Bloomberg: Negotiations On Peace In Ukraine Deadlocked
- 24.02.2026, 15:57
There is no indication that Putin is willing to make an agreement.
Expectations of a breakthrough in talks to end the war in Ukraine have begun to melt even in Washington, whose representatives, above all President Donald Trump himself, have repeatedly said that "Putin wants to make a deal." According to US allies, the administration would like to reach a peace agreement on Ukraine before the 250th anniversary of US independence celebrations begin on July 4, writes Bloomberg. However, there is no indication that Vladimir Putin is willing to strike a deal that does not meet his strategic requirements of getting rid of Ukraine's current authorities and bringing it under his influence, senior European and NATO officials told the agency.
Three rounds of trilateral talks this year have failed to produce a concrete result or create opportunities for further compromise. Moscow and Washington are in effect playing a game of "who's going to fail first," said a senior NATO official familiar with the talks - Russia will drop its maximum demands, or the U.S. will finally stop supporting Ukraine. While the source called the talks constructive, they have effectively stalled, he said.
Even some U.S. officials have begun privately acknowledging that they see no sign that Putin is willing to back down from his maximalist demands, Bloomberg's sources said.
The timeline for reaching agreements keeps shifting. It started with Trump's promise to end the war "in 24 hours," and even before he became president. Last year, Trump called several deadlines, and all of them passed without agreements being reached and without any consequences. This year, Vladimir Zelensky reported that the White House wanted to make a deal before the summer so that Trump would have something to present by the start of the campaign for the midterm elections for the US Congress, which will be held in November.
Trump is now more interested in a deal with Iran, to which he is pulling a huge military force, and rebuilding the Gaza Strip, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal last week.
"Trump himself is to blame for his expectations for a peace deal not being met because he sent the wrong signals," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Tuesday. In particular, he made a tactical mistake when he ruled out the possibility of Ukraine's admission to NATO from the very beginning. "Unfortunately, the American president unnecessarily took the issue of NATO membership off the agenda very early on. Meanwhile, it could have been used to negotiate other issues," the minister told Deutschlandfunk radio.
Speaking on the fourth anniversary of the start of Putin's war, Pistorius said:
"Unfortunately, the American president influenced the course of the war and Putin's self-confidence when he rolled out the red carpet and welcomed him as a friend in Alaska, while completely withdrawing military support for Ukraine."
The participants in the Abu Dhabi and Geneva talks maintained tough positions on two issues - territorial and the fate of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. US representatives earlier said that an agreement on sharing the electricity produced by the NPP should be an important part of the peace agreement. They propose to divide it between Ukraine, Russia and the United States, but Kiev refuses to share it with Russia, although it says that the Americans can do with their share as they wish, Bloomberg writes.
As for the territorial issue, the Kremlin insists on Ukraine's complete surrender of Donbass. Kiev refuses to go for it, discussing at most the creation of a demilitarized zone and within it a free economic zone. Ukraine's allies, in particular, fear that Putin might agree to a ceasefire that would allow Trump to declare a successful return to peace, after which Russia would continue a campaign of sabotage, hybrid warfare and election interference aimed at destabilizing Ukraine, European diplomats familiar with the matter explained to Bloomberg.
Zelensky said Washington believes Putin will end the war if he is given the unoccupied part of Donbass. In an interview with the Financial Times, the Ukrainian president called such a position short-sighted:
"Frankly, I don't believe that this is all Russia is demanding - our withdrawal from Donbass, and then the war will end. Russia is Russia, and as you know, it cannot be trusted."
The intelligence services of European countries believe the same.
"As long as Putin remains in power, Russia is not paralyzed by mass protests, and there is at least some money left in the budget for weapons, the war will continue," writes Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies in Berlin. - The Kremlin will not make significant concessions even if it faces a protracted financial and economic crisis."
Analogous position is held by economist Dmitri Nekrasov, co-founder and director of the European Center for Analysis and Strategy. "The number of economic lines of defense to which the Russian government is capable of retreating in full order at each next deterioration of the situation is far greater than can be built between the current front line in Ukraine and Kiev. Every such maneuver would be a new steal from the future of the Russian economy. But there is a hell of a lot more time to steal from the future," he writes in a column in The Moscow Times.