Analysis
Zelenskyy
employs strategic optimism to highlight Russia’s abundant bad faith
Dan Sabbagh
in Kyiv
Ukrainian
president has learned Trump’s team demand positivity and there is little point
in trying to ‘inject reality’
Thu 27 Mar
2025 18.49 GMT
At a press
briefing in Kyiv on Tuesday, explaining where initial US-brokered peace
negotiations had got to, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, struck a
notably different tone. Long gone is the tetchiness on display in London in the
aftermath of the Ukrainian leader’s catastrophic trip to the White House. In
its place was a degree of optimism so high that it could only be interpreted as
political positioning.
Though he
complained about comments made by Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy,
that four Ukrainian regions wholly or partly occupied by Russia consisted of
people who wanted Moscow’s rule in an “overwhelming majority” – these were “in
line with the messages of the Kremlin”, Zelenskyy said – he insisted that had
advantages too.
Over time,
Zelenskyy reasoned, the White House team would appreciate the Kremlin was not
acting in good faith. It would become clear that “the Russians don’t want” an
unconditional ceasefire as they threw up more and more objections as the peace
talks developed. “People,” he said, meaning Trump’s top team “will not believe
the Russians more and more with every day”.
Though
Zelenskyy signed up Ukraine to the energy and maritime ceasefire proposed by
the US, he knew there were Russian qualifications. Within hours, the Kremlin
said its participation in a maritime ceasefire was conditional on agricultural
sanctions relief, while reports on Thursday of a power outage in Kherson after
Russian shelling suggest the energy ceasefire is not entirely being honoured
either.
Unequally
applied ceasefires may not obviously be to Ukraine’s advantage, but Zelenskyy
acknowledged many details were left vague in the two statements put out by the
US (one negotiated with Ukraine, one with Russia) because the Trump White House
was in a rush to get some sort of deal.
“It does not
say what happens if somebody violates the ceasefire; the US did not want it to
break down,” the president said, suggesting during his briefing “don’t delve
too deeply”. For its part Ukraine would document any Russian violations and
share them with the US and the world, though the impact on Kremlin behaviour
may be limited.
Keir Giles,
a Russia expert at the Chatham House thinktank, said: “Zelenskyy has assessed
that it is better to go along with what is being cooked, rather than to attempt
to inject reality into the process, because he has seen what happens if he does
the latter.”
When, at the
beginning of the month, a tired Zelenskyy, still reeling from the Oval Office
ambush, said at some point during an hour-plus press briefing in London, that a
deal to end the war “is still very, very far away” it was used as justification
by the White House to halt military aid and intelligence sharing.
That was
only restarted when Ukraine committed to a full ceasefire in Saudi Arabia a
week or so later, a commitment that Russia has yet to match, arguing, in the
words of Vladimir Putin, that any ceasefire should lead to “the elimination of
the root causes of the conflict” and therefore more negotiation while the land
and air war continues.
The problem
for Zelenskyy’s strategy is that if there are significant Russian attacks
against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, or some other inequality emerges in
the Black Sea, it is unsure how long Kyiv will be able to turn the other cheek.
On the day of the ceasefire announcement, it was notable that Ukraine’s defence
minister immediately warned Russia not to use the ceasefire as a cover for
manoeuvring its navy out of the eastern Black Sea, where it has been penned in.
Nor is it
obvious that the White House would be willing to ramp up the pressure on the
Kremlin if the peace talks show only negligible progress. That would represent
a sharp change of White House strategy. So far, the US has offered concessions
to Moscow, such as ruling out Ukraine’s Nato membership, while Trump appears
far more comfortable talking to Putin than Zelenskyy.
Putin and
his Russian colleagues, said Giles, “will be calculating just how far they can
go and how much they can extract from the Americans, before it becomes so
embarrassing that even Trump, with no sense of shame or humiliation, says
enough is enough”. On Monday in Saudi Arabia, the US and Russia talked about
Ukrainian territory, though nothing concrete emerged. Zelenskyy did not make
much of that on Tuesday – saying simply that he was “worried” – but in the
coming weeks, the president’s newfound patience is likely to be tested again.
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