President Trump walks off Air Force One last week. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
In a reversal, President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.
For months, President Donald Trump has been threatening to simply walk away from the frustrating negotiations for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
After a phone call Monday between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, that appears to be exactly what the American President is doing. The deeper question now is whether he is also abandoning the United States’ three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a nascent democracy that he has frequently blamed for being illegally invaded.
Trump told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and other European leaders after his call with Putin that Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves, just days after saying that only he and Putin had the power to broker a deal. And he backed away from his own threats to join a European pressure campaign that would include new sanctions on Russia, according to six officials who were familiar with the discussion. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Their account sheds light on Trump’s decision to throw up his hands when it comes to a peace process that he had previously promised to resolve in just 24 hours. And, unless he again reverses course, Monday’s developments left Putin with exactly what he wanted: not only an end to American pressure, but the creation of a deep fissure inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, between the Americans and their traditional European allies, who say they are going ahead with sanctions anyway.
To many, Trump’s decision was foretold – first by his fiery, televised encounter with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, then by the resignation of the US ambassador in Kyiv.
“The policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than the aggressor, Russia,” Bridget A. Brink, the former ambassador and a longtime Foreign Service officer, wrote after leaving Kyiv last month. “Peace at any price is not peace at all – it is appeasement.”
But Trump discovered that he could not get peace at any price, because Putin rejected his overtures. Even after Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that Ukraine would never join Nato and must abandon hopes of winning back all the territory that Russia had seized – two of Putin’s demands – it was not enough to get a ceasefire.
Trump, of course, is usually a fan of financial pressure: he routinely threatens tariffs and sanctions against allies and adversaries alike. But in a statement to The New York Times, a White House official said this was different. The official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the President’s private calls, said additional sanctions against Russia would hinder business opportunities, and the President wants to maximise economic opportunities for Americans.
American officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have countered critics by pointing out that existing sanctions on Russia, largely imposed after the 2022 invasion, remain in place, as does intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
“When Vladimir Putin woke up this morning, he had the same set of sanctions on him that he’s always had since the beginning of this conflict,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, adding that Ukraine was still receiving weapons from the United States and its allies.
Trump, he insisted, is “trying to end a bloody, costly war that neither side can win”.
Yet the subtext of Trump’s call with Zelenskyy and the Europeans is that the era of US expenditures of diplomatic energy, new arms for Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia is rapidly coming to an end. Several European officials said the message they took from the call was that they should not expect the United States to join them any time soon in piling additional financial pressure on to Putin.
For Trump, that is a reversal. In social media posts in recent months he episodically threatened tariffs and sanctions against Russia if it refused to join Ukraine in declaring a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
“If the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions,” he wrote on Truth Social on May 8, after a call with Zelenskyy. He reiterated that stance in a call with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, when they travelled to Kyiv 10 days ago and set a deadline for Putin to sign the ceasefire agreement.
But after Trump’s call with Putin on Monday, those commitments evaporated. The American President declined, both in public and in his call with the European leaders, to follow up on that threat.
Trump implied in his public comments that his call with Putin had resulted in a breakthrough of sorts. But it quickly became clear to the Ukrainians and Europeans that the Russian leader had made no concessions to Trump beyond negotiating. Russia is already doing that, albeit halfheartedly, sending a junior team to Istanbul last week for talks with the Ukrainians.
Trump had famously promised during the campaign that he would bring about peace between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours – portraying it as easy work for a master negotiator. He has since discovered it is much more difficult than he imagined, and he now says he was being “a little bit sarcastic” when he floated that timeline.
Frustrated with the slow progress and Putin’s intransigence, Trump has publicly mused about walking away from the negotiations. And he made clear in his post Monday that he was eager to pull the United States out of the discussions and move on to doing business deals with Russia.
The conditions to end the war, Trump wrote, “will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of”.
Then he pivoted to what some European leaders believe is his real goal: a normalisation of relations between Washington and Moscow.
“Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic ‘bloodbath’ is over, and I agree,” Trump added. “There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED.”
It is not clear what normalisation would look like. In his first term, Trump exited several major arms control treaties with Russia, and the last one, New START, which limits the number of intercontinental nuclear weapons each side deploys, expires in February. So far there are no negotiations for a replacement.
But Trump has been eager to help US companies benefit from Russia‘s energy sector and rare earth minerals, among other potential areas of investment. Trump and his national security team have insisted none of those deals can happen before a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Putin seems to understand Trump’s eagerness for commerce, and has steered much of their conversations toward the potential economic relationship, according to people briefed on their phone calls Monday and earlier this year. As a result, Europe is now moving toward new sanctions and the United States appears poised to move in the opposite direction, looking to get past Ukraine and nurture a larger relationship with Russia.
It’s exactly the kind of split inside Nato that Putin has been looking to create, and exploit, for two decades.
On Tuesday, Britain announced a new wave of sanctions against Russia‘s military, energy and financial sectors, responding to Russian drone strikes against Ukrainian cities.
“Putin’s latest strikes once again show his true colours as a warmonger,” the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, said in a statement. He urged Putin to agree to “a full, unconditional ceasefire right away so there can be talks on a just and lasting peace”.
The news release from the British Government announcing the new sanctions made no mention of the United States, but instead stated that the European Union was preparing to “announce its 17th package of sanctions against Russia, in a coordinated effort to secure a just and lasting peace in Ukraine”.
A senior European official who has been involved in the closed-door discussions said Trump never seemed invested in joining sanctions on Russia if it refused to go along with the unconditional ceasefire. His threats, the official said, appeared largely performative; the United States did not join in the design of major new sanctions.
The disagreement between the Americans and the Europeans over support for Ukraine will likely come to a head over two nearly back-to-back summits: the Group of 7 in Canada in mid-June and the Nato summit a week later in The Hague. The second summit, in particular, will deal with long-term backing for Ukraine and steps to contain Russian forces so that they do not challenge a weaker member of the Atlantic alliance – and test whether Trump would come to that member‘s aid under the Nato treaty.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David E. Sanger, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Michael Schwirtz
Photographs by: Doug Mills and Tyler Hicks
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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