BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — It may be the most profound American foreign policy shift in a generation – a move to engage directly with Russia, in a bid to end the war in Ukraine and open channels of economic and diplomatic collaboration that have been limited or nonexistent for years. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, successive American administrations kept their distance from Russia; Vladimir Putin, who came to power a quarter century ago, was viewed as a dictator who controlled all domestic media, eliminated political opponents, and was increasingly hostile towards the West. More recently, Putin was named a war criminal — not only in an indictment from the International War Crimes Tribunal, but also in comments from senior officials of the Biden administration.
Now, in just a three-week period, the Trump Administration has pivoted sharply: President Trump has spoken directly with Putin; the U.S. has opened direct talks with senior Russian officials; and U.S. officials have criticized Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him “a dictator“ and an ungrateful ally. Last week the U.S. paused military assistance to Ukraine and halted key intelligence-sharing operations with the Ukrainian government.
THE CONTEXT
- The Trump administration is pursuing a major reset in U.S.-Russia relations, including unprecedented direct engagement with Moscow. Top U.S. officials — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security advisor Michael Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — met their Russian counterparts, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for bilateral talks. The two sides agreed to explore economic cooperation opportunities, move to restore staff at their embassies in each other’s capitals, and work on Ukraine peace talks. Ukraine and European allies were excluded from the talks. Trump has also said he intends to meet directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Trump has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and erroneously said that Ukraine started the war.
- At a February 28 meeting at the Oval Office between Zelensky and Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the American leaders berated Zelensky for not showing enough gratitude for U.S. assistance to Ukraine.
- Following the White House clash, the U.S. halted further deliveries of military aid to Ukraine and paused major parts of intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, said the Ukrainians “brought it on themselves” and said the moves were a “forcing function” to compel Ukraine to the negotiating table. National security advisor Mike Waltz said the pause will end only when a date for peace talks with Russia is set.
- Experts warn that for all the criticism and punitive measures imposed against Ukraine, not enough pressure has been applied to Russia. Kellogg said Thursday that the U.S. has sanctioned Russian energy and its “shadow fleet” of tankers, and threatened to use of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine. President Trump said Friday that he was “strongly considering” imposing “large scale” sanctions and tariffs on Russia to get them to a final peace agreement. He spoke after Russian forces launched a major drone and missile attack against Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
The Cipher Brief spoke about these shifts with experts on the U.S.-Russia relationship, including Council on Foreign Relations Distinguished Fellow Thomas Graham, former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried, and former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John McLaughlin. Excerpts from those conversations appear below; in addition, we feature remarks from another Cipher Brief expert, retired General Philip Breedlove, who served as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and who spoke at Council on Foreign Relations forum on Thursday.
All described the recent shift as unprecedented in their time as observers and analysts of the U.S.-Russia relationship. And while some noted the benefits of improved relations between these nuclear powers, they also worried that the U.S. has offered too much to Moscow, too quickly - and that dangerous consequences may follow.
Their remarks have been excerpted here for length and clarity.
THE EXPERTS
At one level, it's a good thing to be in touch with the Russians. I've lived through periods when we have had business-like relations with them. There's nothing wrong with trying to open up a relationship with them. But the problem here is that the circumstances we're in today are very different. We can't get around the fact that Russia blatantly, unprovoked, invaded another country that it had pledged in 1994 never to invade — and in an agreement to which we were party.
So our relationship with them now can't be open-ended, let's sit down and talk, and so forth. It needs to be, We can talk, but you must understand we have conditions and there are things that we need you to do in order to help us arrive at a settlement that is fair to everyone.
What are the Russians prepared to give up here? In any kind of settlement involving Russia that is acceptable to us, there have to be some security agreements to ensure the Russians don't just continue doing what they're doing in Ukraine. And they could be bilateral, or they could be in some sort of peace agreement that the Europeans work out.
For weeks now, we've basically given away the things that the Russians most ardently desire. Even on this sharing of intelligence, it was a Russian parliamentarian who said two or three weeks ago that the United States should stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, and lo and behold, we do. So we seem to be going down the Russian checklist of things that would help them come to the table. I suppose the president and others would say, that's the main thing — get them to the table and then we can deal with all these other things. But if you've taken so many of these leverage points off the table, what are you left to deal with?
The main thing you have to know about Putin is he knows what he wants and he will come prepared to push hard for what he wants. And so [President Trump] will have to know well in advance what he wants. This isn't a pickup game. It's not improvisational. I think the president, for understandable reasons, given his background and the fact that he's engineered an incredible political comeback, I think he has extraordinary faith in his ability to go into a room and move people, persuade people, bring people along and so forth. But in dealing with Putin, he knows what he wants. And you have to know very clearly what you want and don't give it away prematurely. We've tended to use a lot of fear and pressure with our allies. You have to use the same fear and pressure with Putin.
On one side, we've got a criminal aggressor, and in the world's eye we're treating that criminal aggressor with kid gloves. On the other side, we have a nation that's been invaded, clearly the victim, and we seem to be dealing with them with a hammer. It's hard for some of us who travel a lot in Europe to be able to sit down with our allies and discuss why this might be happening.
And I want to highlight two things. Right out of the gate, we have given Russia huge policy wins. For decades and decades, Mr. Putin has wanted to deal with America about Europe — without Europe. We've always kept Europe in the middle of the conversation. We've fought hard not to allow Mr. Putin to establish this idea that he is above Europe and he should be able to do European matters with the American president one-on-one, whoever the American president is. And we seem to now have caved on that, and we are now doing business with Mr. Putin on Europe – without Europe. And in a similar fashion, since the winter of 2013 and '14 when I was the SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander in Europe] and Russia first invaded Crimea and then invaded the Donbas, we have all said that we will not deal about Ukraine without Ukraine, and now we are caving on that as well.
So before the negotiations even start, we have given huge, huge policy concessions to Russia. And I don't think we're walking in the door with a strong hand when that's the way we begin. Many of us remember when we were young, our parents said, people don't care what you say, they care what you do. The world is watching what we do in terms of our commitments to Europe and Ukraine about European security.
I believe right now that Russia needs a ceasefire worse than anybody. They're backing up in the last few days in the Donbas, and they're throwing bodies at Kursk in an amazing way. Twice now they have asked North Korea to help them retake Russian land. That should tell you a lot about the state of the Russian army. They desperately need a ceasefire, and they want us to guarantee that ceasefire via these agreements so that they can rebuild. It's going to take them three, four, maybe even five years to get really ready again because their army has been decimated so badly. But unless the bayonet runs into something hard, they will be back.
I've told a lot of people in Europe that if anybody comes to you and tells you they know what President Trump is thinking, you should put down your pencil and turn off your recording device. And I'll be the first to say, I cannot tell you what President Trump is thinking here.
On the positive side, we are in the process of restoring diplomatic relations [with Russia]. The world is a much more dangerous place when the world's two leading nuclear powers are not engaged in a substantive dialogue about any set of issues. That raises the risk of miscommunications, misperceptions, and direct military confrontation between our two countries.
On the other hand, it's not clear exactly where we're taking this relationship, where the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, sees this leading. What type of relationship does he want to develop with Russia over the long term? We're in an era of great-power competition. Does he see this relationship as largely competitive? Does he believe this relationship is going to be a partnership along the lines of what we aspired to 30 years ago at the end of the Cold War, or does he have something else in mind? I don't believe they have a full-form Russia strategy at this point.
I do believe that the president has realized that to settle the conflict, you need a broader dialogue with the Russians. The Russians aren't interested simply in settling the Ukraine conflict. They want to normalize relations, and there is a practical reason for that. There are a lot of issues that only the United States can help resolve for the Russians – Ukraine being one of them, but strategic stability is another. But the Russians are also interested in this because relations with the United States are a validation of Russia as a great power. And that's extremely important for the Russians – it's extremely important for Putin personally.
There are two challenges here, and I think the Trump administration is focused on only one of them: the challenge of how do you bring Ukraine to the negotiating table? The Ukrainians have made it clear that they're not interested in a simple ceasefire. They want security guarantees. They want to know how they're going to defend themselves against Russia in the future. How are they going to preserve their independence and sovereignty? President Trump really just wants to get that ceasefire. He knows that Ukraine is in a weak position, so he's exercising the leverage he has to try to bludgeon them into agreeing to whatever his vision of a ceasefire is.
But the other problem, which I don't think the Trump administration has given due attention to, is how do you bring Russia to the negotiating table? The Russians keep talking about what they call the root causes of the conflict, which really are two things: their concern about what they see as anti-Russian policies inside Ukraine and, more importantly, the role of Ukraine in Europe's security architecture. They want those issues addressed before they're prepared to agree to a ceasefire.
The Kremlin still believes that time is on its side. It's making grinding progress on the battlefield. Its economy has proven to be resilient against Western sanctions. You see Ukraine's problems in mobilizing forces. You see flagging Western support for Ukraine. If I'm in the Kremlin, I can keep talking about how I'm willing to negotiate this, that and the other thing, but I'm under no pressing need to have those negotiations.
[The Russians] look at the situation as it's developing, and the question you're asking in the Kremlin is, why should I back away from any of my maximal demands? If I'm in the Kremlin, I'm sitting pretty at this point. Let's see what the United States is prepared to do, how they're going to lean on Ukraine, what types of concessions they're going to get out of the Ukrainians that again serve my interest.
This does not serve the United States' interest over the long run. We really do need to preserve an independent and sovereign Ukraine. That should be the minimal goal that the United States is pursuing, and that requires a set of actions that bring Moscow to the negotiating table because it has come to the conclusion that time is no longer on my side, that I need to cut a deal and to cut that deal, I need to back off my maximal demands. That's not where we're headed at this point.
I don't know where we land. There is a notion that Trump wants to deal with Putin, he's enamored of Putin, and certainly in MAGA world there is a pro-Putin strain of thought just like in the right-wing isolationists [of the 1930s], there was a pro-Nazi strain of thought. There were a lot of people sympathetic to Hitler and they weren't all with the Republicans. Joseph Kennedy, Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain, thought the British would lose and it was best that we simply cut aid to Britain and be realistic. Now, he was not the only person who thought that. Lord Halifax, Churchill's foreign secretary, thought that as well.
It may be that Trump wants to punch Ukraine, punch Zelensky, and with Zelensky sufficiently cowed, resume pursuit of a reasonable deal which could work. The outline of the Trump plan could work. And it would mean a ceasefire in place and security for Ukraine, that security to be guaranteed by an Anglo-French force.
The underlying debates about Ukraine are the debates about America's role in the world. There was a similar debate in the 1930s about whether the West should support the Spanish Republic, which was fighting the fascists. Now, in fact, the Spanish Republic was more and more dominated by Stalinists. So it wasn't a great analogy. It wasn't a great cause.
But Ukraine is a better one. And the issue is similar. Do we stand up to aggressive dictators now? Or do we do it at greater cost later? This was a lesson which Americans learned deeply by 1945, and it stayed with us for a very long time. But now that memory is faded, as is natural. I get that. But we may have to learn some of the old lessons the hard way.
There are a number of variables. What will the Europeans do if Trump pulls the plug? Can they back Ukraine by themselves? It's hard to see because Putin will threaten them. And without American backing, Putin might be able to make a European position inside Ukraine very difficult.
But Russia doesn't have all the cards. If we would recognize it, they have a lot of problems. We know about the Ukrainian problems, but the Russian problems are clear. Economic problems, military problems, they can't seem to retake Kursk. Their advance in Eastern Ukraine has slowed. Their casualties are high. This is a winnable situation and Trump likes to win.
I'm by nature optimistic because my professional instincts are to take the stink bomb before me and figure out what to do with it. Don't admire the problem, fix it. That means you have to see that there is a way to fix it. But analytically, it's not a great moment.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
