Damage on Thursday after Russian missile strikes on Kyiv. It was the deadliest attack on the Ukrainian capital in nearly a year.
Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Putin Keeps Pummeling Ukraine, Convinced Trump Is on His Side

by · NY Times

President Vladimir V. Putin is, brutally, walking a tightrope.

The Russian leader appears eager to keep up talks with President Trump as Moscow brims with optimism that energy deals, direct flights and the lifting of sanctions could all be in the offing. After Mr. Putin met the White House envoy Steve Witkoff for the fourth time in three months on Friday, the Kremlin said the “productive Russian-American dialogue” would continue “in the most active mode.”

But Mr. Putin has cast aside Mr. Trump’s calls for a quick peace in Ukraine, with the ferocity of Russia’s airstrikes on civilian targets seemingly increasing. Mr. Putin openly admitted this week that Russia had bombed a restaurant because, he claimed, people “deserving the most serious punishment” were “drinking vodka” there.

The result has been weeks of brinkmanship with Mr. Trump, as the American president threatens to walk away from negotiations while Mr. Putin keeps testing his patience with continued attacks. The Kremlin is exuding calm confidence, even after Mr. Trump posted on Thursday on social media, “Vladimir, STOP!” in response to Russia’s deadliest missile attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in nearly a year.

The funeral this month of Herman Tripolets, 9, who was killed in a missile attack that struck a playground in central Ukraine.
Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

On Friday, Mr. Putin and two of his top aides met for three hours at the Kremlin with Mr. Witkoff, who was shown in videos released by the Kremlin sitting across from them accompanied only by a translator. Afterward, there was little indication of a breakthrough.

“He had, I hear, a pretty good meeting,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to Rome for the pope’s funeral, noting that Mr. Witkoff yet to brief him directly.

One of Mr. Putin’s aides in the meeting, Yuri Ushakov, said the discussion had helped “bring the positions of Russia and the United States closer together, not just on Ukraine but also on several other international issues.” He said the group discussed “the possibility of renewing direct negotiations” between Russia and Ukraine, a notion that both countries raised publicly earlier this week.

The other Putin aide at the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev, released his own statement saying it was symbolic that Mr. Witkoff’s visit came on the 80th anniversary of the first meeting of Soviet and American troops during World War II. The meeting, Mr. Dmitriev said, stood for, “shared hope for postwar peace.”

There was no immediate comment from American officials about the meeting.

Overnight, before the meeting, Russia continued its airstrikes. The Ukrainian authorities said on Friday that a large-scale drone attack had killed three people, including a child, in the eastern city of Pavlohrad.

Greeting Mr. Witkoff at the Kremlin a few hours later, Mr. Putin, speaking in English, responded to Mr. Witkoff’s “How are you, Mr. President?” with, “Fine, just fine, thank you.”

In Russia, experts and people close to the Kremlin say that Mr. Putin’s calculus is simple: Until now, the Russian president has been convinced that he has more to gain by keeping up the pressure on the battlefield than by accepting the deal Mr. Trump appears to be offering. Even agreeing to a temporary cease-fire, Mr. Putin believes, would mean surrendering so much negotiating leverage that it would only make sense to do so after major concessions from Ukraine and the West.

At the same time, Mr. Putin — a leader who likes to keep his options open and hedge his bets — doesn’t want to foreclose the possibility of a war-ending settlement. And Mr. Trump, given his obvious sympathy for Mr. Putin and distaste for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, has given the Russian leader plenty of reason to think he has room left to maneuver.

“For him, it is still important to leave a window of opportunity open, but not to force the process,” Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Putin believes, Professor Golosov added, that as long as he has the battlefield advantage, “He can gain benefits not only in terms of seizing territory, but also in terms of undermining Ukraine’s defense capability and demoralizing the Ukrainian population.”

In Europe and in the United States, the Trump administration was widely criticized for outlining a potential peace deal that seemed heavily skewed toward Russia. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance expressed a readiness both to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and to freeze the current front line, a de facto acceptance of Russia’s occupation of nearly one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

CCTV footage provided by a restaurant owner, Viktoriia Belikova, shows a fashion event at her restaurant before the strike and interior and exterior views at her restaurant at the moment of the Russian strike. She is seen sitting in the exterior video with her back to the camera. She was injured by shrapnel.

Mr. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Putin would be making concessions simply by “stopping taking the whole country” — a goal that analysts don’t believe Russia has any chance of accomplishing.

The current deal being floated by the Trump administration would fall well short of Mr. Putin’s stated war aims. The concessions offered by Trump administration officials do not provide for Russian control of all of the Ukrainian land that Mr. Putin has claimed to be part of Russia, nor do they limit the size of Ukraine’s army, something that Mr. Putin has demanded since the early weeks of the war.

While Mr. Trump said in a Time interview published Friday that he didn’t think Ukraine would “ever be able to join NATO,” Mr. Putin’s designs on a renewed Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe go much further than blocking Ukraine’s membership in the alliance. Weeks before he invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Putin called on NATO to halt all further expansion eastward and to withdraw military infrastructure placed in Eastern European states after 1997.

As if to make his point, Mr. Putin’s military in recent weeks has launched fierce strikes on Ukrainian cities. Mr. Putin acknowledged on Monday that Russia had struck civilian targets because, he claimed, they were being used by Ukrainian soldiers and “nationalists,” as well as by their “international curators.”

“They’re holding gatherings, conferences, meetings in a restaurant, celebrating something, drinking vodka,” Mr. Putin said, an apparent reference to a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in central Ukraine on April 4 that killed nine children. Security footage showed that the restaurant had been filled with women attending a beauty industry event.

Many in Russia’s elite insist that, despite the brutality of the fighting, Mr. Putin could still make a deal by relinquishing some of his most far-reaching demands.

A prominent Moscow newspaper editor, Konstantin Remchukov, published a column on April 20 arguing, for example, that the fine print of Mr. Putin’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions in the fall of 2022 gave him the wiggle room to accept an armistice that would freeze the fighting at the current front lines. Mr. Remchukov headed the 2018 election campaign of Moscow’s mayor, a close ally of Mr. Putin.

The reason Mr. Putin is continuing to fight, Mr. Remchukov wrote, is that he wants to expel Ukrainian forces completely from the Russian border region of Kursk, a goal that Russia’s top military commander said last week was 99.5 percent accomplished.

“As soon as the last half percent is liberated, the troops can stop where the news finds them,” Mr. Remchukov wrote.

In a phone interview, Mr. Remchukov said that Mr. Putin should be ready to reach a Ukraine deal because doing so would unlock the vast benefits of cooperating with Mr. Trump, including sanctions relief, the return of frozen Russian assets, renewed direct flights to the West and joint energy projects in the Arctic.

“Why shouldn’t Putin stop fighting,” Mr. Remchukov asked, “if the foreign policy preconditions for doing so have been created in the form of the new president of the United States?”

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