Trump will have to make first move with Putin – Time

Russian President Vladimir Putin is under no pressure to negotiate with the US, and President-elect Donald Trump will have to make the first move if he wants to make a deal to end the Ukraine conflict, a former US official has told Time Magazine.

Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail to end the conflict within “24 hours,” a statement viewed in Moscow as a campaign season exaggeration. However, Trump said on Thursday that he and Putin would probably speak in the near future, while Putin said that he would be open to a call, and that “it wouldn’t be beneath me to call him myself.”

“There’s no pressure on [Putin] to negotiate,” a former US official told Time on Friday. The official, whom the magazine claimed has “high-level contacts in both Washington and Moscow,” pointed out that the battlefield situation currently favors Russia, giving Putin little reason to seek a speedy end to the conflict.

”The Russians will be interested” in a deal, Time’s source said. “I’m sure they’ve got a lot of feelers out about the menu of options. But they are not going to respond until the US decides what it wants to offer.”

The Russian military is steadily gaining ground in the Donbass, as Kiev – which according to the Russian Defense Ministry has lost around half a million men since February 2022 – struggles to conscript new troops and obtain more weapons from the West. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk Region – which Ukraine’s top commander said was a high-stakes gambit aimed at forcing Russia to pull troops from the Donbass – has failed to achieve its objective and cost Kiev more than 30,000 soldiers, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Trump has offered few details on how he intends to end the conflict, and several competing visions have emerged from figures within Trump’s circle.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has suggested that Kiev could abandon its territorial claims and hopes of NATO membership in exchange for peace, with the conflict frozen along the current line of contact.

Mike Pompeo, a hawk who served as Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state, has called on his former boss to give Ukraine half a trillion dollars, long range weapons, and an invite to NATO, in the hope that Kiev could then dictate its own terms for peace.

Moscow maintains that any settlement must begin with Ukraine ceasing military operations and acknowledging the “territorial reality” that it will never regain control of the Russian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, as well as Crimea. In addition, the Kremlin insists that the goals of its military operation – which include Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification – must be achieved.

Whatever approach Trump takes, Putin said on Thursday that the president-elect’s statements on Ukraine “deserve attention, at the very least.”