 "Is Putin 'dragging his feet' on full ceasefire? Trump thinks so")
Russian leader Vladimir Putin is just buying team with ceasefire talks and now US President Donald Trump appears to agree as well.
Trump said in an interview on Tuesday that Putin appears to be “dragging their feet” on a peace deal with Ukraine.
Even as the Trump administration on Tuesday hailed agreements with Ukraine and Russia regarding a ceasefire in Black Sea, the Kremlin junked the deal within hours and said there would not be any ceasefire until sanctions on certain Russian entities are lifted. Hours later, Russia attacked the Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv and made it clear that there was no ceasefire in motion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that continued attacks showed that Russia had no intention to make peace.
“Launching such large-scale attacks after ceasefire negotiations is a clear signal to the whole world that Moscow is not going to pursue real peace. Since March 11, there has been a U.S. proposal for a total ceasefire, a complete halt to strikes. And literally every night, through its attacks, Russia keeps saying ’no’ to our partners’ peace proposal,” said Zelenskyy in a post on X.
‘It could be they’re dragging their feet’
In a rare moment when he appeared to indict Russia, Putin on Tuesday said that Putin appears to be dragging his feet in ceasefire talks.
However, Trump did not criticise such behaviour. Instead, he said that he has done the same over the years in business deals. It was yet another example of Trump drawing a parallel between him and Putin, the leader of Russia with whom he has long been friends despite the Russian enmity with the United States.
“I think that Russia wants to see an end to it, but it could be they’re dragging their feet. I’ve done it over the years, you know; I don’t want to sign a contract, I want to sort of stay in the game, but maybe I don’t want to do it, quite … I’m not sure. But no, I think Russia would like to see it end, and I think [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy would like to see it end at this point,” said Trump in an interview with Newxmax.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWhile Trump had always been friendly with Putin and critical of the support to Ukraine, he has completely aligned the United States with Russia in his second term by upending generations of US policy. While he has exerted all sorts of pressure on Ukraine, including berating Zelenskyy on live television, seeking his ouster in Ukraine, and suspending military aid and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine, he has done nothing to press Putin. Instead, he has agreed to every concession tsought so far.
Origiinally, Trump and his top officials had urged Putin to accept the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposal that emerged out of US-Ukraine talks earlier this month. However, after Putin rejected it and laid down his maximalist demands, Trump arm-twisted Zelenskyy into accepting a watered down ceasefire regarding energy infrastructure that benefits Russia much more than Ukraine. Similarly, Putin has now placed conditions regarding the Black Sea ceasefire.
Russia buying time to maximise gains
Putin is adding conditions after conditions to ceasefire proposals to prolong talks so as Russian forces could maximise gains from the battlefield and extract maximum concessions from both Ukraine and the United States. The plan has already succeeded in Kursk where, helped by the US suspension of intelligence-sharing, Russia recaptured large swathes of territories previously occupied by Ukraine.
Even though Black Sea ceasefire, just the like pause on attacks on energy infrastructure, primarily benefits Russia, Putin is still not accepting these ceasefire as his approach is to keep buying time.
A Russian diplomat told The Moscow Times, “Time is currently on our side, and we’ll try to make the most of it.”
A second source told the outlet that Russian negotiators have been “tasked with nitpicking every comma” to prolong talks as much as possible to buy as much time as possible.
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