UPDATE (May 17, 2025; 12:00 p.m. ET): On Saturday, Trump said he was planning to speak separately with both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin on Monday in an effort to finally secure a ceasefire.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently lamented that people who were alive in Ukraine are dead today “because this war continues.”
Not exactly. They’re dead because Russia killed them in an ongoing attempt to subjugate their country. The war isn’t a natural disaster out of anyone’s control, like, say, a hurricane. Russian leader Vladimir Putin chose to aggressively attack Ukraine, and decided every day since then to keep attacking while making extensive demands.
That’s the central truth of the war, but Russia has always denied it, and under President Donald Trump, the United States denies it as well. That denial renders peace negotiations a farce.
Russian leaders have long said they’re open to peace talks, but consistently show that they mean, “We’ll accept your surrender at any point.”
If war-ending talks such as this week’s summit in Turkey can’t even acknowledge the main reason the war continues, they’re guaranteed to fail.
Russian leaders have long said they’re open to peace talks, but consistently show that they mean, “We’ll accept your surrender at any point.” Last year, Putin responded to peace efforts by demanding that Ukraine first withdraw forces from all parts of Ukraine that Russian forces occupy and formally commit to never joining NATO. This year, Putin demanded that the United States officially recognize all Ukrainian territory Russia has taken since 2014 as Russia’s, and commit to keeping U.S. peacekeepers out of Ukraine. In exchange, Putin offers nothing besides his word that Russia will stop attacking.
He’s also announced brief ceasefires, such as an “Easter truce” this year, during which Russia kept bombing. And Putin got concessions from Ukraine in exchange for an end to hostilities in 2014, but subsequently broke that deal multiple times, as well as a 1994 treaty called the Budapest Memorandum.
Despite Putin’s record, America’s current leaders place the onus for peace on Ukraine, blaming the victim for the war.
In addition to Trump, there’s Vice President JD Vance, who opposed aid for Ukraine when he was a senator, and at a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this March berated Zelenskyy for showing insufficient gratitude. (Zelenskyy has thanked the U.S. many times.) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth haphazardly canceled some U.S. military support for Ukraine and gave a speech in Europe telling NATO countries that the U.S. would be less committed to European security and wouldn’t provide security guarantees to backstop a peace agreement in Ukraine.
At an April 25 meeting in Paris, the U.S. presented European countries with a document of terms that “represent the final offer from the United States to both sides.” It is predominantly concessions to Putin, including Ukraine forfeiting land and the right to decide its own foreign relations, plus the removal of international sanctions on Russia. The only thing it calls for Russia to do is stop shooting.
With months of this farcical effort going nowhere, Trump and Vance have started expressing some irritation with Russia. This month, Vance said that Russia is “asking for too much.” After a brief meeting with Zelenskyy at the Vatican in late April, Trump acknowledged that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war.” But it never comes with demands that Russia make concessions, nor a renewed commitment to Ukraine’s defense that could force Russia into a real deal. And it quickly snapped back to Trump excusing Putin.
Russia’s leader didn’t bother going to this month’s summit in Turkey— advertised as the first direct talks between the warring parties —nor did Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Zelenskyy went, as did Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff. Trying to excuse Putin’s nonattendance and the apparent lack of progress, Trump said this: “Nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together, OK? And obviously he wasn’t going to go. He was going to go, but he thought I was going to go.”
It’s worth unpacking how much absurdity is in that one statement. Trump frames the war entirely as the U.S. and Russia settling spheres of influence, as if Ukraine and Europe don’t have any say. Russian propaganda uses the same frame, in part as a “look what you made me do” excuse for Putin’s aggression.
Trump claims peace can be achieved only when he and Putin get together, except he claimed the same thing would end the war months ago, and he’s been in contact with Putin a lot. Witkoff traveled to Russia and met with Putin in February, March and April. Witkoff was so solicitous that he didn’t follow diplomatic protocol and bring a Russian translator, instead relying on the Kremlin’s. Additionally, Trump has conducted at least two phone calls with Putin: one in February, which Trump promoted as the start of peace negotiations, and another in March.
On top of all that, Trump says Putin would have attended the peace summit in Turkey if Trump had attended. If we take the president’s comments at face value, he claims he could have ended the 21st century’s biggest interstate war simply by flying to Turkey, but didn’t feel like it. Except we’re not supposed to take the president seriously, like the leader of a powerful country conducting high-stakes diplomacy. Not this president, at least. Many media outlets made Trump’s “until Putin and I get together” their headline, with the fact that he and Putin have communicated many times on the war buried deep in the story, or not mentioned at all. Russia pretends it’s interested in peace to perpetuate the absurd narrative that Russia’s war isn’t Russia’s fault. At the summit in Turkey, the Russian delegation announced “we have agreed that each side will present its vision of a possible future ceasefire.” Why they couldn’t do that before the summit, or why months of Trump administration efforts haven’t gotten things even to the preliminary present-your-vision stage, Russia did not say. When Russia presented its vision, it demanded Ukraine fully withdraw from the parts of Ukraine that Russia wants to keep as a precondition for a ceasefire. In other words, “give in first, then we’ll talk.” Ukraine called that unrealistic — its vision starts with a ceasefire — and the talks collapsed, with both parties agreeing to some prisoner swaps and to communicate again in the future. So here’s where things stand as the Turkey summit fails for the same predictable reasons: Russia pretends it’s interested in peace to perpetuate the absurd narrative that Russia’s war isn’t Russia’s fault. The U.S. pretends Russia is interested in peace to perpetuate the absurd narrative that Trump is pursuing peace and advancing American interests, rather than hoping to see Russia’s aggression succeed as his actions indicate. And Ukraine pretends the Trump administration is pursuing a just peace to counter the absurd narrative that Ukraine is somehow the obstacle to peace, hoping that the umpteenth failure of peace talks will convince America and enough of the world that the obstacle now is what it has been the whole time: Putin and Russia.
Nicholas Grossman
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of "Drones and Terrorism." 
