Has Donald Trump been outfoxed by Putin and Zelensky?

Donald Trump likes to use the phone. In his (ghostwritten) bestseller, The Art of the Deal, he talks of making between 50 and 100 calls during the average working day and then going home and picking up where he left off. He found his predecessors in the White House puzzling because, apparently, they didn’t tend to use the telephone: “If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate,” he told reporters in 2017.

So it is that the US president has engaged in two phone calls this week which could prove to be of great consequence. On Tuesday he spoke with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for about two hours in what the pro-Putin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda referred to as “a diplomatic victory” for the Russian president (more about which a little later).

The following day he had a call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, which Trump described in a post on his Truth Social site as “very good and productive”. It’s a major step forward from “ungrateful” and “disrespectful”, adjectives employed by the US president following the February 28 meeting at the White House that seemed so disastrous for Zelensky.

It appears, from the press briefing delivered after the call by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that the Ukrainian president took great pains to assure his US counterpart of both his gratitude and his respect. Indeed it looks like he broke almost all known records for the number of ways in which he could praise America’s – and Trump’s – “leadership”.

It was, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, a very successful bit of diplomacy on the Ukrainian president’s part, which has put the pressure very much back on Vladimir Putin.

Trump sees the prospect of a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia resulting from the recent talks between US and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia as his personal triumph. This obviously hasn’t been lost on Zelensky, writes Lindstaedt, a professor in the department of government at the University of Essex. She notes the pains taken by Zelensky to stress that while he remains committed to Trump’s peace plan, in the meantime he is very happy with whatever (small) concessions Trump managed to wring out of Putin during their call the previous day.

Agreeing to the partial ceasefire when it comes to energy infrastructure and power plants, the two leaders also discussed the prospect of the US taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear power facilities. This included Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which is at present occupied by Russia (although this appears to have since been ruled out by the Ukrainian president).

But the upshot of the call between the two leaders is that now it’s Putin who is getting in the way of Trump’s big deal. Linstaedt believes that while Trump clearly has a great deal of respect for Putin, the US president also has a notoriously short attention span and may get tired of Putin playing for time.

Playing for time is clearly what Putin is doing at present, write Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko, experts in international security at the University of Birmingham and National University Odesa Law Academy, respectively. Reacting to Trump’s phone call with the Russian president on Tuesday, Wolff notes how Putin successfully avoided making any concessions at all to bring Trump’s dream deal closer to reality. Meanwhile, each day that passes brings further death and destruction to Ukraine.

About the only concession Putin would agree to is the agreement not to target power and energy infrastructure. And there’s talk of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, although as many commentators have noted (and as has been covered in detail here on The Conversation), the Black Sea is one area of the conflict where Ukraine has had the upper hand.

Tellingly, there was also talk of an ice hockey match between Russia and the US, something of a distraction from the incredibly high stakes involved.

Like Lindstaedt, Wolff and Malyarenko believe Putin’s stalling is a high-risk strategy. They note Trump’s short attention span but also have one eye on Europe, where leaders continue to discuss their plans to increase their assistance to Ukraine’s war effort and ramp up sanctions against Russia. They conclude:

Undoubtedly, these measures would be more effective if they had Washington’s full buy-in – but they send a strong signal to both the Kremlin and the White House that Ukraine is not alone in its fight against Russia’s continuing aggression.

One of Putin’s key demands in response to Trump’s 30-day ceasefire proposal was that all military aid and intelligence to Ukraine be halted. He also stipulated that Kyiv would have to refrain from reequipping its military or conscripting any new recruits during any pause in the fighting. This would leave Ukraine dangerously exposed in case Putin decided not to hold to his side of the bargain.

Ukraine conflict: who controls what territory, March 19 2025.

Natalya Chernyshova believes that Trump and his team should heed the lessons of the Minsk accords. These were agreements brokered in 2014 and 2015 with the help of France and Germany that aimed to end the violence in eastern Ukraine after Russian-backed separatists took control of large parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Chernyshova, a professor of modern European history at Queen Mary University of London, walks us through the background to the agreements, neither of which held for more than a few days.

She says the deals were doomed from the start. Quite apart from Moscow’s utter lack of commitment to a peaceful settlement, the agreements were worded in such as way as to effectively bar Kyiv from seeking membership of Nato. This was high on Putin’s wishlist but something that Ukraine was never going to be happy to accept. As she says, the accords “failed to recognise that Russian war aims were irreconcilable with Ukrainian sovereignty”.

It was a bitter lesson. In the five years after the signing of the Minsk accords, more than 14,000 people were killed and 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. She also believes the failed peace deals gave Putin the impetus for the subsequent war as it showed that Russia could reap benefits from its aggression.

“Historically, Russia has responded to strength, not appeasement,” writes Christo Atanasov Kostov, an expert in the cold war and Russian propaganda at Spain’s IE University. Kostov believes that Trump’s transactional style plays to Putin’s strengths. It has offered him rewards in return for a deal to end the war, rather than insisting, as Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden did (and as most of Ukraine’s European allies still agree), that allowing Russia to benefit from its aggression is simply storing up trouble for the future.

Time and time again, the recent approach to mediation from Truump’s team has favoured Russia. Trump and his team have, in public statements, appeared to have echoed numerous Kremlin talking points and made concession after concession, including ruling out Ukraine’s membership of Nato or its hope of regaining territory occupied by Russian troops. It even – bizarrely – prompted the US to recently vote against its closest friends and allies in the United Nations general assembly, choosing instead to vote alongside Russia, North Korea and Belarus against a resolution condemning Moscow’s invasion and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Ominously, Kostov warns: “China will also be watching closely. If Trump hands Putin a win, Beijing may feel emboldened to escalate its military efforts in Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

Meanwhile in Gaza…

While the world’s attention has largely been focused on the possibility of halting fighting between Russia and Ukraine, Israel drove a nail into the coffin of the already moribund Gaza ceasefire deal. On the night of March 17, it recommenced massive aerial bombardment of the Strip, killing more than 400 people in a single night of bombing.

We put a series of key questions to Scott Lucas, a Middle East expert at University College Dublin. Lucas predicted weeks ago that the ceasefire would collapse, given domestic Israeli politics which have incentivised the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to continue his assault on the Gaza Strip.

He also predicted that the bombing was a prelude to further ground assaults. His forecast has since proved correct. The Israel Defense Forces launched a “limited ground operation” this morning to retake the Netzarim corridor, which divides the Strip in two and possession of which will give Israel effective control of much of the territory.

He also warns that the renewed assault on Gaza should not detract attention from the escalating violence in the West Bank, where the UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, has reported this week on the likelihood of mass ethnic cleansing to make way for the establishment of Israeli settlements.

The airstrikes came days after an independent report commissioned by the UN found that Israel’s military is “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. Rachel Rosen of University College London and Mai Abu Moghli of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies have taken a deep dive into this aspect of the conflict. They believe that targeting children is a deliberate strategy on the part of Israel to destroy the Palestinian people’s hopes for future self-determination.