The most important sentence from President Trump about yesterday's phone call between President Putin and him is this:
Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.
The most important sentence by President Putin about yesterday's phone call is this:
Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes of this crisis is what matters most to us.
Russia will not fall for ending the war without having achieved its main goal.
Western media, here the NY Times, continue to play dumb (archived) about what the Russia's main goal is:
[Putin] repeated his mantra that a peace deal needs to “remove the root causes of this crisis,” referring to Russia’s pursuit of wide-ranging influence over Ukraine.
David Ignatius, a CIA spokesperson at the Washington Post, makes a similar (archived) nonsensical claim:
He still wants victory, which he described once again after Monday’s call with the phrase “eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” That’s code for his conviction that Ukraine cannot be a European country, as it wants, but must remain under Russian hegemony.
Russia as well as Ukraine are European countries. Russia has no interest in having 'hegemony' or 'wide-ranking influence' over Ukraine. Its interest is the defense of the Russian Federation. It had to prevent Ukraine from becoming a U.S. (NATO) spear tip aimed at its heart.
A different NY Times piece about the Russian northern defenses build up after Finland joined NATO is far more correct when it states (archived):
From Moscow’s perspective, the Russians need to bolster their defenses to protect themselves from NATO expansion, which has always been a sore subject. The Baltic nations were the first members of the former Soviet Union to join NATO, bringing large stretches of Russia’s border up against NATO’s. The prospect of Ukraine, an even bigger former Soviet republic, following suit was so threatening to Moscow that it became one of the causes of the most devastating land war in generations.
It is NATO expansion, not Ukraine the country, that is the root cause of the war. It is NATO expansion that has to be eliminated.
The U.S. and its European allies are still in denial of that. To ignore that the U.S. has, for over 30 years, been driving the NATO expansion that led to the war, allows Trump to play a 'mediator' in war in which the U.S. is a dominant participant.
It is stupid for western media to accept Trump's claim (archived) of such a role:
After phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump posted that “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War”.
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In remarks that indicated that Washington may be stepping back from a role as a mediator, Trump said the “conditions” for a deal could only be agreed by the warring parties “because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of”.
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Trump also said that immediately after his call with Putin, he recounted the conversation to Zelenskyy together with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Commission. (1)
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But two people briefed on the call with the European leaders said Trump was clear that he would pull the US back from engaging with the conflict and leave Ukraine and Russia to directly negotiate a ceasefire. He also made no promise of future US sanctions against Russia should Putin refuse any peace attempts. One person familiar with the conversation said the leaders were stunned by the US president’s description of what was agreed. They added it was clear Trump was “not ready to put greater pressure” on Putin to come to the negotiating table in earnest.
Trump is pretending to wash his hands (archived) over Ukraine:
The US desire to disengage has been flagged for weeks, by Trump himself but also by secretary of state Marco Rubio and vice-president JD Vance, who have repeatedly expressed frustration with Russia and Ukraine in equal measure. Vance told reporters on Monday that the US might ultimately have to say: “This is not our war.”
The U.S. can not be a mediator in a war, or wash its hands over it, when it continues to supply weapons and the all important field intelligence and communication means needed to wage it. Only yesterday the U.S. allowed Australia to send (old) U.S. made tanks to Ukraine.
Trump's claims of disengaging from the war has yet to be confirmed by any evidence that he is really going to do so.
The only thing Trump did reject so far was to join the European attempts to escalate the war by inserting their own troops into it.
Having learned from the economic disaster his tariffs have caused Trump also rejected plans to impose secondary sanctions in form of 500% tariffs on anyone who continues to buy oil from Russia.
Aside from that Trump has kept support for the war on the same level as before and only refrained from expanding it.
That he is, for now, leaving the negotiations to Russia and Ukraine, is an admission that he has failed to keep his election promise of making peace.
The U.S. will have to reengage in negotiations if peace is to be achieved. It is U.S. (NATO) expansionism that has cause the war.
Russia needs to remove the root cause, U.S. (NATO) expansionism, to achieve peace.
A complete victory in Ukraine is a necessary but not yet sufficient condition for that.
But chances are good that the further disagreements over the defeat of Ukraine will rip NATO apart.
That might be the victory President Putin has on his mind.
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(1) The FT claims that: "[Trump] recounted the conversation to Zelenskyy together with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Commission.
But Trump's statement does not mention Britain at all: "I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me, immediately after the call with President Putin."
It seems like, despite the FT's claim, Prime Minister Starmer was left out in the cold on this.