Putin gives Trump just enough to claim progress on Ukraine peace

In the run up to today’s call, Donald Trump made a big deal of his conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

But the results look like there’s little to shout about.

The Russian president has given the US leader just enough to claim that he made progress towards peace in Ukraine, without making it look like he was played by the Kremlin.

Trump can point to Putin’s pledge to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for 30 days. If that actually happens, it will bring some relief to civilians.

But it’s nowhere near the full and unconditional ceasefire that the US wanted from Russia.

The “very horrible war” Trump has insisted he can stop is still raging.

And Putin, a man indicted as a suspected war criminal by the ICC, has been given a leg-up back to the top tier of global politics.

Russian state media report that the two presidents’ phone call lasted more than two hours. The Kremlin readout – its account of the call – is also long at 500 words.

It presents the conversation as chatty: they apparently discussed ice hockey, the kind of detail an audience back in Russia will lap up.

After three years as a pariah in the western world, and frosty relations long before that, Russia is back dealing directly with a US administration that wants to engage.

The two leaders are even discussing Middle East peace and “global security”.

The Kremlin must be struggling to believe the transformation.

Ahead of the call, some wondered whether Donald Trump might actually pile some pressure on Russia. After all, it’s been clear for over a week that it was stalling on the ceasefire.

But there’s no sign of a dressing down for Putin like the one Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky had to endure in the Oval Office a fortnight ago.

Both countries’ accounts suggest nothing has changed.

Russia repeats that it wants peace. But instead of grounding its drones and silencing its guns, it’s quibbling over how a still non-existent ceasefire might be monitored.

Meanwhile, it’s adding even more conditions aimed at crippling Kyiv’s ability to resist.

One demand is that the flow of both weapons and intelligence to Ukraine from its allies has to cease.

For Ukrainians, the only sliver of hope is that the US hasn’t agreed to any of this – yet.

They can also point to the call as more proof that Russia has no interest in ending its invasion.

But all that talking will bring Ukraine minimal relief from its suffering.

For US diplomacy, too, it has to be disappointing.

But for the Kremlin it will feel like a pretty decent day, the kind unimaginable before Donald Trump returned to the White House.