President Vladimir Putin has solved the problem of how to conduct telephone calls with Donald Trump’s personality cult.
Following Trump’s tweeted claim in the early morning of Tuesday that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to” the telephone call which took place over two hours of the early Moscow evening, ended without agreement on any “final” point.
Trump has remained uncharacteristically silent. The only tweet he has issued since the call with Putin has been an attack on a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama”.
The US media have remained in the dark, while detailed results have been compiled and published by the Russian media. According to these sources, Putin agreed to the creation of “expert groups” to work on the military, political, and economic end-of-war settlement. This is a signal that the efforts by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to continue the war on their terms will be excluded, and that the Russian military advance westward will continue on all salients. Russian targeting of British, French and US military units on the battlefield, at Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov and at staff bunkers in western Ukraine will continue.
In response to Trump’s demand for a 30-day ceasefire – the Anglo-American proposal which was announced with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah on March 11 – Putin said no. Instead, he agreed to suspend the Russian electric war campaign, and for thirty days halt strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on condition that Trump will reciprocate with a stop to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.
No agreement was reached on Trump’s attempt to save the encircled Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Instead, Putin agreed that Ukrainians who surrender on the battlefield will not be shot. Putin also offered an exchange of prisoners of war, 175 to 175; and the return from Russian hospitals of 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
Although the discussion by the presidents touched on naval operations on the Black Sea, including targeting flights by US drones and NATO fixed-wing aircraft, no agreement was reached.
The assessment in Moscow is that Putin has turned a battlefield restriction he has already imposed on the General Staff into a concession he now requires Trump to enforce on the Zelensky regime. The ball, as US officials have insisted they have put in Moscow’s court, has been played back into Washington’s court.
The US and NATO media appear to have been paralyzed by lack of information from Trump and other US officials.
CNN had reported Trump on Sunday as staking out his agenda for the Putin talks. “Trump himself suggested as much while speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, saying that US negotiators have discussed ‘dividing up certain assets.’ ‘We’ll be talking about land. A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants, that’s a big question,’ Trump said.” The Moscow record indicates there was no discussion of these points, and they have been reserved for later talks at the expert group level.
Trump’s real estate investment associate, Steven Witkoff, had been sent to Moscow to meet with Putin to prepare for the telephone call. He then told the New York Times that his talks with Putin had “narrowed the differences between them”. There is no evidence of this in Moscow.
Comprehensive reporting has been published by the Russian state agency RIA Novosti.
Source: https://ria.ru/20250318/razgovor-2005807349.html
The Kremlin communiqué has reversed the ceasefire proposal into a ban on US military and intelligence support for the warfighting. “In the context of the initiative of the President of the United States on the introduction of a 30-day truce with the Russian parties a number of significant points were identified concerning the provision of effective control over a possible ceasefire along the entire line of combat contact, the need to stop forced mobilization in Ukraine and rearmament of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. There were also serious risks associated with the inability of the Kiev regime, which has repeatedly sabotaged and violated the agreements reached. Attention is paid to the barbarian crimes of a terrorist nature committed by Ukrainian militants against the civilian population of the Kursk region. [It was] emphasized that the key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict and working in the direction of its resolution by political and diplomatic means should be complete ending of foreign military assistance and [battlefield] intelligence information to Kiev.”
The White House has issued no response.
There is no record that the sanctions war was discussed between the presidents.
Earlier in the Moscow afternoon, in a speech to the business lobby, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Putin had attacked the US and the European allies for the economic war. “Sanctions are neither temporary nor targeted measures; they constitute a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure against our nation,” Putin said. “ Regardless of global developments or shifts in the international order, our competitors will perpetually seek to constrain Russia and diminish its economic and technological capacities…Here, the Ministry of Finance has tallied them. I state with confidence: 28,595 sanctions against individuals and legal entities. This exceeds – by a significant margin – all sanctions ever imposed on all other nations combined.”
If Putin raised this issue with either Witkoff or Trump, there is no sign in Moscow or Washington of their answer.
