Analysis by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
US President Donald Trump (R) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the end of a joint press conference after participating in a US-Russia summit on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. Photo: AFP / DREW ANGERER
Analysis - Vladimir Putin does not want a deal, and the sweetness of being begged to entertain one is something the Russian president relishes. Five hours of US President Donald Trump's envoy and son-in-law meeting with the Kremlin head seemed to yield little publicly. It is helpful to step back and view the world and the Russian invasion through his eyes.
It is a war Putin started, hoping he could in a matter of days put Russia back on the map as the pre-eminent military force in Europe, capable of decisive action after the embarrassing departure by the United States from its longest war in Afghanistan. His hope for a swift win morphed into an ugly war of attrition. For a while, strategic defeat loomed, with US and NATO aid to plucky, tiny Ukraine allowing Kyiv to achieve victories unthinkable a year earlier.
But then came the gift of the Trump second term and its wobbly sympathy (or admiration) for Putin, and desire for peace, almost at any cost. Putin faces no election; the only likely limit on his term is that of his natural lifespan.
When he hears Trump say Ukraine is not his war, that he doesn't want to waste money on it, and just wants it to end, he hears frailty and disinterest from the world's biggest military power. This is the chance the former KGB spy had likely never imagined history would afford him: the US begging Russia to make peace. And the longer the process continues, the better the outcome likely afforded Moscow.
Putin's aide Yuri Ushakov emerged from Tuesday's talks referring to a 27-point plan and four other documents. These details were likely designed to irk Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had most recently referred to a 20-point plan and must have hoped they had oversight of the contents of the other three documents.
Andriy Yermak seen next to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during a top level meeting in Warsaw, Poland in January, 2025. Photo: Sergei Gapon / AFP / Getty Images / File via CNN Newsource
But the tail end of this diplomacy is occurring mostly in silence, with little reason for Zelensky to rejoice. His team will brief the Europeans and then meet the Americans again, and he is returning to Kyiv. Trump's Thanksgiving deadline for an immediate deal is now a mirage, and ahead looms an inhospitable desert.
Ukraine has endured nearly four years of Russian invasion, but also now nearly 11 months at the mercy of Truth Social. The impact of this unpredictability is often lost, as Trump vacillates from imposing some of the toughest sanctions on Russia yet and mulling sending Tomahawks, to the next moment reciting Russian talking points and putting the greatest pressure on his European allies and Zelensky himself.
The damage done to Ukrainian morale cannot be underestimated, and when the history of this episode is written, it will likely focus on Ukraine's valiant and remarkable resistance against a larger foe, followed by the drastic undermining of their sacrifice by a White House obsessed with televised micro-moments of pleasing or pressuring whichever world leader fell into Trump's attention span.
Trump is correct to seek as quick an end to this war as possible.
But this stems from a fatal misreading of Putin and his goals. Putin is a pragmatist, who adapts to each new opportunity or setback, but he retains a wider overarching dream. And that is to reset the balance of global security, and undo the ascendance of the US to its decades-long hegemony.
Putin is not all-powerful, has catastrophically misread his own henchmen in just the past two years - as we saw with the failed Wagner revolt in 2023 - and is facing clear manpower and budgetary pressures at home too. But he faces no anti-corruption probes, mid-term elections, or successors waiting in the wings. He has reset the Russian industrial complex to a ferocious war footing, and arguably must have as serious a plan to demobilise a now frail, over-stretched nation. In many ways, a continued war is Putin's best shot at a continued reign.
Ukrainian rescue personnel operate at the site of a heavily damaged residential building following Russian air strike in the city of Ternopil, on 19 November, 2025, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photo: YURIY DYACHYSHYN / AFP
So where does this leave Trump's peace process? Ushakov said elements of the proposed deal were acceptable, others harshly criticised. It appeared possible that Zelensky had privately toyed with the idea of land swaps prior to the Kremlin meeting - softening a red line of the war. Yet the exact nature of any concessions from Kyiv was a closely guarded secret, presumably to not box Zelensky into a new starting point for future talks. Yet whatever sweeteners Witkoff attached to the deal, Putin sent the dish back.
This is the dynamic of the months ahead, and it is not overwhelmingly hard to understand Russia's hand. Putin is winning militarily - slowly, but undeniably - and he sees a Ukraine weak with manpower and funding issues, and in the grip of a domestic political crisis that keeps resurfacing.
Zelensky is hobbled at home, power cuts and frontline casualties blighting morale, and the repeat agony of loss, diplomatic deceit and pressure, coupled with ebbing aid, lead so many to question where this story ends without a growing Russian win?
Trump wants peace above all else, and has shown in recent months that pressuring his allies to make concessions is a reflexive move. This is logical if you are a real estate tycoon squeezing your subcontractors to improve terms for a possible purchaser. But Putin is not looking to buy a hotel. Trump is rather trying to persuade an armed squatter to leave a property that they have set fire to, simply to show they are a force in the neighbourhood again. This is not the sort of deal Trump is used to.
The fight and the slow win is the juice for Putin, and he sees more of both ahead. He can add to his delight the salacious sight of his opponent's one-time main backer, the US, now beseeching him to make a deal, and using the US president's son in law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff to do it. Moscow's progress on the frontlines may be agonisingly and brutally slow, delivered at huge cost. But the wider spectacle is slowly becoming one of Putin's geopolitical fever dreams, which likely puts a real, enduring peace far out of reach.
- CNN
