is prepared to go in making concessions is to talk to him face-to-face.

“He and I will meet, and I think we’ll solve it or maybe not,” Mr Trump said. “At least we’ll know.”

Putin is no doubt delighted by the development. Not only is it another sign of Mr Trump’s indulgence towards him, it also represents a further humiliation for the European leaders who expected the US president to react to the no-show by approving tougher sanctions.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said the EU was preparing an 18th round of sanctions on Russia to supplement a package agreed this week.

The hope had been that Mr Trump would have given the go-ahead for Lindsey Graham, the US senator, to introduce a Bill in Congress that would impose 500 per cent tariffs on any country buying Russian oil, a move that could cripple its economy.

That looks unlikely to happen, certainly not until the US president meets Putin.

Face-to-face meeting ‘necessary for breakthrough’

While Mr Trump said he would meet his counterpart “as soon as we can set it up,” the Kremlin has made it very clear it is in no hurry to arrange.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s urbane spokesman, welcomed the suggestion of what he was quick to characterise as a “summit”. “The importance of this cannot be overstated,” he said.

But Mr Peskov also warned against expecting a meeting any time soon, adding that “long and intense preparations” would be needed before the two men could get together.

Meanwhile, the most immediate consequence of Mr Trump’s offer is that the peace talks in Istanbul, which should have been a moment of history, have been reduced to an almost irrelevant sideshow.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, had already foreshadowed their failure. He said before the negotiations began that he did not think “anything productive [was] actually going to happen.”

“I think it’s abundantly clear that the only way we’re going to have a breakthrough here is [in talks] between President Trump and President Putin,” he said.

In the absence of pressure to make any concessions, the Russian delegation, led by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, enraged his Ukrainian counterparts by making demands that crossed all of Kyiv’s red lines.

Mr Medinsky led negotiations with Ukraine early in the war in 2022 that swiftly collapsed after Russia demanded Mr Zelensky abandon his Nato ambitions, disband most of his armed forces and accept conditions that, in Kyiv’s view, would have reduced the country to vassalage.

At Friday’s talks, not only did the Russian negotiators insist on the same terms, they went one step further by demanding Ukraine withdraw its forces entirely from the four eastern provinces that Russia claims it has annexed.

Russian troops occupy large swathes of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, but do not have uncontested control in any of the four regions. Russia does have full control of Crimea, the fifth region it has claimed as its own.

Moscow also brushed off Mr Zelensky’s accusations that its negotiators had not come to Istanbul in good faith. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesman, responded by calling the Ukrainian leader “a clown”, “a loser” and a “person with no education”.