Analysis
Week of
geopolitical poker over Ukraine ends with no endgame in sight
Shaun Walker
in Kyiv
Path to
peace looks as unclear as it was before European leaders’ meeting with
Zelenskyy in Kyiv
Russia and
Ukraine agree prisoner swap but peace talks fail to make progress
Fri 16 May
2025 17.00 BST
This week
began with four European leaders, standing defiantly in Kyiv alongside
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issuing an ultimatum to Vladimir Putin: sign a ceasefire
now, or together with Donald Trump we will force you to do so, with sanctions
and other tough measures.
Over the
subsequent days, there followed a series of offers, counter-offers, ultimatums
and deflections, in a dizzying week of high-stakes diplomacy that often seemed
to resemble a geopolitical poker game.
Yet by the
end of the week there was no ceasefire and no sanctions. Various sets of talks
were held in Turkey, for which nobody had much hope of a breakthrough, and the
path to peace looked as unclear as it had done a week earlier.
Halfway
through the week, the Guardian spent an hour with Zelenskyy, with three other
European journalists, in his office at the presidential administration in Kyiv.
He had just made the surprise announcement that he would travel to Turkey for
talks, and challenged Putin to join him. It was a dramatic raising of the
stakes and we asked if he felt a bit like he was playing poker.
He said:
“With several people at once.”
The week
started well for Zelenskyy, with a quartet of Europeans – Britain’s Keir
Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz,
and Poland’s Donald Tusk, all descending on Kyiv.
The five men
huddled on a sofa as Macron called Donald Trump, who had just woken up. Trump,
the Guardian understands, was pleased the five had met but did not offer any
firm commitments to sign up to sanctions if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.
Nonetheless,
in an open-air press conference outside the Mariinskyi Palace in Kyiv, Macron
and Starmer portrayed the call as if everyone was on the same page. They gave
Putin an ultimatum, until Monday night, to begin a ceasefire. “If he turns his
back on peace, we will respond, working with President Trump, with all our
partners, we will ramp up sanctions and increase our military aid for Ukraine’s
defence,” said Starmer.
The ball was
now in Putin’s court, although all past experience suggested the Russian leader
would not react well to an ultimatum, particularly not the day after overseeing
a bombastic military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory
in the second world war, an event that has become the foundation myth for his
nationalist idea of Russian identity and has been used to justify the invasion
of Ukraine.
An early
sign that Putin’s response might not be positive came from Dmitry Medvedev,
formerly Russia’s president and now its loudest nationalist troll on X. “They
are blurting out threats against Russia … You think that’s smart, eh? Shove
these peace plans up your pangender arses,” he wrote on X.
Still,
Putin’s is the only important reaction in Moscow these days and he was
apparently about to give one live. Western television correspondents, a few of
whom were still in Moscow after the Victory Day parade, were called into the
Kremlin for a press conference where Putin was expected to give his response to
the Starmer-Macron-Merz-Tusk ultimatum.
It was close
to 2am by the time Putin appeared, and the press conference had been downgraded
to a prepared statement, apparently written by Putin himself. He scorned the
idea that the west thought it could talk to him using ultimatums, and claimed
disingenuously that Russia had always offered ceasefires and Ukraine had been
the side to turn them down. Instead of a ceasefire now, he said, let’s start
talking. He even named a date and a place: Istanbul on Thursday.
Putin’s
offer of talks flew in the face of what the western leaders had demanded.
Starmer, Merz and Macron had been clear in Kyiv – a ceasefire had to come
first, “no ifs or buts”, otherwise sanctions would be applied. They had made it
clear that Trump was onside with this plan.
But perhaps
inevitably, the US president responded by putting pressure on Kyiv. “Ukraine
should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “HAVE THE
MEETING, NOW!!!”
There was at
least a somewhat positive coda to his message, that if after the meeting it was
clear a deal was not possible, western leaders would “proceed accordingly”. But
it was hardly the tough talking to Putin that the Europeans had hoped to
extract from Trump.
Soon after,
Zelenskyy raised the stakes once again with his suggestion of a top-level
summit. “We await a full and lasting ceasefire, starting from tomorrow,” he
wrote in a statement. But he added a twist. “I will be waiting for Putin in
Türkiye on Thursday. Personally. I hope that this time the Russians will not
look for excuses.”
It was a
dramatic challenge that seized the initiative from the Russian leader. If
Putin’s goal had been to deflect the demand for ceasefire with a
faux-constructive offer, Zelenskyy was now calling his bluff. He did it
remarkably quickly, too, suggesting it was not a move agreed with western
allies.
“If you read
carefully, I spoke about both the ceasefire and about a meeting,” he said, when
asked about it in the interview. “I formulated my words exactly like this. I
can’t tell you why I did this. But I knew exactly what I was doing,” he added,
enigmatically.
Zelenskyy,
like many world leaders now, has to calibrate his words carefully to make sure
not to offend Trump. “We are putting on a theatre performance for just one
audience member,” said a Ukrainian security source this week. It can sometimes
be an excruciating dance, but if it goes wrong, as it did for Zelenskyy in the
White House in late February, the consequences can be even worse.
Putin was
never likely to show up in Turkey, but a three-day silence from the Kremlin
before this was confirmed suggested he was at least considering various
options. In the end, he sent a negotiating team to Istanbul led by Vladimir
Medinsky, a former culture minister with a sideline in writing pseudo-history
books about the west’s long-running mission to destroy Russia.
By Thursday
evening, Zelenskyy was in Ankara complaining the Russians had not shown up;
Medinsky was in Istanbul complaining the Ukrainians hadn’t shown up; Putin was
in the Kremlin saying not much at all; and Trump was coming to the end of his
lavish Middle East tour and still hinting there could be an 11th-hour meeting
with Putin.
On Friday,
negotiations between a Ukrainian delegation and Medinsky’s Russian group did
finally happen. But they were over in less than two hours, producing a prisoner
exchange but apparently little else, with the Russian side reportedly insisting
on maximalist demands. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, dismissed the
negotiations (which Ukraine had attended only because the Americans insisted)
as pointless and at a “logjam”, and echoing the US president, said it would
probably take a meeting between Trump and Putin to end the conflict.
The week
ends with no sign of a lasting peace being any closer, and little talk of the
US implementing the tough measures that Starmer and Macron had promised against
the Russians. In a neat piece of symmetry, Zelenskyy and the other four
European leaders again called Trump, this time from a summit in Tirana. “We are
now closely aligning our responses and will continue to do so,” said Starmer,
in what could hardly be described as a wall of solidarity against the Kremlin.
Trump, in his comments this week, has sounded excited about the prospect of a
bilateral meeting with Putin, and has made little reference to any potential
negative consequences for Russia.
Earlier in
the week, Zelenskyy said he felt confident if cautious while sitting at the
geopolitical poker table. The Ukrainian president said: “I’m in general a
confident person. Though in negotiations there should always be doubts … You
have to have some reflections, to be able to step to the side, to veer off the
fast-moving track everyone else is on.”
The problem
for Zelenskyy – and for Europe more broadly – is that all the carefully
calibrated poker plays count for nothing if it turns out Trump is not even
bothering to follow the game, but instead playing his own game, according to
his own rules.
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