Trump discussion with Putin to focus on what Ukraine will lose

WASHINGTON – To hear US President Donald Trump describe it, he and President Vladimir Putin of Russia are about to have something akin to their own Yalta moment, great powers determining borders within Europe.

He did not explicitly refer to the 1945 meeting, where British leader Sir Winston Churchill, Soviet-era leader Josef Stalin and a deathly ill then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt carved the continent into the American-aligned West and the Soviet-dominated East, creating spheres of influence that became the battlegrounds of the Cold War.

But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on the night of March 16, Mr Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr Putin on March 18 would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any ceasefire with Ukraine.

He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the

full-scale war Mr Putin started three years ago

.

White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea – in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 – and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds.

Though administration officials have stressed that they have kept their Ukrainian counterparts and European leaders fully briefed on their interactions with Russia, only Mr Trump and Mr Putin will be on the call, presumably with aides listening in. And it is not clear that either Ukraine or the big European powers will go along with whatever Mr Trump and Mr Putin might agree on.

Mr Trump and his aides have been circumspect about the details of the deal being discussed with the Russian leader. Mr Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate developer and old friend of Mr Trump’s who is now special envoy to the Middle East, spent hours with Mr Putin in Moscow recently preparing for the call.

“We’re doing pretty well, I think, with Russia,” Mr Trump said, adding, “I think we have a very good chance” of reaching a ceasefire. But then he turned to the question of what Ukraine might have to give up.

“I think we’ll be talking about land, it’s a lot of land,” he said. “It’s a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants,” he added, apparently referring to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear site in Europe.

“That’s a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides.”

Mr Trump was careful not to say much about which parts of Ukrainian territory he was discussing, or whether he would try to limit Mr Putin’s ambitions.

The Trump administration has already made clear it expects Russia to control the land that its troops already command, roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine. But aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in February that they were concerned that Mr Trump may entertain Mr Putin’s other desires for parts of Ukraine, perhaps including the critical port of Odesa.

Mr Trump’s national security adviser, Mr Michael Waltz, said on Meet The Press on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether the country was being rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Mr Trump’s National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious – that Russia began the war.)

“Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?” Mr Waltz asked in the NBC interview.

In his television appearances in recent weeks, Mr Waltz has taken the position that the most important outcome of the talks should be an end to the killing after three years of vicious trench and drone warfare.

He and other Trump aides say little about the conditions attached to a ceasefire, but suggest they are secondary to that larger mission. The alternative, Mr Waltz has suggested, was a policy closer to former US president Joe Biden’s strategy: assuring Ukraine that the US and its allies were with them “as long as it takes”.

That is a prescription, Mr Waltz insisted on March 16, for “essentially endless warfare in an environment that we’re literally losing hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of months”.

And he warned that the conflict could still “escalate into World War III”, echoing the case that Mr Trump was making to Mr Zelensky in their heated,

public argument in the Oval Office

in February.

“We can talk about what’s right and wrong, and we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground,” Mr Waltz said.

There are other issues that may become central to the negotiation. France and Britain have offered to put troops inside Ukraine, perhaps with other European powers. But it is not clear that Mr Putin will agree to a peacekeeping or “trip wire” force. Those forces would be part of a security guarantee for Ukraine, although it is unclear how effective European troops would be without backup from the US.

There are other signs that Mr Trump is getting ready to make concessions to Mr Putin. The US Justice Department has told European officials that the US is withdrawing from a multinational group investigating leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, including Mr Putin.

The administration is also shrinking the work done by the US Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team, created in 2022 by Mr Merrick Garland, the then US attorney-general under Mr Biden, to hold accountable Russians who were responsible for atrocities committed in the aftermath of the full invasion three years ago.

Taken together, those actions are a major retreat from an effort announced by then US vice-president Kamala Harris in 2023 after the US concluded that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity”. The steps appear to be part of Mr Trump’s effort to make it easier to come to an accord with Mr Putin.

No historical analogy to a previous era is exact, of course, and the negotiation to end the war in Ukraine has many differences from the conditions in the depths of the winter of 1945, when it was clear that Nazi Germany would soon lose.

But as Professor Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently, “today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II” because “major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map” at Yalta.

In an interview, Prof Toft said that land expansion “is what Putin wants, and it’s obviously what Trump wants – just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada”.

She continued: “This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.”

“The big question mark is China,” she added. The outcome of the negotiations – and particularly the question of whether Mr Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, “may indicate what will happen if (Chinese President) Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan”. NYTIMES