Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have very different negotiating styles. Trump lines up his offer in advance, browbeating all the parties on his own side into compliance before slapping his bottom line on the table. Putin, by contrast, is a haggler. He loads his proposals with superstructure intended to be jettisoned in the course of getting to yes. Or to put it another way, what Putin says he wants and what he realistically expects to get are two different things.
On the face of it, Russia’s first response to US proposals for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine contain several major deal-breakers that the Ukrainians could never swallow. First and foremost, the Kremlin demands international recognition that Ukraine’s Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhiye and Kherson provinces are now part of Russia. Given that Russia does not actually control the entirety of the latter four regions – including the provincial capitals of Zaporozhiye and Kherson cities – Moscow is technically demanding that Kyiv actually cede even more land than it has already lost.
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