There seems to be some confusion over where the Russo-Ukraine ceasefire talks are. Let’s pick through the details.

Some say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is just going through the motions in an effort to weaken US President Donald Trump’s support for Kyiv and doesn’t actually want peace at all.

Others say that Putin agreed to the 30-day ceasefire deal proposed by the White House, but has since then ignored it, continuing to target Ukrainian energy assets as well as urban areas such as last week’s strikes on Sumy and Dnipro where dozens of civilians were injured or killed.

But the reality is much simpler. Trump has done his deal with Putin and an extremely lenient one at that. The White House gave up two of the big negotiation points – Ukraine’s Nato membership is definitively off the table and Ukraine will have to concede the territories occupied by Russia – even before the talks kicked off in Riyadh on February 18.

Putin took these gifts, but when the nitty gritty horse-trading got underway on March 25 he came up with a long list of specific conditions – demands that Trump has also almost universally rolled over on.

In breaking news, Putin announced a temporary ceasefire for Eastern on April 19. While the Kremlin is unwilling to give up its military momentum on the battlefield with the mooted month-long halt to hostilities, with the announcement, Putin is hoping to put pressure on Brussels by playing to the White House’s desire to see the conflict end with a gesture and a limited compromise. The move will also play well at home as for Orthodox believers, Easter is the most important festival in the Christian calendar.

This is an all-or-nothing moment for Putin. It was always clear that the White House team favours Russia even before the talks got underway. Putin has to make the most of this moment while Trump is willing to talk. He will never have a better opportunity than this to reset Russia’s relations with the US. When Trump eventually leaves office, it is all but guaranteed “normal” politics will resume and the US will become hostile to Russia again.

Putin needs to achieve two things: he needs to roll back sanctions and get international recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over the occupied Ukrainian territories.

If the sanctions are not lifted or eased, they will probably stay in place for decades or longer. If Russia’s sovereignty over the five regions it currently controls then there is a chance war will break out again with a post-Trump administration rearming Ukraine, which will rearm itself in the meantime anyway with European help.

Ceasefire deal confusion

Putin’s conditions on the deals he has been cutting are the key to understanding the Kremlin’s position. In the new Black Sea grain deal on March 25, the Kremlin agreed to ensure naval security only if its conditions were met. The White House readout following the conclusion of those talks were vague but alluded to “helping” Russia, whereas the Kremlin was explicit saying that the deal would only enter into force if the US:

• Removes sanctions on Russia’s agricultural bank Rosselkhozbank and related financial institutions to allow international trade in food and fertilisers, including access to SWIFT and correspondent banking.
• Eliminate restrictions on trade finance transactions.
• Lift sanctions on companies that produce and export food and fertilisers, and allow insurers to cover these shipments.
• Remove port servicing and shipping sanctions on Russian-flagged vessels involved in food and fertiliser trade.
• End restrictions on supplying agricultural machinery and related goods to Russia for food and fertiliser production.

Trump agreed to this, but in the case of lifting banking sanctions Rosselkhozbank in particular, he cannot act unilaterally. The EU has to lift its bank sanctions in parallel and has refused to do so.

Likewise, in the 30-day ceasefire deal, Putin insisted that some sort of effective and independent monitoring system be put in place.

The upshot of these unmet conditions has been that while Zelenskiy has agreed unconditionally to both deals, Putin has agreed in principle to them both but not in practice and has yet to implement them.

Rubio starts the countdown

As far as he is concerned, Trump has done his deal with Putin – at least on the big things needed to bring the hostilities to an end. His problem now is to get Brussels and Kyiv to play along.

Notably, Trump has exerted no pressure on the Kremlin to compromise to drop any of its conditionality whatsoever, other than a few vague statements about imposing tariffs on Russia if there is no deal.

Conversely, the White House just massively ramped up the pressure on Europe after Rubio told the assembled EU leaders that the US would walk away from the Ukraine problem if no agreement was reached by the end of April.

Very few details came out from Rubio’s talks, but clearly they were talking about the terms of Trump’s deals with Putin. One detail that was released is that the US team said that a deal on monitoring the ceasefire was close to being agreed, which is one of Putin’s demands. Rubio also said specifically that sanctions relief was discussed, but it appears little progress was made as he said no more. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff also said that Ukraine would have to give up its five regions – the Crimea annexed in 2014 plus the four regions annexed in 2023 – in any ceasefire deal. It appears that Rubio has given the EU an ultimatum: it’s my way or the highway.

This is going to be a problem. While it is possible to see some sort of compromise solution to the monitoring problem, the EU has refused to contemplate any sanctions relief until the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) quit Ukraine entirely. And Zelenskiy has been explicit: Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) will not concede the sovereignty of any of its territories under any circumstances. “It’s a red line,” he explained again last week.

Now the clock is ticking. Rather than pressuring the Kremlin to do a more reasonable deal, Trump has simply accepted Putin’s position and is instead applying maximum pressure on Brussels to accept his position. And as he has made it crystal clear that he is not interested in drawn out negotiations – his Iran deal is now in full swing as Witkoff met indirectly with Iran’s foreign minister in Rome this weekend – he will simply walk out on Ukraine, handing the entirety of weapons supplies and funding to Brussels to cope with on its own if they don’t agree.

At this point it is likely that both the EU and Bankova will refuse. The EU is under the leadership of Russia hawk European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has taken a principled stand against Russia’s invasion from the first day of the invasion. Zelenskiy has also painted himself into a corner having also taken a maximalist stance after a period of willingness to compromise in the first year of the war. If the EU has the wherewithal to bear the entire burden of the Ukraine conflict on its own remains an open question, but Rubio has made it clear that the White House will no longer make any more compromises.

Business deals

As a postscript, Ukraine has a separate but related problem. It is being forced into a harsh mineral deal with the US that has been described as “worse than reparations.” Bankova has already rejected all four versions submitted so far because the terms were so harsh and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said they also undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and could jeopardise its EU accession bid.

But Trump has made it clear that if Ukraine wants any support from the US Zelenskiy will have to sign – and sign next week. Ukraine inked a memorandum of intent to do the mineral deal on April 18, but the memo was void of any details. A final agreement has to be signed by April 26, the White House said. Few details of the fifth version of deal were released, and while some of the terms were reportedly softened, it appears the terms remain as harsh as before and therefore highly likely that Bankova will still balk at the latest version.

Here is another aspect where Trump clearly favours Russia. Since the start of the process Rubio has said on multiple occasions that there is a “historic opportunity” to do business with Russia if a ceasefire accord can be struck.

Putin has made it clear that he is open to a business deal and has, among other things, suggested the US invest into Russian rare earth metals (REMs), America use Russia’s frozen $5bn in Central Bank of Russia (CBR) reserves to pay for Boeing parts and planes, and opened the door to the return of Western companies. For their part, the US team has said they are interested in jointly developing Russia’s Arctic oil and gas deposits. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, has been asked to work out the details in a “parallel track” to the Riyadh ceasefire talks. The business deals will go ahead, that is clear, but only after a ceasefire deal is reached.

It appears it is the billions that the US can earn from these deals that is Trump’s motive for being soft on Russia. As bne IntelliNews reported, the Ukraine minerals deal is more or less worthless as Ukraine doesn’t have trillions of dollars of rare earth metals and what strategically important minerals it does have will need billions of dollars of investment to exploit. But Trump is insisting on doing that deal anyway.

Everything will depend on what both Bankova and Brussels decide in the next two weeks, but there is a rising possibility that there will be a definitive split between Europe and the US over the Ukraine conflict, which will be bad news for Putin too as any chance he has of getting rid of sanctions and normalising relations with the US will also disappear.