Kremlin response to Ukraine ceasefire hints at Putin’s dilemma

There were “certainly reasons to be cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of peace in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Friday, after President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin in Moscow. 

Peskov’s comments echoed those of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said Thursday that he in theory accepted the ceasefire proposed by the United States and Ukraine — but only on terms tantamount to a victory over Ukraine.

It was an emphatic “yes, but.”

“We agree with the proposals to stop the hostilities,” Putin said in a speech Thursday. But only if it leads “to long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of this crisis.”

That term — “root causes” — is a reference to long-held Russian grievances about what it sees as NATO’s eastward expansion. Western officials and analysts reject this, saying Putin wants to subjugate Ukraine, drawing it into Russia’s sphere of influence and away from its European tilt.

Trump himself called Putin’s remark “a promising statement,” but many officials and experts across Ukraine and Europe are far less impressed. But, despite flirting with the Trump administration there is little evidence Putin has shifted from his core war goals: cementing his landgrabs in Ukraine and stopping it ever joining NATO.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Putin’s words “manipulative” during his nightly address Thursday. “Putin often does this — he does not say ‘no’ directly, but he does it in such a way that practically everything only delays it and makes normal decisions impossible.”

He added, “Putin, of course, is afraid to tell President Trump directly that he wants to continue this war, that he wants to kill Ukrainians.”

Other observers believe Putin is in a tight spot and that his evasive response was an attempt to balance two competing realities.

First, the Kremlin has no reason to accept a truce unless it delivers him a favorable outcome; and second, he wants to achieve a settlement with the White House while it is led by a president amenable to Moscow, said Jonathan Eyal, a director at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.

“It’s not in Putin’s interest to get a ceasefire now,” Eyal said Friday. “However, he cannot afford to annoy the American president, and expose and humiliate him with an outright rejection.”

The deal on offer to Putin is not going to improve, Eyal said, adding that Putin has “got an amazing opportunity to return to the global stage and [escape] from his isolation — with the help of the United States,” he added. So “he’s got to try to grab this deal without making too many concessions on Ukraine, and that’s his dilemma.”

Officials in Kyiv will be hoping to use Putin’s “evasive” response to “help convince their American colleagues that the Kremlin dictator is not genuinely interested in ending the war,” wrote Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian think tank.

While Putin may entertain a truce with terms favorable to Moscow, he will not accept an independent Ukrainian state on Russia’s border, Bielieskov wrote for the Atlantic Council.

“This does not mean that current U.S.-led peace efforts are entirely futile, but it is vital to recognize that freezing the conflict along the current front lines will not be enough to end the war.”