As Trump and Putin circle each other, an agenda beyond Ukraine emerges

They have been circling each other carefully for seven days now -- sending out invitations to talk, mixing a few jabs with ego-stroking, suggesting that the only way to end the Ukraine war is for the two of them to meet, presumably without the Ukrainians.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose relationship was always the subject of mystery and psychodrama in the first Trump term, are at it again.

But it is not a simple rerun. Trump was unusually harsh in his rhetoric last week, saying Putin was "destroying Russia," and threatening sanctions and tariffs on the country if it doesn't come to the negotiating table -- a fairly empty threat given the tiny amount of trade between the US and Russia these days.

Calculating and understated as ever, Putin has responded with flattery, agreeing with Trump that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had he been president three years ago. He repeated that he was ready to sit down and negotiate over the fate of Europe, superpower to superpower, leader to leader.

So far they have not spoken, although Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday night that "he wants to speak, and we'll be speaking soon." As they prepare the ground for that first conversation, they are sending signals that they want to negotiate about more than just Ukraine -- a war that, in Putin's telling, is only one of the arenas in which the West is waging its own fight against Russia.

Both men seem to envision taking on the whole relationship between Moscow and Washington, possibly including revived nuclear arms talks, a conversation that has a looming deadline: The major treaty limiting the arsenals of both nations expires in almost exactly a year. After that, they would be free to pursue the kind of arms race the world has not seen since the deepest days of the Cold War.

Recalling conversations with Putin in 2020, before his defeat in the US election that year, Trump insisted last week, "We want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that's very possible." He appeared to be assuming that China would engage in the same conversation. (It has refused, at least so far.)

While he kept using the word "denuclearize," Trump almost certainly meant negotiating a new agreement to reduce -- not eliminate -- the stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons, which can cross continents. For his part, Putin talked about reviving discussions on "strategic stability," the term of art among negotiators for talks that cover not just the number of nuclear weapons deployed on each side, but where they are based, how they are inspected, and steps to deter their use.

The last, tentative arms control talks were ended shortly before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin has argued since then that any talks on limiting nuclear arms should also cover the war in Ukraine. The Biden administration had refused to mix the two, fearing that Putin's real goal was to trade limits on its nuclear arsenal for the territory he had captured in Ukraine and other concessions.

But Trump seems open to a broader negotiation, which is exactly what Putin would like, because it could enable him to make that trade-off.

It is unclear what, if any, long-term security guarantees Trump is willing to offer to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who he has insisted in recent days should have made a deal with Putin and avoided a devastating war.

Trump clearly wants to establish himself as a peacemaker: In his first term he suggested he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and bringing some kind of end to Europe's biggest war since World War II would bolster his argument. He seems unconcerned about giving Ukraine a substantive role in the process, in contrast to former President Joe Biden, whose mantra was "Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine."

"For all these blustering exchanges, the thing Putin most wants to hear is that this is a deal Russia and the US will strike by themselves," said Stephen Sestanovich, a Russian and Eurasian studies expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former State Department official.

Keith Kellogg, a retired general who, at 80, has been tasked by Trump to get the conversations going, insists that the key will be economics, not casualties. "When you look at Putin, you can't just say, 'Well, stop the killing,' because candidly, that's not their mentality," he said on Fox News last week. Trump "approaches warfare differently: he looks at the economics as a piece of that warfare." And he will focus, Kellogg insists, on limiting Russia's oil revenues.

Putin, confident of his position on Ukraine's battlefields despite Russia's enormous casualties, has been trying to telegraph a wait-and-see approach to Trump. Russia's goals haven't changed, he has said, and while it is ready for talks to end the war, it will only do so on its own terms.

Putin has strongly signaled that, at a minimum, he would demand to keep the roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine that Russia now controls, as well as an agreement ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine and limiting the size of its military.

At the same time, Putin has made clear his eagerness to engage with Trump -- and, more broadly, with the United States, after three years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.

The Kremlin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has been telling journalists on a near-daily basis that Putin is ready to receive Trump's call. "We're waiting for signals," he said Friday. "Everyone is ready."

And Putin himself twice went out of his way last week to lavish praise on Trump -- a proven method for winning Trump's favor.

On Jan. 20, Trump's inauguration day, Putin held a televised meeting of Russia's Security Council -- an event that normally happens on Fridays and largely behind closed doors. He said Trump "showed courage" in surviving attempts on his life and had won "a convincing victory."

On Friday, in a stage-managed moment, Putin stopped to answer a state television reporter's question about Trump. The Kremlin promptly posted the video on its website.

"It is probably better for us to meet and, based on today's realities, talk calmly about all areas that are of interest to both the US and Russia," Putin said. He brushed aside Trump's sanctions threats, calling him "smart" and "pragmatic," and spoke Trump's language by saying the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him.

Like Trump, Putin has hinted at a desire to discuss a much broader set of issues with Trump than only the war in Ukraine. In his comments to state television Friday, Putin said the Kremlin and the Trump administration could "jointly look for solutions to the key issues of today, including strategic stability and the economy."

The "strategic stability" reference signaled potential interest in arms control talks, which the Kremlin briefly began with the Biden administration in 2021. "We discussed the range of arms control and nonproliferation issues, from AI in weapons to renewal of New START," Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state, who conducted the talks for the US side, said in an email. (New START is the arms control treaty that has been partly suspended by Russia, and expires in February 2026.)

Sherman noted that the talks were broken off ahead "of Putin's horrific invasion."

Putin's invitation for broad talks underscored what appears to be his continued optimism about Trump, despite Trump's tough words about Russia last week and the fact that the president imposed a raft of new sanctions on Russia during his first term as president.

Trump also went after Zelenskyy last week, essentially blaming him for not striking an agreement with Putin that could have avoided the war.

"I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelenskyy decided that 'I want to fight,'" Trump told Fox Television host Sean Hannity.

He made clear he was not interested in Biden's approach of supporting Ukraine for as long as necessary, but with his tough rhetoric last week against Putin he may be trying to show he is not a pushover for the Russian leader, while preparing for the possibility that he cannot coax Putin into a deal that works for all sides.

"To keep Putin off balance, Trump has to show him a deal is possible only if it makes sense to Ukraine and our allies," Sestanovich said.

Even as Putin welcomes talks with Trump, Russian officials aren't backing away from their overall message about the United States as a malignant force -- one sign of how the Kremlin is hedging its bets in case discussions with Trump do not go well.

Sherman, who has extensive experience negotiating with Russia, warns that if talks with Russia begin, the Trump administration should be ready. "Putin will want what he has always said he wanted: As much territory as possible, no Ukraine ever in NATO, no Western nuclear weapons in Europe that could target Russia." Given that, she bets that actually negotiating a follow-on to the New START treaty "is likely low on his list."