Is Putin stringing Trump along with the promise of a Budapest summit?

Sorry, Volodymyr. There won’t be any Tomahawk missiles headed to Ukraine now that  President Vladimir Putin of Russia has talked on the phone with President Donald Trump, who called their session “very productive.”  

What it will produce remains an open question. But it does seem to have resulted in a decision to hold an upcoming summit in Budapest. The bottom line: Putin has outflanked Ukrainian President Zelensky, who will meet at the White House with Trump tomorrow. 

Trump is a transactional president and he has business that he wants to transact with Russia, including, but not limited to, a peace deal between it and Ukraine. If anything, Trump, intent on winning the Nobel Peace Prize that eluded him this year, appears to be on the verge of becoming a foreign-policy president. He’s hopscotching around the globe, trying to solve conflicts, wherever and whenever he can. Whether they are truly solved is another matter. For Trump the art of the deal is to secure one, no matter how precarious it may appear. Then move on to the next zone of conflict. 

For Zelensky, Putin’s missive could not come at a worse time. Ukraine has been bathing in the warmer rays emanating from the Trump White House to it. Trump has repeatedly voiced his frustration with “Vladimir,” as he likes to call him, for refusing to end the war. Now Putin is once more dangling the bait of a ceasefire at the very moment that he is pounding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in preparation for what looks to be a very cold winter indeed. 

Zelensky had been hoping to persuade Trump to up his game and confront Russia more openly. Since the Alaska summit, Trump has approved further cooperation between American and Ukrainian intelligence services, ensuring that they receive better targeting information to hit Russian energy infrastructure. But acceding to Tomahawk missiles, which can reach deep into Russia, would have escalated the conflict, particularly with the Kremlin threatening that it would erase the barrier to the nuclear threshold. Anyone who doesn’t get a case of the collywobbles from confronting that prospect should head directly to the local cinema and watch the new and sparkling film, A House of Dynamite, which offers a timely reminder of the destruction that one warhead can deliver. 

Here’s hoping that Trump can forge some kind of viable agreement between the two sides, one that could lead to further cooperation on the nuclear arms-control front, where most of the agreements forged during and after the Cold War lie in tatters. Putin’s track record, of course, should hardly inspire much confidence. A master of the tactical move, the Russian President may well have intervened simply to stymie Trump from delivering more potent weapons to Ukraine. 

Zelensky will be on his best behavior in meeting in Washington with a president who is desperate to reach some kind of accommodation with Putin. Throughout, Zelensky would do well to make favorable noises about peace and allow Putin to once more emerge as the recalcitrant party. It is Putin, and Putin alone, who has steadily been saying nyet to ending the conflict in his mad desire to reestablish the Russian empire of yore.