Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Irina Gekht, Acting Governor of Nenets Autonomous Area, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, March 18, 2025.
Those in the Trump administration who are invested in deals over and above what those deals are meant to achieve are unlikely to admit that Vladimir Putin rejected the terms for a 30-day cease-fire in Ukraine. Of course, Putin didn’t say “no” outright — at least, not according to either the Kremlin's or the White House’s read-outs of the two-hour conversation between Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart. But what Moscow was willing to agree to is far from the terms into which the administration muscled Kyiv.
Under immense pressure from the administration, and amid battlefield setbacks occasioned by Trump’s withholding ...