In the aftermath of the Geneva negotiations to end the Ukraine conflict last weekend, Moscow kept its message simple.
Russia had not seen the revised peace plan — but was already blaming the Europeans and Kyiv for wrecking a proposal that it claimed had been the potential basis for a deal.
Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Tuesday that if the plan “erased . . . key understandings” that Russian President Vladimir Putin had reached with US President Donald Trump, the situation would be “fundamentally different”.
“The only substantive thing is the American project, Trump’s project,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
It was a new variation of the public message the Kremlin has been spinning to the Trump administration for months: Russia is open to an eventual peace deal — but on its own timeline and under its own conditions.
For months, Moscow has held firm on its position that it will not sign up for any deal that does not include Kyiv’s surrender of some of its frontline positions in the Donbas region, a condition Trump announced he had agreed to during his summit with Putin in Alaska in August.
In a leaked October phone call between US envoy Steve Witkoff and Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, released by Bloomberg on Tuesday, Witkoff acknowledged that any deal would need to include “Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere” — suggesting the US would back Russia taking the rest of Donetsk province, which it has been unable to seize since 2014. That has been a long-standing red line for Kyiv.
In a separate leaked phone call, also published by Bloomberg, another Kremlin envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, said that while he believed the Trump administration would not take “exactly [Russia’s] version” of a peace plan, it would be “at least . . . as close to it as possible”.
The Financial Times has not independently verified the transcripts.
Lavrov said he “welcomed” a 28-point US peace proposal drawn up with Russian input that called for Kyiv to give up territory and face other restrictions, which was presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday.
However, a modified 19-point version drawn up with Ukrainian and European negotiators in Geneva earlier this week appears far less favourable to Russia. Rustem Umerov, a senior Ukrainian official, said his team had reached “a common understanding on the core terms of the agreement” with their US counterparts.
Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, said there was “no way” Moscow would sign off on the plan amended by Kyiv and the Europeans.
Instead, Russia was likely to spin out the negotiations in multiple formats and continue its slow grind on the battlefield, he said.
“The tactic that Putin has consistently taken with Trump is to never close the door,” said Charap.
“They [Russia] are going to say: ‘Yes, but . . .’ or ‘This is a good basis for discussion, but we’d like to talk about the details . . .’”
Russia will have that opportunity next week, when Witkoff is due to visit Moscow for talks on the peace plan. Trump has dropped his Thanksgiving deadline for a deal, while talking up the progress that has been made so far.
Moscow was the ghost at the feast last weekend, when Ukrainian and European negotiators hastily convened to amend the US plan, excising several contentious points and deferring others to talks between Trump and Zelenskyy.
Still, the Kremlin will probably be pleased that Washington’s initiative destabilised Kyiv and further weakened a strained Atlantic alliance, observers said.
The panic provoked in Kyiv and European capitals by that plan would have been the icing on the cake for Moscow, said Fiona Hill, a former senior director on Trump’s National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. “Because everyone’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Even if subsequently revised, Washington’s diplomatic bombshell echoed Trump’s previous attempts to solve the conflict and his enduring instinct that Russia holds the upper hand, Hill said.
“[Trump] has already done this. How many times has he given everyone an ultimatum and made it crystal clear: ‘Russia is the great power, Russia should win’?”
Negotiators in Geneva agreed to defer the most sensitive issues around territory and security guarantees to further talks between Zelenskyy and Trump. Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said these were always the biggest sticking points in the negotiations and Moscow would continue to press its demands.
As Witkoff’s leaked remarks suggested, the Trump administration is receptive to Moscow’s demand that Ukraine surrender the rest of Donetsk province as the price of a deal.
“Putin is looking for something that would allow him to say that he achieved the goals that he had laid out as the invasion took place back in February 2022 — that he wants the Donbas, which was the initial focus of the military operation on security,” Graham said.
“There will be a lot of things in the revised plan that the Russians will not agree with,” he added. “They’re still making progress on the ground. They still think time is on their side. Whether they’re prepared to compromise or not on anything is an open question.”
Russia cannot wait out the war indefinitely. The economy continues to show strain, and its battle losses continue to mount.
Yet Moscow was also in no real urgency to sprint to the negotiating table — or to make compromises in areas where it was not ready, Charap said.
“Relatively speaking, they think that the deal will be better in six months. So they’re not going to be in a rush,” he said. “The question is can the US supply the right amount of carrots and sticks to get them to a deal sooner rather than later.”
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