By Robyn Dixon, Catherine Belton · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Amid expectations in Moscow that President Donald Trump will speak by phone in the coming days with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian officials are staking out hard-line positions on the Ukraine war ahead of any talks and playing down any imminent major breakthrough on U.S.-Russia ties.
Sensing increasing progress on the battlefield amid the strong possibility that Trump will scale back military aid to Ukraine, many in Moscow appear to be doubling down, believing Russia can seize more territory and force Kyiv into submission later in the year.
“In spring the conditions won’t be ripe for an end to the war,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst. “But by autumn, while Trump reduces financing and while the Russian army makes further progress, maybe by then there will be better political conditions.”
Trump, however, has called for a swift resolution to the war, and is expected to push for negotiations immediately. On Thursday, he previewed U.S. efforts to halt the war in remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Our efforts to secure a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine are now, hopefully, underway,” he said. “It’s so important to get that done.”
The remarks followed threats posed by the president in a post Wednesday on Truth Social, in which he warned of“high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States,” unless Putin agreed to a peace deal with Ukraine.
“I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE,” he added.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that Moscow sees a small window of opportunity to forge agreements with Trump’s administration, but based on what many influential voices in the country are saying, the agreements would involve far-reaching changes in European security and the dismemberment of Ukraine.
This formula, increasingly pushed by officials from Putin on down, involves a neutral, demilitarized Ukraine outside of NATO, with Russia keeping the territory it has already annexed. It may also encompass Moscow’s demands for broader talks on Europe’s security architecture and for NATO to roll back its military infrastructure from its eastern borders. Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov earlier this week insisted that it “should be not some brief ceasefire, and not some respite, but a lasting peace based on respecting our objective interests.”
Hard-line presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the Russia’s Security Council, suggested in a recent interview with pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that Ukraine and neighboring Moldova could cease to exist by the year’s end.
“For Patrushev there is no other path than either Ukraine becomes ours – friendly: they capitulate and accept all our demands – or they collapse,” said independent analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, of R.Politik, an analytical agency based in France.
Patrushev and other hard-liners represent an influential section of Russia’s political elite, she said, but the final judgment on a deal with Trump would come from Putin alone.
In a series of articles for the pro-Kremlin online magazine Profile, hard-line analyst Dmitri Trenin wrote that the fighting would have to continue because Moscow’s condition – namely, Kyiv’s capitulation – would be unacceptable to the West.
“The confrontation between the two powers will remain deep and enduring. Trump’s strategy will prioritize America’s global dominance,” he wrote, predicting Russia could take more Ukrainian territory in coming months, including Odessa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv or Dnipro.
“For Moscow, anything less than full victory equates to defeat, and such an outcome is simply not an option,” Trenin wrote. Any peace option where a pro-Western Ukraine survived “must be prevented at all costs.” Ukraine must be “first pacified, then peaceful, eventually a partner, and ultimately an ally.”
Several senior Russian officials have also expressed growing caution that Trump could pursue Washington’s interests aggressively, at Russia’s expense. They maintain that no matter who is in charge, the United States is determined to contain Russia militarily and economically.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s parliament, said during a plenary session that under Trump, the United States would “seek to retain its hegemony.”
After all, these officials point out, in his first term, Trump’s administration increased sanctions on Russia and provided the first lethal arms to Ukraine. Anatoly Antonov, the recently returned former Russian ambassador to the United States, told the Kommersant newspaper that Trump’s first term saw “a consistent destruction of bilateral relations,” a collapse in diplomatic contacts and the “strangulation of Russia.”
Yet some are optimistic, given Trump’s repeated calls for an end to the war and the expectation that he will cut military aid to Ukraine.
Many are looking to some of Trump’s Cabinet picks, such as Tulsi Gabbard – who has been nominated to the post of director of national intelligence and who often has echoed Kremlin talking points – as potentially helping to steer relations Russia’s way.
“Among these calls for caution and for the rejection of illusion, some hope is still peeping through because Trump is not a standard politician, and some surprises can be expected from him,” said a Russian academic with ties to senior diplomatic officials.
“All of Moscow is now involved in what you can call expectation management,” he added.
According to Stanovaya, the maximalist demands circulated by pro-Kremlin hawks indicate Putin’s willingness to fight on in the war if he does not get what he wants from Trump.
“They are not looking for negotiations for the sake of negotiations. They are looking for understanding in Washington in the West that Ukraine has lost the war,” she said in an interview. “This is Russia’s view: We can continue to fight further. We will lose people, and it’s going to cost a lot, but we will do this and we will do this for decades if we need.”
Stanovaya said Putin was less concerned with international recognition of Russia’s annexations of Ukrainian territory than with establishing Russian dominance over Ukraine.
“The main thing is a friendly Ukraine. Kyiv should capitulate and admit that it has lost the war and stop resisting,” she said.
But there are risks for Putin, notably due to the growing strain on Russia’s economy and the steep cost of the war, that could be further exacerbated if Trump follows through on his sanctions threat. Interest rates and inflation are already soaring, with big business warning that massive corporate debt could lead to bankruptcies. Meanwhile, 40 percent of budget spending goes to the military and security agencies.
A major danger for Putin is the possibility that Trump could ramp up economic pressure on Russia by driving down oil prices, with his “drill, baby, drill” mantra, as well as his threat Wednesday that he would impose ever tougher new sanctions to bring Putin to the negotiating table.
“He should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” Trump said about Putin earlier this week, adding that Russia was “in big trouble.”
Markov, the pro-Kremlin analyst, said a call between Trump and Putin would unblock the dialogue between Moscow and Washington, establish a working group on Ukraine and pave the way for a summit meeting.
“At this meeting, they won’t be able to reach a compromise on the Ukraine problem but they will find a compromise on other questions,” he said, adding that he was hopeful about possible concessions from Trump, for example reinstating the ban on Kyiv using Western missiles to target Russia. Last year, Trump strongly criticized the Biden administration’s easing of restrictions on the use of Western weapons.
Despite Trump’s tough talk, some in his Republican Party believe that if the leaders meet, Putin will secure the deal he wants from the American president. “Trump will demonstrate he ended the war. But he’ll capitulate. Putin will get what he wants,” said a Russia-sympathetic Republican Party operative on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.
Trump’s rhetoric before and during the inauguration also caught the attention of many as he talked about acquiring new territories for the United States, namely the Panama Canal and the island of Greenland, which is part of NATO ally Denmark.
Such moves chime with Putin’s worldview, where the leaders of a few powerful nations carve out deals at the expense of smaller nations, and territorial expansion based on economic threats and potentially military force is the new normal.
The view is that this U.S. administration will break with the post-World War II rules-based order that outlawed the use of force to change borders, and so will find common cause with Putin’s Ukrainian land grab.
“The statements of Trump show that the old rules don’t work anymore, including for the United States,” said the academic. “The U.S. can make territorial claims on its allies.”