For President Vladimir V. Putin, a phone call marked a turning point as great like any battle in his three -year war.
In a long call on Wednesday, President Trump delivered a message to Mr. Putin who encapsulated most of how the Russian leader sees today’s world: that Russia and the United States are two great nations that should negotiate fate directly of Ukraine and also move on to the participation of fating each other uniformly. Heavier global affairs.
It was the clearest sign that Mr. Putin, despite the disastrous failures of Russia at the beginning of his Ukrainian invasion at the beginning of 2022, could still emerge from the war with a redesigned map of Europe and an expansion of the influence of Russia in it.
The call came on the same day when the secretary to defense of Mr. Trump, Pete Hegseth, said that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire to belong to NATO. It also came when the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as a nice with Mr. Putin, like the next director of the National Whaller.
As a whole, the developments have marked a Payoff for Mr. Putin’s campaign for the loss of praise for Mr. Trump – apparently in the belief that the American president has the power to offer a Russian victory in Ukraine.
“Putin is playing a very intelligent game,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior member of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “He is investing 100 % in the effort to seduce Trump.”
In Moscow, the news of the long -awaited call inaugurated a wave of joy barely contained. The commentators said that the three -year effort led by the Americans to isolate Russia was finished with emphasis. They celebrated the post on Signor Trump’s brilliant social media after the call on the “great history of our nations” and noticed that the American president had spoken to Mr. Putin before having called the president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
A Russian legislator said that Mr. Putin’s call with Trump “broke the block of the West”. Another said that Europeans were surely reading Mr. Trump’s post on it “with horror and cannot believe their eyes”. A third said it was a “day of good news”.
In a sign of the explosion of optimism, the main index of the Russia stock market jumped by 5 % on Thursday morning to the highest point since last summer and its mistreated currency, the Rublo, gained the dollar at its strongest level from September.
Russian businessmen hope that a peace agreement with Mr. Trump can lead to penalties against their country. The Kremlin said that, beyond Ukraine, Trump and Putin have touched “Russian-American bilateral relationships in the economic sphere”.
Not everyone was happy. Some Russian war cheerleaders grumbled on social media that an agreement with the United States could sell soldiers on the battlefield. A blog in favor of the war with over one million followers, two major, mentioned a fighter who said that the discussion on Wednesday’s call “demoralizes and irritates me”.
Mrs. Stanovaya and many other commentators noticed that Mr. Putin’s possibilities to get everything he wants were far from insured. In particular, while Trump seems concentrated on the end of the fighting in Ukraine, Putin wants a wider agreement with the United States that rejects NATO and would allow Russia to recover a sphere of influence in Europe.
“Donald Trump spoke in favor of a rapid end to hostilities,” said the Kremlin in his summary of the call, mentioning that divergence. “Vladimir Putin, for his part, mentioned the need to eliminate the causes of the root of the conflict.”
The call creates a complex negotiation whose contours – and participants – are not yet clear. Zelensky will try to present the case of American support in a meeting with the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the vice -president JD Vance in Monaco on Friday.
Putin is likely to maintain military pressure on Ukraine, while appealing to the ambitions of Mr. Trump as a peacemaker. Analysts say that what Mr. Putin worries more is not what a territory capture in Ukraine; Rather, he wants a more complete agreement that maintains Ukraine out of NATO, limits the dimensions of the Ukrainian army and reduces the presence of the western alliance in Eastern and central Europe.
Analysts doubt that Mr. Putin will agree to stop the fighting before receiving insurance that at least some of those wider requests will be satisfied.
Ilya Grashchenkov, Russian politics analyst based in Moscow, said that the call with Mr. Trump made Putin’s repeated by doubling on the Ukrainian war “looks like a successful bet in a casino”.
Russia has absorbed enormous losses in Ukraine, playing to play that, in the end, “the global paradigm would have changed” and the West would tire of supporting the country, said Grashchenkov in a telephone interview. “This change has happened, and now it is not clear how this bet will go in the future.”
Ivan Nechepurenko Contributed relationships.