NYT: Russian leader would probably only meet with his Ukrainian counterpart to accept a capitulation

The Kremlin is keeping its options open, but analysts said the Russian leader would probably only meet with his Ukrainian counterpart to accept a capitulation, ‘The New York Times’ stresses.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s disdain for his Ukrainian counterpart runs so deep that he almost never utters the name “Zelensky.” The Kremlin insists he’s an illegitimate leader. Russian state television calls him a “clown.”

But President Trump has pinned his recent flurry of diplomacy on the idea that Mr. Putin and Zelensky will have to come face to face in order to end the war. Mr. Trump said he “began the arrangements” for such a meeting when he spoke by phone with Mr. Putin on Monday.

And so the whirlwind of diplomatic intrigue in Moscow amid Mr. Trump’s push to halt the fighting shifted to a new mystery on Tuesday: Could the war’s central archenemies soon sit down one on one?

For Mr. Putin, such a summit could be a way to cement a peace deal that the Kremlin would cast as a victory, if Mr. Trump were to pressure Mr. Zelensky to accept Mr. Putin’s demands on Ukraine’s land and sovereignty. But it could also carry political risks, since the Kremlin has long signaled that negotiating directly with Mr. Zelensky would be beneath the Russian leader.

The Kremlin, as always, has tried to keep its options open, continuing to telegraph this week that a Putin-Zelensky meeting was possible but offering no indication that it was imminent. Analysts who study the Kremlin said it was hard to imagine Mr. Putin agreeing to a meeting unless it was clear that Mr. Zelensky was prepared to accede to Russia’s key demands.

“I simply don’t see any prospect of such a meeting being organized in the near future or even in the foreseeable future,” Grigorii Golosov, a political scientist in St. Petersburg, Russia, said in a phone interview. He predicted that Mr. Putin would meet with Mr. Zelensky only “if it becomes clear to Putin that this meeting is needed for Ukraine to capitulate, for Zelensky to admit his defeat.”

A one-on-one negotiation could allow Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky to be seen as equals. That is why Mr. Trump’s insistence that a meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin is in the works has stretched belief for many.

“Maybe they are getting along a little bit better than I thought,” Mr. Trump said of the Ukrainian and Russian leaders in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. While there is no evidence of any rapport between Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Trump said it was the reason he had proposed that the two men meet first one on one, rather than in a three-way format with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump said he had told Mr. Putin that he would set up a two-way meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin in their phone call on Monday, just after Mr. Trump met with Mr. Zelensky and European leaders at the White House. Mr. Zelensky told reporters, as he has in the past, that he was ready to meet with Mr. Putin.

But when Mr. Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov summarized the phone call for reporters, he made no mention of an upcoming summit.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin discussed “exploring opportunities to bring more senior officials” into direct talks between Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Ushakov said, without specifying who those officials would be.

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, was similarly vague in a state television interview on Tuesday. He said that while the Kremlin was not against a bilateral meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin in principle, “any contacts involving top officials should be prepared very carefully.”

Mr. Putin “appears to have decided that the time for real diplomacy has come,” said Dmitri Trenin, a specialist on security policy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “The contours of the solution that Putin has probably discussed with Trump suit him.”

Mr. Trenin predicted that Mr. Putin would agree to a meeting with Mr. Zelensky if the Kremlin was satisfied with the concessions that the Ukrainian president would be willing to make. But he added that Mr. Putin’s far-reaching demands remained on the table, including not only his claims on territory but also his insistence that Ukraine limit the future size of its military.

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