WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has grown increasingly pessimistic about the chance of brokering an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict anytime soon or seeing the leaders of the two warring countries meet in person, according to two senior administration officials.
Trump isn’t abandoning hopes of settling the dispute: He joined a conference call Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, in which he stressed that “Europe must stop purchasing Russian oil that is funding the war,” a White House official said. Trump also made the point that European leaders must subject China to economic pressure for underwriting the Russian war effort, the official added.
But Trump’s more dour view of reaching a peace deal underscores the distance he has traveled since the 2024 campaign, when he brashly predicted he’d end the war within 24 hours of taking office. (He later said he was speaking “figuratively.”) Trump has since acknowledged that the war has proved a more stubborn problem than he expected.
Whirlwind peacemaking efforts last month appear to have stalled. Amid expectations of an elusive breakthrough, Trump flew to Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15 for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He touched down in Alaska hoping for a ceasefire and left hours later without one.
Three days later, Trump convened a meeting at the White House with Zelenskyy and European leaders. Afterward, he announced that Putin and Zelenskyy would meet for the first time since the war began in February 2022, raising hopes that a rapprochement might be in sight.
That meeting still hasn’t happened, and there’s no sign it will. During a visit to China this week, Putin said he will end the war by force if Ukraine doesn’t agree to his demands. And he said he would meet with Zelenskyy only in Moscow, the Russian capital.
Zelenskyy is willing to meet with Putin in certain Persian Gulf countries, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey and elsewhere — but not on Putin’s turf, a Ukrainian adviser said.
“We see nonstop obstacles to peace from Russia’s side and fake arguments from Russia as to why there can’t be a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy in the same room,” Sergii Leshchenko, an adviser to Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said in an interview.
Asked whether he had a message for Putin, Trump told reporters at the White House this week: “I have no message to President Putin. He knows where I stand, and he’ll make a decision one way or the other. Whatever his decision is, we’ll either be happy about it or unhappy. And if we’re unhappy about it, you’ll see things happen.”
As the peace talks bog down, the casualties continue to mount. Just last week, Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, that killed at least 15 people, including four children. Since Russia sent tanks into Ukraine in February 2022, casualties on both sides have reached about 1.5 million.
A European source, speaking on condition of anonymity, spoke Thursday about being frustrated that the Trump administration hasn’t imposed meaningful new sanctions on Russia as a prod to end the war.
Leshchenko said, “The pressure on Putin has to be really harsh so that he will not be able to continue his war machine.”
A complication may be Trump’s relationship with Putin; he has told his advisers that he’s determined not to wreck it, two people briefed on his comments said. Dating to his first term, Trump has said it’s in America’s interest for him to be on civil terms with his Russian counterpart, who presides over a nuclear arsenal.
A potential advantage in retaining a leader-to-leader rapport with Putin is that Trump can position himself as a mediator both sides can trust, a Western official said in an interview. He enjoys leverage with both Putin and Zelenskyy, whose country depends on U.S. arms and money for survival.
In that vein, Trump last month was heard on a hot mic telling French President Emmanuel Macron that Putin wants to make a deal “for me … as crazy as it sounds.”
While sanctions are a tool that may wrest concessions from Putin, they carry a downside in that each escalatory twist jeopardizes Trump’s role as a fair broker, the official said. The challenge, the official added, is to adeptly time the sanctions and “dial back” when progress is made.
Another consideration is that sanctions can reverberate in unexpected ways. An administration official pointed to India as a cautionary example. When the United States doubled its tariff rate on India as punishment for buying Russian oil, American relations with India soured. This week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned up in China for an event hosted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The United States has long seen India as a vital democratic partner in countering Chinese and Russian influence around the world.
Yet in China, Modi was seen holding hands with Putin and speaking warmly to Xi. Images of Modi cozying up to Russia and China, the administration official said, were “not great.”
Brett Bruen, who was White House director of global engagement in the Obama administration, said in an interview: “We spent the last decade trying to build up an Indo-Pacific partnership with a view toward limiting the spread of China’s adversarial actions. Trump just took a bazooka to it.”
