Trump-Putin relations enter a new chapter and the world is at stake
Putin wants a sit-down with Trump as equals in which they divide the world into spheres of influence.
Two self-proclaimed geopolitical alpha male leaders will be squaring off next year.
In one corner will be President Donald Trump, hungry for a Ukraine peace deal that would make him look like a global peacemaker. In the other, Russian President Vladimir Putin, an astute, manipulative and vehemently anti-American autocrat who hopes to entice Trump into creating a transactional new world order without rules or human rights.
Putin is seeking a grand bargain on European security that would leave Ukraine at the Kremlin’s mercy, weaken NATO and cement Russia’s place as a global power.
Ahead of any talks, the Kremlin is carefully assessing Trump’s messaging, ambitions and vulnerabilities, while remaining wary of his unpredictability. Trump’s weaknesses, according to Russian analysts, include geopolitical naivety, a short attention span and a propensity to rely on gut not brain.
“Trump deliberately keeps silent, I think, because he doesn’t know,” said Konstantin Remchukov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “We saw his campaign. He’s not a profound thinker on geopolitical stuff.”
The biggest issue between the two men will be the conflict in Ukraine, which Trump has promised to end in 24 hours.
But Putin has set strict conditions for any deal, including keeping Ukraine permanently out of NATO, significantly reducing its military and hanging on to Ukrainian territory. Analysts see little hope for a peace deal, given Putin’s maximalist position and Trump’s wariness of looking weak if he gives too much to Russia.
Trump, “like any world leader, wants to negotiate from a position of strength. He doesn’t want to be seen as weak and he doesn’t want to be seen as kowtowing to Putin,” said Joshua Huminski, senior vice president at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.
So far, the signaling between Putin and Trump does not immediately suggest a new era of warmer relations. Russian state television anchors aired nude pictures of Melania Trump just days after the election, smirking as they discussed America’s returning first lady.
Then last month Putin warned that Trump was “not safe,” in an apparent reference to his possible assassination: “Unfortunately, in the history of the United States various incidents have happened,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, crowed after Putin lost his Syrian client, Bashar al-Assad, that Russia was in a “weakened state” because of the Ukrainian war and a struggling economy.
“This is his time to act,” he said, telling Putin to go for a ceasefire in Ukraine and peace talks.
There are, however, many places where the two men see eye-to-eye.
Putin has no tolerance for Western liberalism — foreign leaders who lecture him on Russian repression and universal values such as human rights. In Trump, he sees a similar ruthless cynic.
That could be an advantage as he seeks to forge Russia into a global power in a new multipolar world order without human rights values, where global giants divide up the map and trade away weaker nations’ sovereignty.
“That values approach formed what Putin hates most of all, the rules-based order, and that’s how our relations deteriorated,” Remchukov said. “Trump in this respect seems to be a person who doesn’t care about values, who doesn’t care about ideology, doesn’t preach or scold on any of these issues. Trump says, I don’t care what you do internally.”
Speaking days after Trump’s victory, Putin conveyed a triumphal mood, claiming that his new order is almost here.
“Before our very eyes, an entirely new world order is emerging, unlike anything we’ve seen before,” he declared, adding that with the old rules-based order dead, “a fierce, uncompromising struggle is underway to shape the new one.”
NATO, he said, is “an outright anachronism.” The U.N. charter, which prohibits invasions, was created by the victors, and must be changed because “new centers of power are emerging.” Western liberalism is “totalitarian in essence.”
Prominent Russian writer Mikhail Zygar, who is based in the United States but was convicted in Russia in July for his criticisms of the war, said Putin appeared to be addressing Trump directly when he said that sooner or later the West would understand the need for “a pragmatic, sober approach, grounded in a rather harsh, sometimes cynical, but rational assessment of events and its own capabilities.”
“Simply put, Putin insists that every dictator deserves tolerance. Every regime has the right to carry out its own repressions,” Zygar wrote in a recent analysis. Wars, Putin suggested, are inevitable.
“Might makes right, and this principle also works. Nations have to defend their interests militarily, asserting them by any means necessary,” said Putin, who two days later used a new intermediate-range missile named Oreshnik against Ukraine. He has since threatened to use the missiles to destroy Kyiv’s political and military decision-making centers.
As his envoy to Ukraine, Trump has chosen retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who has argued that Trump’s transactional approach in his first term allowed him to “lower tensions with Putin while standing firm on American security interests.”
As Putin and Trump prepare to shadowbox, the Russian leader is under a time constraint of how long his sanction-squeezed economy can sustain the war, but he is betting that it is longer than Ukraine can hold out — especially, if as Moscow believes, Western arms deliveries will be cut under Trump.
“Putin is counting on being able to decide something with Trump,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said in an interview, adding that Putin hoped to “be able to convince Trump that the war needs to end — on [Putin’s] terms of course.”
“If it doesn’t work out, then he will just continue fighting as before,” she said. “He is counting on Ukraine not being able to resist for long.”
A Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats said there was no mood for compromise in the Kremlin, with its forces advancing steadily in eastern Ukraine and no one forecasting an economic collapse.
“Russia is ready to conduct negotiations, but negotiations from a position of strength not of weakness,” he said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
Trump’s boasts that he can wrap up a deal fast suggest impatience, so Moscow officials keep insisting that the deal address the “root causes” of the war, suggesting they are going to bog down the talks into long, complicated negotiations on a broader European security pact.
Putin’s desire for a grand bargain on European security architecture was conveyed by a conservative oligarch close to the Kremlin, Konstantin Malofeyev, who warned in an interview with the Financial Times in Dubai this month that Putin would reject any Trump deal unless it involved not just Ukraine but Europe and the world.
The Russian academic said Moscow could suggest it was willing to be “flexible” on some of its territorial demands on Ukraine in exchange for concessions on the future makeup of Europe’s security architecture.This essentially means a Trump-Putin summit agreeing to divide the world into spheres of influence, with Russia’s primacy over Ukraine, Georgia and other non-NATO former Soviet neighbors assured. It would curb NATO and compromise Europe’s security.
“I hope that Trump doesn’t fall into that trap because the Europeans will object to it and I think the Ukrainians will, too,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat and Russia expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to abide by the rules of the American think tank that employs him. Putin, he said, “has always wanted to have some kind of U.S.-Russian-imposed peace on this.”
Then there is the angle popular among many in Trump’s orbit of splitting the emerging Russia-China alliance. In an interview in October with right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, Trump said he would have to “un-unite” Russia and China.
“This school of thought seems to be popular with many people in the Trump universe, including those who have been nominated to his national security team,” wrote Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
One Republican congressional staffer dismissed this “wedge strategy” as Russian propaganda efforts to persuade the West to soften its stance on Putin. “It’s usually the code for people who want to go soft on Russia and may or may not even care about China.”
Russia is dependent on China for trade, and Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both know that Trump will be gone in four years.
Any Trump play to weaken Moscow-Beijing ties would not succeed, according to Gabuev, given “the personal relationship between the two autocrats, their common mistrust of Washington and their hopes of becoming more powerful in an emerging multipolar order — at the United States’ expense.”
Mary Ilyushina in Berlin contributed to this report
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