Trump abandons carrot and wields stick over Putin in Ukraine talks

A week ago I had a distinct feeling that today was Groundhog Day, or as the Russians call it, Dien Surka.

Amid US threats to put pressure on Moscow by supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump held a telephone conversation. Result: announcement of a US-Russian summit in Budapest.

Last August, amid threats of additional US sanctions against Russia, Putin met with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff. Result: announcement of a US-Russian summit in Alaska.

Already seen it.

But Groundhog Day seems to be over.

The meeting in Alaska took place with minimal preparation and little result.

But the summit in Budapest has been postponed. To be honest, he barely had time to turn on. Now President Trump has canceled it.

“It didn’t feel like we were going to get to where we needed to get,” the US president told reporters.

And that's not all.

Previously, Trump did not implement the threat of increasing pressure on Russia, preferring carrots to sticks in his relations with the Kremlin.

For now he has removed the carrots.

Instead, he imposed sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.

This is unlikely to force President Putin to turn the war 180 degrees. But it is a sign of Trump's frustration with the Kremlin's reluctance to make any compromises or concessions to end the fighting in Ukraine.

Russians don't like sticks.

On Thursday, President Putin told reporters that the new US sanctions were an “unfriendly act” and an attempt to put pressure on Russia.

“But no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decides anything under pressure.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was less diplomatic.

“The USA is our enemy, and their talkative ‘peacemaker’ is now completely on the path to war with Russia,” he wrote on social networks. “The decisions taken are an act of war against Russia.”

The Thursday morning edition of the Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid was slightly less dramatic, but clearly unflattering. The newspaper criticized the “capriciousness and inconsistency [Russia's] main negotiating partner.”

So what has changed?

Instead of rushing to the top, no. At the second summit, as at the first summit, President Trump was a little more cautious this time.

He asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to lay the groundwork for a summit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to make sure it made sense to flee to Budapest.

It soon became clear that this did not happen and that a new summit was unlikely to lead to a breakthrough.

Russia vehemently opposes Donald Trump's idea of ​​freezing the current front lines in Ukraine.

The Kremlin is determined to take control of at least the entire Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. He captured and occupied most of it.

But President Vladimir Zelensky refuses to cede to Russia the parts of Donbass that Ukraine still controls.

Moscow would welcome a second US-Russia summit.

The first, in Alaska, was a diplomatic and political coup for the Kremlin. President Putin's red carpet welcome in Anchorage symbolized Russia's return to the international stage and the West's failure to isolate Moscow.

Over the past week, Russian state media have been relishing the idea of ​​a summit with President Trump in Europe, but without the EU at the negotiating table. Russian commentators called the proposed meeting in Budapest a slap in the face to Brussels.

At the same time, few people here seemed to believe that even if the summit in Budapest took place, it would bring the result that Moscow wanted.

Some Russian newspapers are calling on the Russian army to continue fighting.

“There is not a single reason why Moscow should agree to a ceasefire,” Moskovsky Komsomolets said yesterday.

This does not mean that the Kremlin does not want peace.

That's true. But only on your own terms. And now this is unacceptable for Kyiv and, apparently, for Washington.

These terms do not only refer to territory. Moscow is demanding solutions to what it calls the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine: a catch-all phrase by which Russia is expanding its demands to include an end to NATO's eastward expansion.

It is also widely believed that Moscow remains committed to returning Ukraine to the Russian orbit.

Is Donald Trump ready to increase pressure on Russia even more?

Maybe.

But it's also possible that we'll wake up one morning and find ourselves in Groundhog Day all over again.

“Russia is again in the lead in Trump’s game of tug of war,” Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote after the announcement of the summit in Budapest.

“A couple of weeks before the meeting in Budapest, Trump will be pulled in the opposite direction by phone calls and visits from Europe. Then Putin will pull him over to our side again.”