Putin marks 25th year as Russian leader and winner in Ukraine peace talks, thanks to US

LONDON - For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the signing of the first partial ceasefire agreement between his country and Ukraine could not have been better timed.

The terms of the agreement

are already disputed,

and the deal is not the end of the war.

But Mr Putin appears to have persuaded the US that any end to the hostilities will be tied to a lifting of the West’s crippling economic sanctions on Russia.

And this diplomatic achievement comes at a historic moment, just as Mr Putin celebrates 25 years from when he was first elected as Russia’s president.

During the past quarter of a century, he has seen off an entire generation of Western leaders, including four US presidents.

He is already the third longest-ruling Russian leader in the past two centuries, after Czar Nicholas I and Joseph Stalin.

And as things currently stand, only the immutable force of biology can remove Mr Putin from his gilded Kremlin palace in Moscow.

The US claimed on March 25 that it had brokered an agreement between the two countries

to halt military activity in the Black Sea

after US officials met separately with counterparts from Russia and Ukraine in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh.

What has actually been agreed on remains unclear.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already accused Russia of “lying” about the terms of the deal.

And US President Donald Trump has yet to signal his acceptance of Russia’s conditions.

“We’re thinking about all of them right now,” Mr Trump told reporters soon after the end of the Riyadh discussions.

Ultimately, the Ukrainians and Russians signed the deal not because either side believed the war was over, but because both wished to remain on good terms with President Trump.

Having defused a serious breakdown in his personal relations with Mr Trump, Mr Zelensky could not afford to rebuff US efforts to broker a ceasefire.

So, although the Ukrainians knew that a ceasefire limited to the Black Sea would not impact the vicious ground fighting elsewhere, they had to accept the deal on offer.

Conversely, although Moscow is not interested in a ceasefire since Russian forces have the upper hand in the current ground fighting in Ukraine, Mr Putin has to protect his developing friendly relations with President Trump by signing up for the ceasefire deal.

However, there is no doubt that Mr Putin has emerged as the winner from this current round of negotiations.

Russia’s diplomatic gambit of refusing to consider an overall ceasefire but offering instead “partial” ceasefires, which are meaningless yet still allow Mr Trump to claim he is a peacemaker, seems to work; Mr Putin is poised to continue this game of pretending to seek peace while waging war for months.

The Russian leader also succeeded in persuading the Americans that the restoration of Russian trade – including exports of Russian foodstuffs and fertiliser products through Black Sea shipping routes – should be part and parcel of any ceasefire, not something anyone had accepted before.

Most importantly, Mr Putin imposed the precondition that lifting Western financial sanctions, which paralysed Russia’s commerce, should be considered before any ceasefire comes into effect.

All are potentially huge wins for Russia, especially since none affect Russia’s ability to continue its three-year-old invasion of Ukraine or retain – probably in perpetuity – the roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory the Russians already occupy.

To make matters better still, the latest ceasefire accord, with its promise of far better relations between Russia and the US, was concluded on March 26 – the date in 2000 when Mr Putin was first confirmed in office as Russia’s new president.

A mid-ranking officer in the KGB, the former Soviet Union’s domestic security agency, Mr Putin was initially regarded as a transient figure.

He was plucked out of obscurity by Russia’s first post-communist leader Boris Yeltsin, with the sole mission of ensuring that Mr Yeltsin and his family could retire peacefully without being hounded for their ill-gotten gains.

Initially, Mr Putin failed to excite ordinary Russians. He won his first term with just 52.9 per cent of the vote, hardly the sort of crushing majorities he came to enjoy – or learnt to manufacture – as years went by.

Yet few would doubt Mr Putin’s determination to reverse what he saw as Russia’s decline after the Soviet Union’s collapse or his obsession with reviving Russia’s sphere of influence in Europe.

He first tried to do so in alliance with the US; Russia was one of the first countries to offer support to the Americans in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, in the hope that the Americans would reciprocate.

But after being rebuffed by the US, Mr Putin set out to make Russia great again by force.

Most of his military gambles paid off. In 2008, he invaded neighbouring Georgia, taking two large chunks of that country and effectively preventing it from joining Western military alliances. In 2014, he repeated the strategy in Ukraine, seizing the Crimean peninsula with little bloodshed and no diplomatic backlash.

Matters turned out quite differently in February 2022 when Mr Putin

ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

To everyone’s surprise, the Ukrainians fought back, and Russia was quickly embroiled in a vicious war of attrition that continues to this day.

But, as he did throughout his presidency, Mr Putin has held his nerve, calculating – correctly, as it now turns out – that the West would blink first and that Russia would achieve its objectives.

This is precisely what seems to be happening. Russia’s relations with the US are flourishing, and Ukraine is about to be sacrificed as part of a bargain between Washington and Moscow.

The price that Mr Putin paid for his latest adventure is enormous.

Up to 100,000 young Russians – most of whom were born after Mr Putin came to power and have known no other leader – have been killed in the fighting.

The Russian economy will also need a long time to recover from the war and Western sanctions.

However, none of this threatens President Putin’s continued rule.

He must feel a sense of satisfaction that, just as he marks a quarter of a century at the helm, his dream of restoring Russia to great power status is about to be accomplished.

With the help of none other than the United States.