President Trump once approached the challenge of ending Russia’s war in Ukraine as a straight-ahead deal that he could achieve easily. But after months of trying, he’s signaling that he might actually walk away.Michael Crowley, who covers U.S. foreign policy for The New York Times, discusses the recent phone call between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and what it tells us about how the conflict could end.Guest: Michael Crowley, a reporter covering the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump’s new position on the war in Ukraine: Not my problem.In his call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin notched a diplomatic win, with an economic caveat.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What was Trump's initial approach to the Ukraine conflict?
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. President Trump once approached the challenge of ending Russia's war in Ukraine as a straight-ahead deal, something that he could achieve easily. But after months of trying, he's signaling that he might actually walk away.
Today, my colleague Michael Crowley on the phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and what it tells us about how the conflict could end. It's Wednesday, May 21st. Michael, nice to speak with you. I don't think we've ever met before.
I don't think we have. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, our pleasure. So, Michael, we want to talk to you about this two-hour phone call that happened between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that happened on Monday. But before we get there, we haven't really checked in on the war between Russia and Ukraine since that disastrous Oval Office meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
I want to understand what happened in between Trump and Zelensky kind of blowing up at each other and this call that was, I think, pretty remarkable in a few ways.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the phone call between Trump and Putin?
Yeah, well, in some ways, we are at a point that no one could have predicted back in February when Zelensky was essentially thrown out of the White House by Trump. And, you know, it looked like Ukraine was cooked. Trump was very angry at Zelensky and very eager, by all indications, to please Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But in the weeks since then, the story has become a little more complicated. There's some tension in the relationship between Trump and Putin that we've not seen before. Ukraine is certainly not out of the woods yet.
But the path to this phone call was much more winding and filled with surprises, I think, than anyone would have expected on that day when Trump essentially berated the president of Ukraine and acted as though he was finished doing business with him.
Let's start at the beginning of that winding road. What was the immediate fallout from that meeting?
Well, Ukrainians and their supporters in Europe and the United States were basically panicking after that meeting. You know, Trump declared that Ukraine was not ready for a peace deal, a deal he promised as a candidate that he could strike in as little as one day, and suspended U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. His attitude was...
You, Zelensky, are not showing enough respect to the United States and not willing enough to cut a deal. And we're done with you. Good day and good luck.
And, you know, what was happening was not only was Trump castigating Zelensky and to many people blaming the victim of this Russian invasion, but accelerating his diplomacy with Moscow and talking about, you know, economic deals and potentially lifting sanctions and restoring normal diplomatic relations. and seeming to get very excited about this prospect that America and Russia would be friends.
So how did President Zelensky respond to all of this at the time?
You know, I think a couple of things happened. Number one, I think the Ukrainians changed their tone. Zelensky was much more careful about what he said about the U.S. and the Trump administration in public. At the same time, behind the scenes, you had some European leaders acting differently
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Chapter 3: How did the Ukrainian leadership respond to Trump's actions?
I think it starts to dawn on Trump in the following days and weeks that Putin is not looking for the grand deal that Trump has in mind and that Trump has been promising since he was a candidate for president.
So it sounds like Zelensky, in saying, sure, I'm open to a deal, kind of put the onus on Putin and in so doing exposed Putin as being much less willing to negotiate the Trump may have expected or wanted. Like, it sounds quite shrewd on the part of Zelensky is what I'm getting at.
No, it's exactly right. You might call it a kind of a pull the chair strategy. Putin has talked as though he is open to peace for a long time.
He's strung Trump along.
Trump along, he strung the world along for years. And, you know, something that Biden administration officials would always say is Putin is not serious about negotiating a peace deal. Putin wants victory. He wants huge gains that the Ukrainians can never accept.
But now, with the arrival of Trump, who is actually pressing this and very much wants to engineer a deal, he's finally called Putin's bluff in a way that no one else has. And Zelensky has very shrewdly created the dynamics for that to happen.
So what happens after Trump starts getting angry at Putin?
Well... By late March, you see some of the first signs of Trump's frustration with Putin. And in one interview, he says he's very angry and even pissed off at comments Putin has made about Zelensky, saying that they're not helping the peace process. And he talks about increasing sanctions on Russia. But Putin is undeterred.
As the weeks go by, he's bombing and striking Ukrainian cities, hitting civilian targets with drones and missiles. And, you know, there's worldwide outrage that finally even includes President Trump, who on April 24th posts on his Truth Social account, Vladimir, stop. Not necessary and very bad timing in response to a major Russian attack on Kyiv.
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Chapter 4: What was the fallout from the meeting between Trump and Zelensky?
Hmm.
And something that's ominous for Vladimir Putin is on the same day he sees Zelensky at the Vatican, he again complains about Russian missile strikes into civilian areas of Ukraine and says that these attacks make him wonder whether Putin actually doesn't want to stop the war and that he's just, as Trump says it in kind of an odd terminology, just tapping me along.
And at this point, Trump decides he needs to talk to Putin. And he arranges a call with the Russian leader. And all these weeks of gamesmanship, maneuvering, and roiling frustration seems to be culminating in this one essential conversation. And to hear Trump tell it, this call with Vladimir Putin could determine whether he is willing to continue trying to mediate an end to this war.
We'll be right back.
So, Michael, after all of this buildup, all of this anticipation, what actually happened on the call between Putin and Trump?
So, 10 a.m. comes on Monday for this highly anticipated call, and the two leaders are treating it very differently. For Trump, there's been all this fanfare and buildup on social media and his comments to reporters and comments from other administration officials. And he does the call from the White House Putin does the call from a school on the Sochi coast. He's not even at the Kremlin.
He's not even in Moscow.
He didn't even announce it.
He didn't announce it. And he seems to be kind of squeezing it into his schedule. For Putin, this is not the defining event of the week. And I think that symbolizes the mismatch in... expectations, or really a mismatch in substance. And you saw that in the way both men described this call after the fact.
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Chapter 5: How did Trump express his frustration with Putin?
Trump's version was a bit more upbeat, and he did tell journalists afterward that he is still hopeful for a deal.
There's a good chance we can get this done. I believe Putin wants to do it. Now, if I thought Putin didn't, well, I mean, that's what I do. My whole life is like deals, one big deal.
But he clearly puts the onus on Putin.
I said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir? I've known him for a long time now. I said, when are we going to end this bloodshed, this bloodbath?
It's a bloodbath. Trump was blaming Putin again for how long this has gone on. And, you know, he straight up asks Putin, when is this war going to end? He's clearly frustrated or maybe disappointed that Putin has not changed his position. It's not particularly angry or threatening.
Big ego's involved, I tell you. Big ego's involved, but I think something's going to happen. You get the sense that Trump has reached his own limits. And I did say also, if I thought that you couldn't do it, I'd step away, because what are you going to do?
It seems that he's reaching a point where he's ready to just wash his hands of both of them.
Again, this was a European situation. It should have remained a European situation.
You know, he says that maybe others could help out, but that it just might not be worth it to try to make this deal.
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Chapter 6: What deals did Trump and Zelensky discuss?
But what happened when he was face to face or on the phone with those guys? He didn't threaten them. He didn't bluster and bully by any account. And I think what that tells you is that Trump says a lot of things for public consumption. He likes to posture a lot and talk tough. But ultimately, and particularly if it's in the service of cutting a deal,
it doesn't mean that that's where his head is really at or that he's going to let those resentments get in the way of what he perceives to be his tactical interest at any given moment.
I just sort of wonder if this whole saga so far, Trump going from optimism to anger to maybe apathy with some other motions in between, with no change in outcome, Putin has remained the same in what he wants this entire time. And so I just sort of wonder if this whole evolution has just showed us that Trump is learning that he cannot – pressure or sweet talk or make a deal out of this problem?
Like what people said about the stock market, right? He cannot bully the stock market into giving what he wants, and he cannot pressure Putin into giving him what he wants.
I think that's right. Now, I've heard people say that Trump came into this second term riding higher, feeling stronger and He had been around the block once before as president, and he may have thought he could come in and get things done really fast in a way that he couldn't do in his first term.
But the world is a really complicated, difficult place, and dealing with Vladimir Putin, any experienced diplomat will tell you, is one of the great challenges in foreign affairs today. And I'm sometimes reminded of a saying that is attributed to the Taliban in Afghanistan when the U.S. spent 20 years trying to outfight the Taliban and defeat them.
And the saying was, you have the watches, but we have the time. And the idea behind that was you may be more technologically sophisticated, more advanced, more powerful, but we can just wait you out. We're here and we're not going anywhere. And I think that, you know, that partly explains how Vladimir Putin sees this.
He's got to get through this sort of quaint little adventure of the American president who wants a nice deal. But he's playing a much longer game. And he may have calculated that Trump will get frustrated and storm off. And at the moment, it looks like that might be exactly what's happening.
Michael, thank you so much.
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