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11:57 22.05.2025 •
President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it, ‘The New York Times’ notes.
For months, President Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.
After a phone call on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American president is doing. The deeper question now is whether he is also abandoning America’s three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a nascent democracy that he has frequently blamed for being illegally invaded.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky and other European leaders after his call with Mr. Putin that Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves, just days after saying that only he and Mr. Putin had the power to broker a deal. And he backed away from his own threats to join a European pressure campaign that would include new sanctions on Russia, according to six officials who were familiar with the discussion. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Their account sheds light on Mr. Trump’s decision to throw up his hands when it comes to a peace process that he had previously promised to resolve in just 24 hours. And, unless he again reverses course, Monday’s developments left Mr. Putin with exactly what he wanted: not only an end to American pressure, but the creation of a deep fissure inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, between the Americans and their traditional European allies, who say they are going ahead with sanctions anyway.
To many, Mr. Trump’s decision was foretold — first by his fiery, televised encounter with Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, then by the resignation of the American ambassador in Kyiv.
“The policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than the aggressor, Russia,” Bridget A. Brink, the former ambassador and a longtime Foreign Service officer, wrote after leaving Kyiv last month. “Peace at any price is not peace at all — it is appeasement.”
Mr. Trump, of course, is usually a fan of financial pressure: He routinely threatens tariffs and sanctions against allies and adversaries alike. But in a statement to The New York Times, a White House official said this was different. The official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the president’s private calls, said additional sanctions against Russia would hinder business opportunities and the president wants to maximize economic opportunities for Americans.
American officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have countered critics by pointing out that existing sanctions on Russia, largely imposed after the 2022 invasion, remain in place, as does intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
Mr. Trump, he insisted, is “trying to end a bloody, costly war that neither side can win.”
Yet the subtext of Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky and the Europeans is that the era of American expenditures of diplomatic energy, new arms for Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia is rapidly coming to an end. Several European officials said the message they took from the call was that they should not expect the United States to join them any time soon in piling additional financial pressure onto Mr. Putin.
For Mr. Trump, that is a reversal. In social media posts in recent months he episodically threatened tariffs and sanctions against Russia if it refused to join Ukraine in declaring a 30-day, unconditional cease-fire.
But after Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Putin on Monday, those commitments evaporated. The American president declined, both in public and in his call with the European leaders, to follow up on that threat.
Mr. Trump implied in his public comments that his call with Mr. Putin had resulted in a breakthrough of sorts. But it quickly became clear to the Ukrainians and Europeans that the Russian leader had made no concessions to Mr. Trump beyond negotiating. Russia is already doing that, albeit halfheartedly, sending a junior team to Istanbul last week for talks with the Ukrainians.
Frustrated with the slow progress and Mr. Putin’s intransigence, Mr. Trump has publicly mused about walking away from the negotiations. And he made clear in his post on Monday that he was eager to pull the United States out of the discussions and move on to doing business deals with Russia.
The conditions to end the war, Mr. Trump wrote, “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.”
Mr. Putin seems to understand Mr. Trump’s eagerness for commerce, and has steered much of their conversations toward the potential economic relationship, according to people briefed on their phone calls on Monday and earlier this year. As a result, Europe is now moving toward new sanctions and the United States appears poised to move in the opposite direction, looking to get past Ukraine and nurture a larger relationship with Russia.
It’s exactly the kind of split inside NATO that Mr. Putin has been looking to create, and exploit, for two decades.
A senior European official who has been involved in the closed-door discussions said Mr. Trump never seemed invested in joining sanctions on Russia if it refused to go along with the unconditional cease-fire. His threats, the official said, appeared largely performative; the United States did not join in the design of major new sanctions.
The disagreement between the Americans and the Europeans over support for Ukraine will likely come to a head over two nearly back-to-back summits: the Group of 7 in Canada in mid-June and the NATO summit a week later in The Hague.
…In a subsequent call with European leaders, Trump signaled that he was convinced Russia was winning, repeating a number of the Kremlin’s talking points, according to people familiar with the exchange who declined to comment on talks behind closed doors, Bloomberg stresses.
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