Donald Trump seeks an off-ramp from Russia-Ukraine negotiations

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Donald Trump has left Kyiv and Europe feeling abandoned after making clear the US wants to disentangle itself from negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and let the warring nations duke out peace for themselves.

Trump said he’d end the conflict on his first day in office, but now he has appeared to wash his hands of the peace effort, leaving Ukraine vulnerable at the negotiating table.

For observers, this is a turning point that confirms Europeans’ worst fears: seduced by Vladimir Putin’s flattery, Trump is prepared to sell out Kyiv in favour of Moscow. Trump and Putin spoke for more than two hours yesterday in a conversation so friendly that the Russians said neither leader wanted to hang up first.

After the call, the US president said that negotiations for a ceasefire would start “immediately”, but that “the conditions for that 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”, seemingly abdicating Washington’s role as peace broker. 

And who could take its place? Pope Leo XIV. “The Vatican . . . has stated that it would be very interested in hosting negotiations,” Trump said.

Just over a week ago, Trump joined other western leaders in promising to impose new punitive measures on Russia if it didn’t implement an immediate ceasefire.

But after speaking with Putin yesterday, Trump told European leaders that he did not intend to apply additional pressure on Moscow while bilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine are ongoing, according to two people briefed on the conversation. The Europeans are now racing to convince Trump to stay involved.

“It was never realistic to think the US could strike a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine,” said Andrew Weiss, vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The goal now seems to be to agree to disagree with Russia and allow the Europeans and Ukrainians to work something out.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who also spoke to Trump yesterday — had a stark warning: “It is crucial for all of us that the United States does not distance itself from the talks and the pursuit of peace, because the only one who benefits from that is Putin.”

The latest headlines

What we’re hearing

While the stock market has come roaring back since Trump’s so-called liberation day tariffs brought chaos and steep losses, the pain is set to endure for Main Street as confidence in the US economy takes a hit.

“The market has overbought the deal,” said Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins University economist who worked as an adviser to Ronald Reagan. “Trump still thinks he’s running Trump Enterprises, not the US economy,” he told the FT’s Claire Jones. 

While Trump’s climbdown on tariffs — and the détente with China in particular — have cut the chances of a serious recession, his handling of the trade war looms large over the US economy.

It could unwind years of exceptional US growth and trigger stagflation that would leave the Federal Reserve’s policymakers in a bind.

And the trade tensions aren’t gone — they’re just on pause. When the current 90-day deadline for talks expires in July, tariffs could surge again, adding to a climate of uncertainty.

The US-China deal “undid a decent amount of the damage”, Jason Furman, economist at Harvard University who worked in Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Claire. “But we’re still going to get a bunch of inflation, we’re still going to get slower growth. And we still don’t know how this play is going to end.”

And the anxiety is strangling every economy tied to the US. 

EU economics commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told the FT’s Sam Fleming that the global trade war has had “quite a sizeable negative impact” on the bloc’s own forecasts, generating a sharp downgrade to the global growth outlook. It “creates negative confidence effects which affect first and foremost investment decisions”.

Viewpoints

The budget fight on Capitol Hill has highlighted Trumpism’s growing split between plutocrats and Steve Bannon’s economic populists, says Edward Luce.

Russia and Ukraine are playing along with Trump’s demands to talk about peace, but they each hope the other will get the blame when the efforts founder, writes Gideon Rachman.

Rana Foroohar thinks the markets are declaring tariff victory too soon, and that we’re still in for a lot more volatility over the next few years.

After Trump announced his cash incentives for undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”, Patti Waldmeir found no takers — just disgust and laughter — in one of Chicago’s immigrant neighbourhoods.

Despite the term “woke right” seeming like culture war clickbait, Jemima Kelly thinks there might be something to it.