Trump’s Dressing Down of Zelensky Plays Into Putin’s War Aims

 

News Analysis

Trump’s Dressing Down of Zelensky Plays Into Putin’s War Aims

 

The public blowup could propel President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to escalate the fight in Ukraine instead of agreeing to peace.

 

By Anton TroianovskiNataliya Vasilyeva and Paul Sonne

Anton Troianovski and Paul Sonne reported from Berlin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/europe/trump-zelensky-putin.html

March 1, 2025

 

President Trump says he wants a quick cease-fire in Ukraine. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears to be in no rush, and the blowup on Friday between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president may give Russia’s leader the kind of ammunition he needs to prolong the fight.

 

With the American alliance with Ukraine suffering a dramatic, public rupture, Mr. Putin now seems even more likely to hold out for a deal on his terms — and he could even be tempted to expand his push on the battlefield.

 

The extraordinary scene in Washington — in which Mr. Trump lambasted President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — was broadcast as the top story on state television in Russia on Saturday morning. It played into three years of Kremlin propaganda casting Mr. Zelensky as a foolhardy ruler who would sooner or later exhaust the patience of his Western backers.

 

For the Kremlin, perhaps the most important message came in later remarks by Mr. Trump, who suggested that if Ukraine did not agree to a “cease-fire now,” the war-torn country would have to “fight it out” without American help.

 

That could set up an outcome that Mr. Putin has long sought, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives: a dominant position over Ukraine and wide-ranging concessions from the West.

 

In fact, Mr. Trump’s professed attempts to end the war quickly could intensify and prolong it, experts warned. If the United States is really ready to abandon Ukraine, Mr. Putin could try to seize more Ukrainian territory and end up with more leverage if and when peace talks ultimately take place.

 

“Russia will be willing to keep fighting for longer, and more bitterly,” said Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin ties, describing the consequences of Mr. Trump’s public break with Mr. Zelensky. “If Zelensky says the Ukrainian people are ready to keep on fighting, Moscow will say, ‘Sure, let’s keep fighting.’”

 

If Friday’s angry encounter in Washington leads to a further drop in U.S. military support for Ukraine, Mr. Remchukov said in a phone interview, the consequences could be profound, possibly even encouraging Mr. Putin to return to the broader territorial aims he pursued when he began his invasion in 2022.

 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Moscow decided to go further, to Odesa or Mykolaiv,” Mr. Remchukov said, referring to key Black Sea ports that remain under Ukrainian control. “It could change the strategic direction of the offensive.”

 

Despite the striking alignment that has emerged between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin in recent weeks, many analysts have spotted a key difference in their views. While the American president says he wants to “stop the death” in Ukraine as soon as possible, the Russian leader says he wants to resolve the “root causes” of the war first.

 

For Mr. Putin, that terminology is code for his desire for a wider deal that would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, limit the size of its military and grant Russia influence over its domestic politics — along with a broader pullback of the NATO alliance across Eastern and Central Europe.

 

Such a deal, of course, would take months to negotiate, which is why Mr. Putin has appeared resistant to the idea of a quick cease-fire. The spat in the White House on Friday appeared to play into the Kremlin’s hands because it may convince Mr. Trump that Mr. Zelensky, rather than Mr. Putin, is the more recalcitrant of the two leaders.

 

“You tell us, ‘I don’t want a cease-fire,’” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office. “I want a cease-fire because you’ll get a cease-fire faster than an agreement.”

 

Mr. Zelensky on Saturday reiterated his opposition to a quick cease-fire with Mr. Putin, saying that the Russian leader could not be trusted to uphold one. Instead, he said, Ukraine needed security guarantees from the West to deter future Russian attacks.

 

But Mr. Zelensky also signaled that he had not completely given up hope on repairing the relationship with Mr. Trump. And since the Friday meeting, he has publicly expressed thanks for American support, after Vice President JD Vance accused him of not being grateful enough.

 

A Moscow foreign-policy analyst who is close to the Kremlin said on Saturday that any delay to peace talks was likely to benefit Russia because there was no deal in sight at present that would satisfy Mr. Putin. The analyst insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivities in Moscow of speaking to Western journalists.

 

Dmitry Suslov, an international relations specialist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said in comments published by the Kommersant newspaper that Mr. Trump would become “even more favorable to Russia’s position on a settlement” after “the fiasco of Zelensky’s negotiations with Trump.”

 

Mr. Suslov also raised the possibility of Russia’s being able to grab far more than the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory in the country’s south and east that Moscow now holds.

 

If the United States stops providing weapons and intelligence to the Ukrainian military, Mr. Suslov wrote, “the pace of Kyiv’s defeat on the battlefield will accelerate, with the prospect of a complete collapse of the front within months.”

 

Friday’s scene was a boon for Moscow in other ways, too. It may have helped advance, in just a matter of minutes, one of Mr. Putin’s longtime goals: the removal of Mr. Zelensky from power in Ukraine.

 

Immediately after the White House meeting, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of his party’s staunchest backers of Ukraine, said, “I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.” He called the Ukrainian leader’s behavior in the Oval Office “disrespectful.”

 

The public dressing-down of Mr. Zelensky also accomplished another longtime goal of Mr. Putin’s: cleaving the Western military alliance led by Washington that united behind Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion. European leaders immediately came out in support of Ukraine after the meeting, setting up a possible split with the United States, their longtime security backer.

 

Russian officials could hardly control their glee.

 

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president who is deputy chairman of the country’s security council, cheered Mr. Trump on with a post on X, piling on to denounce Mr. Zelensky as an “insolent pig.”

 

And Konstantin Kosachev, a senior Russian lawmaker, wrote on the Telegram social network, “Zelensky lost this round in a resounding crash,” adding, “He will have to crawl on his knees to the next one.”

 

Pro-Kremlin commentators who for years have been hurling invective against the United States could barely believe their change in fortune.

 

Igor Korotchenko, a military analyst who is a regular on Russian talk shows, wrote that he never thought he would be applauding the president of the United States.

 

“But tonight I applaud the 47th President of the United States Donald Trump — Zelensky was thrown out of the White House like a garbage alley cat,” Mr. Korotchenko wrote in a post on X.

 

Yet for all the schadenfreude in Russia, Friday’s bitter meeting in Washington did little to illuminate a pathway toward a settlement. And while Mr. Putin may want to extend the war, he could also suffer if it goes on much longer, given the country’s economic problems and steep battlefield casualties.

 

“The Russian leadership would like to end the war on its own terms, not just restore ties with the U.S.,” Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, said in a phone interview. “The prospects for that are not clearer at all despite what happened yesterday.”

 

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski

 

Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine. More about Paul Sonne