The Ukraine peace deal has stumbled yet again over an inevitable obstacle: Putin

Before the harsh white glare of the Kremlin reception room came a telling prologue: Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s self-described “deal guys”, being led by Kremlin officials through the sparkling streets of a festive Moscow.Wasn’t it lovely, Vladimir Putin asked later, as both sides sat down to a five-hour negotiation that seems to have led right back to where they started. “It’s a magnificent city,” Witkoff replied. Then the cameras cut out.What followed behind closed doors was not difficult to predict. Despite all the pressure on Ukraine to make concessions that Putin would accept, the assurances from the Trump administration that this was the best chance yet for peace, and the boosterism from envoys such as Witkoff and Kushner, the Ukraine peace deal has stumbled over an intractable, inevitable obstacle: Putin himself.The road to peace has always led through the Kremlin. That’s not a surprise given that it was Putin who launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions more displaced.And yet for weeks, the Trump administration has put pressure mainly on Ukraine – a junior partner far easier to cajole and cow than the Kremlin, in order to extract maximally advantageous conditions that it could offer to Putin in exchange for peace.“What we’re trying to see is if it’s possible to end the war in a way that protects Ukraine’s future that both sides could agree to,” said the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after the Kremlin rejected the latest plan.Apparently not. Witkoff and Kushner found a Kremlin that remained as unwilling to compromise on key issues including territorial control and Ukraine’s future political status as when Trump first took office.Putin, flanked by foreign policy advisers Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, at the Kremlin during the talks. Photograph: Alexander Kazakov/APThat isn’t how the Kremlin presented the results of course. Shortly after the meeting, the longtime Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov said that the talks were productive but that Moscow and Washington were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine”.Given that there was a specific US proposal on the table drawn up in part by another Kremlin adviser, Kirill Dmitriev, media coverage after the talks naturally saw that response as a Kremlin rejection.“No, this is incorrect,” said the Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “The thing is that the first direct exchange of views was conducted yesterday, and again, as it was said yesterday, some [proposals] were accepted, and some were called unacceptable, which is a normal working process in the search for a compromise.”A classic Kremlin “yes, but”, then. Both Russia and Ukraine have remained eager not to be seen as the obstacle to peace in the eyes of Trump, but the Kremlin has broadcast its own plans to continue fighting until it gets the result it desires: considerable territorial and political concessions on Kyiv’s future military and political trajectory.Putin’s initial rejection of any deal this week was widely predicted. Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, had written that the meeting was “never a negotiation. It was a deliberate, unambiguous presentation of Russia’s preconditions. Putin is now waiting to see whether this direct message will shift Trump’s stance”.But a Kremlin agreement to discuss the proposal may mark progress, argued Thomas Graham, a former senior US official who has remained in contact with current and former Russian officials, in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations.Putin was tiring, however, of the kind of wheeler-dealer process led by Witkoff, who is part of an influential set of five foreign policy advisers to Trump but nonetheless holds no formal role in government and is not trained in formal diplomacy.“Putin doesn’t want to see Witkoff coming to Moscow to have these discussions,” said Graham. “He really does want to turn this into what he would call a normal sort of diplomatic process where you get working groups together to work out the details of what are, in fact, very, very complex issues, where each side has significant differences and where there might be a possibility of bridging that.”Back to the working groups, then. For Ukraine, it could mark a crisis averted if the Trump administration views that Kyiv is not the main obstacle to peace. And the Kremlin has also signalled it is content to continue fighting until it gets the deal that Putin wants.In the meantime, Putin could avoid giving a hard yes or no on a deal with Ukraine, something that US officials say is the only way to end the war.“Ultimately the decisions have to be made, in the case of Russia, by Putin alone,” Rubio said. “Not his advisers, Putin only. Putin can end this war on the Russian side.”