Putin and Trump Back on The Path to Peace: Will the Kremlin succeed once again in exploiting the rift between Europe and the United States?

Vladimir Putin's and the Russian military command's persistent and demonstrably false claims of battlefield success, repeated during a military briefing on 3 June, are unlikely to convince even a domestic audience that the Kremlin is moving closer to achieving the objectives of its military campaign in Ukraine. Rather, this alternative narrative of Russia's offensive appears to have been crafted primarily for Putin's telephone conversation with Donald Trump on US Independence Day, which marked the launch of a new round of negotiations on Ukraine.

Putin used this narrative of Russian military success to justify his intention to continue offensive operations until the complete conquest of Donbas, or until Ukraine makes concessions that would facilitate a rapid peace settlement. The Kremlin is seeking to return to the negotiating positions established during the 2025 talks, despite the fact that they no longer reflect the realities on the battlefield or the current balance of forces.

At the same time, Moscow continues to argue that Ukraine's European allies, by sustaining Kyiv's military capabilities, constitute the principal obstacle to peace. As in 2025, the Kremlin claims that European support will prevent the conclusion of the ‘peace deal’ that Donald Trump is particularly keen to secure ahead of the US mid-term elections.

The Russian authorities are stepping up their public rhetoric against those NATO member states which, in Moscow's assessment, are already effectively participating in the war on Ukraine's side. At the same time, the intelligence services of several countries have warned of a heightened risk of a Russian hybrid attack against one of the Baltic states or Poland.

The NATO summit opening today will provide the first test of this new negotiating round. It will reveal the extent to which efforts to reach a settlement in Ukraine become a source of division between Europe and the United States, and whether Vladimir Putin succeeds in selling his exaggerated battlefield achievements and threats of escalation in Europe.

A cognitive offensive

Against the backdrop of the escalating petrol crisis, the energy blockade of Crimea and the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ ever-increasing strikes on Russian oil and industrial infrastructure, Vladimir Putin has attempted to launch an offensive in the information domain, or, in the terminology of military analysts, in the cognitive dimension of warfare. The principal target of this offensive appears to have been directed less at Russian citizens waiting in queues for fuel than at US President Donald Trump.

On Friday, 3 June, Putin visited an ‘auxiliary command post of the Russian force grouping’, theatrically concealed behind protective green camouflage netting. There, both he and his senior generals once again recounted Russia's military successes on the Ukrainian front. The picture they presented differed little from the one Putin had outlined a week earlier in a detailed interview with Russian state television. They described, with even greater triumphalism, the supposed historic significance of capturing Kostiantynivka (although fighting is in fact continuing there – see the analysis by the publication ‘Agency’). They repeated false claims that Russian forces had established control over Kupiansk and provided lengthy accounts of marginal or non-existent advances along secondary sectors of the front.

This catalogue of achievements was intended to reinforce the Russian military's quantitative claims regarding territorial gains. According to Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, Russian forces captured 636 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory during June and more than 3,000 square kilometres since the beginning of the year. Such figures appear remarkably detached from reality given the widespread assessment, shared even by pro-war Russian military bloggers, that the Russian offensive has ‘run out of steam’ (Podolyaka), ‘stalled’ (Kotenok), or reached a ‘strategic deadlock’ (Viktor Baranets and Maxim Klimov). Ukrainian OSINT projects estimate Russian territorial gains at their lowest level since the launch of Russia's offensive in Donbas in January 2024, amounting to fewer than 800 square kilometres since the start of the year and less than 100 in June (→ Re:Russia: Disconnected from reality).

However, the Chief of the General Staff openly outlined in his report that the principal purpose of the briefing and its territorial accounting was polemical. According to him, the Ukrainian military had launched an information operation designed to create a false picture of the battlefield by exploiting the concept of the ‘grey zone’. In other words, the Russian General Staff is openly defending its practice of claiming territorial gains on the basis of symbolic flag-raising operations or the temporary infiltration of small assault groups, effectively treating territory as captured ‘on credit’. This practice has resulted in the same settlements being declared captured repeatedly over many months, despite remaining the scene of intense fighting. Whereas such reporting was previously used to embellish operational progress for the political leadership, it has now effectively been institutionalised as an alternative Russian methodology for measuring territorial control.

Other statements by the Russian military leadership served the same purpose of constructing an alternative picture of the battlefield. Thus, Putin's and Gerasimov's repeated assertions that Russian forces are advancing along virtually the entire front should be read against the backdrop of statements by the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, who has argued that the number of sectors witnessing active Russian offensive operations has fallen from 13 to seven, of which only four remain major axes of attack. In Syrskyi's assessment, this reflects the gradual exhaustion of Russia's deployed forces. The Russian command, by contrast, is keen to demonstrate that it continues to hold the initiative and numerical superiority across most sectors of the front, implying that the overall balance of forces has remained essentially unchanged from last year.

Finally, Gerasimov's claim that Russian air strikes over the past month destroyed 34 Ukrainian defence industry facilities, 10 ‘strike aviation’ airfields and five energy infrastructure sites appears almost as a parody of Ukraine's campaign against Russian infrastructure. Unlike the Ukrainian record of strikes, which is documented daily and routinely identifies the locations and names of the facilities targeted, the Russian account was presented retrospectively and without attributing individual strikes to specific factories or airfields.

The alternative military reality constructed during the 3 June briefing was not intended to withstand expert scrutiny or public debate. Its principal function was to provide Vladimir Putin with conclusions he could cite during his telephone conversation with Donald Trump on 4 June, marking the 250th anniversary of US independence.

Evoking the ‘spirit of Anchorage’

Unlike in 2025, when Donald Trump himself was usually the principal source of information about his telephone conversations with Putin, often portraying them as taking place in an atmosphere of mutual understanding, this year the role of chief ‘telephone messenger’ has been assumed by Putin's foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov. In his regular verbal press briefings, Ushakov carefully describes the length of the conversations, their supposedly warm and trusting atmosphere, and the areas of emerging common ground. Whereas last year such conversations were often followed by unexpected visits to Moscow by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, they are now routinely accompanied by statements from the Russian side that Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected in Moscow soon. Since mid-April, Ushakov, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have each referred on at least five occasions to the prospect of such a visit.

These repeated signals, together with the tone of Ushakov's briefings, strongly suggest that Moscow is seeking to revive the so-called ‘spirit of Anchorage’, in other words, the negotiating framework of 2025. The central premise of that approach was Donald Trump's belief that Putin was winning a war of attrition and therefore entitled to demand concessions from Ukraine. Demonstrating Russian military success is an indispensable element of this narrative. According to Ushakov, Putin told Trump during Saturday's conversation that the ‘European party of war’ was operating on the basis of a false understanding of both the overall strategic situation and conditions along the front line, before presenting what he described as the real picture of the battlefield, where Russian forces were advancing confidently.

It is difficult to judge whether Putin genuinely expected the carefully staged display of Russian military success prepared by the General Staff to persuade Trump. At the very least, however, it was intended to reinforce Putin's own claim that military victory remains achievable and that he therefore has every reason to continue the war. A similar image of determination, appearing irrational from an external perspective, is depicted by informed sources in Moscow cited by The Financial Times. According to those sources, Putin has no intention of making concessions before at least next February, having instructed the military to complete the conquest of Donbas by the end of the year. It is worth recalling that Putin projected the same confidence in eventual military victory a year ago, although at that time such confidence still rested on at least some plausible assumptions. In effect, this alternative picture of military reality has itself become a negotiating position and a ready-made counterargument should Donald Trump suggest to Putin that he has ‘no cards to play’.

As Ushakov pointed out, alongside claims of military success, another central theme of Putin's conversation, held on the eve of the NATO summit, was the alleged ‘European party of war’, which, in Putin's view, is preventing an end to the conflict. Putin has developed this argument repeatedly, both in his recent interview and during the military briefing. The claim that a mutual understanding between Putin and Trump, and the conclusion of a peace deal, are being obstructed by European leaders encouraging Volodymyr Zelensky's intransigence is another defining feature of the 2025 negotiating framework that Moscow is now attempting to revive. Within this narrative, it is ultimately the ‘European party of war’ that has stood between Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize.

It remains unclear to what extent Putin succeeded in drawing Trump back towards his preferred negotiating framework and his vision of a new settlement. Last year, the US President repeatedly demonstrated a striking receptiveness to Putin's interpretation of events. According to Trump himself, he intends to meet Volodymyr Zelensky on the margins of the NATO summit before holding another telephone conversation with Putin. As Reuters reports, a senior administration official said that ‘the President feels a strong urgency to try to bring this to an end’. Then, on 6 July, commenting on Russia's ballistic missile strike against Kyiv, Trump unexpectedly declared that 'we are much closer [to ending the war] than people realise', adding that Putin was ‘under pressure’ and wanted to end the conflict. Such rhetorical reversals are familiar from the negotiating track of 2025. Putin insists he will continue fighting, while Trump explains that what Putin really wants is peace.

It is clear that the prospect of even a temporary agreement or ceasefire in Ukraine within the next three months would be highly attractive to Trump. Such an outcome would almost certainly strengthen his domestic political standing, which has been significantly weakened by the Iran conflict ahead of the US midterm elections. This creates opportunities for Putin to bargain over the apparent intransigence and confidence in ultimate victory that he is projecting today. At the same time, developments on the actual battlefield increasingly favour Ukraine. Kyiv now enjoys a significant advantage in the low-altitude aerial domain and is gradually disrupting Russian logistics across the occupied territories. For the first time since 2023, the question of whether Russia can retain control over all occupied territory no longer appears merely hypothetical. Consequently, Trump's characteristic desire to secure a rapid agreement may, in practice, work against Ukraine's interests.

Does the path to peace lie through war?

However, the desire to revive the ‘spirit of Anchorage’ is far from the only message Putin has been sending to the West in recent weeks. If, from Trump's perspective, the Russian leader appears closer than ever to peace, from Europe's perspective he appears closer than ever to war, specifically, to a confrontation with Europe itself.

During Friday's meeting with the military leadership, Putin instructed officials to identify those 'inciting the continuation of the war in Ukraine' and assess the extent of their 'involvement' in 'actual combat operations... for the possible adoption of appropriate decisions in the future'. This second signal, containing a carefully calibrated threat, was reinforced by a series of statements from senior Russian officials over the following days.

Expanding on the idea that these ‘instigators’ are already directly ‘involved’ in the fighting, Dmitry Peskov stated in an interview with the ‘Vesti’ programme on Sunday that the 'special military operation' had become 'a real war', because the West stands behind Kyiv by 'helping it to target through its satellites and guiding foreign weapons towards our targets'. By deliberately emphasising the official terminology used by the Kremlin to describe the invasion of Ukraine, Peskov signalled that this was not merely an attempt to explain the Russian military's setbacks or the protracted nature of the conflict. Rather, it reflected a new mobilisation narrative that broadens both the list of Russia's adversaries and the potential geographical scope of military confrontation.

On the same day, commenting on the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ strikes on the Baltic Fleet base in Kronstadt and the St Petersburg oil terminal, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin stated that Moscow possessed 'verified information' showing that Latvia and other Baltic states had provided air corridors for Ukrainian drones.

Meanwhile, the scenario of a hybrid war in the Baltic region, which, by threatening to split the bloc, would force Europe into negotiations and concessions regarding Ukraine (→ Re: Russia: A Fox in the Baltic), is being discussed with increasing seriousness in Eastern European capitals, often with reference to intelligence assessments. At the end of June, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski warned of the possibility of provocations against one of NATO's eastern flank states. Several days later, the Polish news outlet Onet reported that a number of intelligence services, including those of the United States, had warned Poland of a significant risk of a Russian hybrid attack. Finally, last Friday, precisely while Putin was meeting with the Russian military leadership, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk responded to questions about such a possibility by stating: ‘I don’t want to scare anyone, but the coming months may prove to be truly critical, not least because of the changing nature of war.’

Putin’s second signal, implying Moscow's readiness to escalate on the territory of European NATO member states, does not contradict the first, which centres on reviving the prospect of a peace deal with Trump. Rather, it complements it. Its purpose is to deter Ukraine's European allies from attempting to shape the terms of any future agreement between Moscow and Washington. The NATO summit opening today will provide the first indication of whether a new round of negotiations over Ukraine is likely to deepen divisions between Europe and the United States, and of how successfully Vladimir Putin is able to market both his inflated claims of battlefield success and his warnings of escalation in Europe.