Alexander Baunov
In his quest for an agreement to stop the war in Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump began with the easy part: putting pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is dependent on U.S. military support. Now it’s time to face the hard part: putting pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine has agreed to a thirty-day ceasefire without preconditions and in full—not just in the air and at sea, as it had previously proposed. In return, it received what it had been getting until just a few days earlier without any ceasefire: a resumption of intelligence sharing and previously approved U.S. aid. Now, as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, “the ball is in Russia’s court.”
Ahead of U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff’s arrival in Moscow on March 13, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov appeared to reject the ceasefire proposal on the grounds that it would merely provide Ukraine with a temporary respite, enabling it to rally its forces. Indeed, Moscow is unlikely to respond with a simple and honest cessation of hostilities at a time when the Russian army has begun recapturing territory in Russia’s Kursk region that had been seized by Ukrainian troops. It could try to persuade the Americans to give it time to complete the Kursk operation, or to exclude it from the ceasefire agreement, though even Trump would likely have a hard time accepting that: it would imply that Ukraine is a legitimate battlefield while Russia is not. Another option for Moscow is to simply drag out its response in the hope of quickly completing the recapture of the region.
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