Donald Trump’s shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine has at times resembled a game of broken telephone, and the US president’s disregard for the details suggests the ceasefire he seeks is further off than his bullish statements may suggest.
Consider the events of just the last week. After his call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, Trump said that the two men had agreed to a partial ceasefire on “energy and infrastructure” targets, indicating that Russia would not target bridges, hospitals, railways or other civilian structures.
Hours later, a Russian drone slammed into a Ukrainian hospital. Russia’s readout of the call said that it had agreed to a halt on strikes on “energy infrastructure”, suggesting that everything else was fair game.
By Wednesday, the White House press secretary was dodging the question of what was discussed, pointing reporters to the administration’s readout without clarifying if Trump had misunderstood their discussion.
That day, Trump surprised the world by announcing that the US was proposing an American-led privatisation of Ukrainian power plants in order to provide a new security guarantee to the Ukrainians. Trump ordered his national security adviser Mike Waltz and secretary of state Marco Rubio to provide an “accurate” readout of the call (in itself a curious distinction). In it, they said Trump had told Zelenskyy that “American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure.”
Not so fast, said Zelenskyy on Thursday. The power plants are national property and “belong to all Ukrainians”. A takeover bid had never come up.
“If the Americans want to take the station from the Russians and they want to invest there and modernise it, that is a completely different issue,” he said. “In terms of ownership [of the nuclear power plants], we definitely did not discuss this with President Trump.”
The discrepancies are adding up and Ukraine is looking to protect itself from a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding. On Thursday, Zelenskyy also announced that he would send a team of negotiators to Riyadh in order to supply US negotiators with a list of energy infrastructure that it wanted to be included in a partial ceasefire.
“I don’t want there to be a different understanding of what the parties will agree on,” Zelensky said.
Trump has a habit of describing complex and sometimes compromising conversations in exultant, hyperbolic terms. He famously described one 2019 phone call with Zelenskyy as “perfect”. During it, he suggested that Ukraine launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for future military support.
Trump’s recent phone calls, particularly with Putin, have been held in a similar black box. After they spoke this week, the Kremlin said it had demanded a cessation of foreign military aid with Ukraine as part of any long-term peace. That was never discussed, Trump claimed.
“We didn’t talk about aid, actually, we didn’t talk about aid at all,” Trump said. “We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed.”
The US president has sought to control the information that comes out of his private discussions with foreign leaders. And in his recent discussions, particularly with Putin, the White House has not made clear which advisers were present on the calls.
Only Steve Witkoff, a real-estate mogul and friend of Trump’s, has spoken directly about the call, saying it was “epic, transformational” and he was “proud to be an American sitting there listening to it”.
Next week’s exercise in shuttle diplomacy in Riyadh may prove a moment when Trump can no longer paper over the cracks. “There are going to be proximity discussions meaning one group’s going to be in this room, one group in this room and they’ll sit and talk go back and forth sort of like shuttle diplomacy in a hotel,” said General Keith Kellogg, the Trump envoy to Ukraine. “And that’s how it’s going to work and then we’ll find out where everybody stands.”
There is a degree of gullibility to the US approach as their business-facing dealmakers begin to encounter veteran Russian diplomats. When Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov met with US negotiators in Riyadh, they brought decades of experience and pointed to draft agreements to help shape the discussions. The US negotiators appeared outflanked.
Witkoff has said he believes that Putin is “acting in good faith” and that after the Trump-Putin phone call to prevent attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, the Russian military had shot down seven of their own drones. Some members of Russia’s ultrapatriotic right have ridiculed him in subsequent days as gullible.
“The west believed that nonsense and that’s great,” said Mikhail Zvinchuk, a popular Russian military blogger and propagandist, during an online stream. “Mr Witkoff said he was impressed by Russia’s commitment to peace.”
Putin’s negotiating team in Riyadh is to be led by a former FSB general who headed the department gathering intelligence on Ukraine, and Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who negotiated the Minsk accords between Russia and Ukraine
Those agreements sought to halt the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed proxy forces in the country’s south-east. But they were seen as deeply disadvantageous to Ukraine and were plagued by the details of which side had to provide which guarantees and in which order. Ultimately, they collapsed.
One question as Witkoff, Waltz, and Rubio prepare to travel to Riyadh for the high-stakes meetings on Monday is whether they can summon the expertise to wrangle the details of an 11-year-old conflict with some of Russia’s most experienced negotiators sitting across the table.
