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This week began with four European leaders, standing defiantly in Kyiv alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issuing an ultimatum to Vladimir Putin: sign a ceasefire now, or together with Donald Trump we will force you to do so, with sanctions and other tough measures.
Over the subsequent days, there followed a series of offers, counter-offers, ultimatums and deflections, in a dizzying week of high-stakes diplomacy that often seemed to resemble a geopolitical poker game.
Yet by the end of the week there was no ceasefire and no sanctions. Various sets of talks were under way in Istanbul for which nobody had much hope of a breakthrough, and the path to peace looked just as unclear as it had done a week earlier.
Halfway through the week, the Guardian spent an hour with Zelenskyy, with three other European journalists, in his office at the presidential administration in Kyiv. He had just made the surprise announcement that he would travel to Turkey personally for talks, and challenged Putin to join him. It was a dramatic raising of the stakes, and we asked if he felt a bit like he was playing poker.
He smiled: “With several people at once!”
The week started well for Zelenskyy, with a quartet of Europeans – Britain’s Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and Poland’s Donald Tusk, all descending on Kyiv.
The five men huddled on a sofa as Macron called Donald Trump, who had just woken up. Trump, the Guardian understands, was pleased the five had met but did not offer any firm commitments to sign up to sanctions if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.
Nonetheless, in an open-air press conference outside the Mariinskyi Palace in Kyiv, Macron and Starmer portrayed the call as if everyone was on the same page. They gave Putin an ultimatum, until Monday night, to begin a ceasefire. “If he turns his back on peace, we will respond, working with President Trump, with all our partners, we will ramp up sanctions, and increase our military aid for Ukraine’s defence,” said Starmer.
The ball was now in Putin’s court, although all past experience suggested the Russian leader would not react well to an ultimatum, particularly not the day after overseeing a bombastic military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the second world war, an event that has become the foundation myth for his nationalist idea of Russian identity and has been used to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
An early sign that Putin’s response might not be positive came from Dmitry Medvedev, formerly Russia’s president and now its loudest nationalist Twitter troll. “They are blurting out threats against Russia … You think that’s smart, eh? Shove these peace plans up your pangender arses,” he wrote on X.
Still, Putin’s is the only important reaction in Moscow these days and he was apparently about to give one live. Western television correspondents, a few of whom were still in Moscow after the Victory Day parade, were called into the Kremlin during the day for a press conference, where Putin was expected to give his response to the Starmer-Macron-Merz-Tusk ultimatum.
It was close to 2am by the time Putin appeared, and the press conference had been downgraded to a prepared statement, apparently written by Putin himself. He scorned the idea that the west thought it could talk to him using ultimatums, and claimed disingenuously that Russia had always offered ceasefires and Ukraine had been the side to turn them down. Instead of a ceasefire now, he said, let’s start talking. He even named a date and a place: Istanbul on Thursday.
Putin’s offer of talks flew in the face of what the western leaders had demanded. Starmer, Merz and Macron had been clear in Kyiv – a ceasefire had to come first, “no ifs or buts”, otherwise sanctions would be applied. They had made it clear that Trump was onside with this plan.
But perhaps inevitably, the US president responded by putting pressure on Kyiv. “Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “HAVE THE MEETING, NOW!!!”
There was at least a somewhat positive coda to his message, that if after the meeting it was clear a deal was not possible, western leaders would “proceed accordingly”. But it was hardly the tough talking to Putin that the Europeans had hoped to extract from Trump.
Soon after, Zelenskyy raised the stakes once again with his suggestion of a top-level summit. “We await a full and lasting ceasefire, starting from tomorrow,” he wrote in a statement. But he added a twist. “I will be waiting for Putin in Türkiye on Thursday. Personally. I hope that this time the Russians will not look for excuses.”
It was a dramatic challenge that seized the initiative from the Russian leader. If Putin’s goal had been to deflect the demand for ceasefire with a faux-constructive offer, Zelenskyy was now calling his bluff. He did it remarkably quickly, too, suggesting it was not a move agreed with western allies.
“If you read carefully, I spoke about both the ceasefire and about a meeting,” he said, when asked about it in the interview. “I formulated my words exactly like this. I can’t tell you why I did this. But I knew exactly what I was doing,” he added, enigmatically.
Zelenskyy, like many world leaders now, has to calibrate his words carefully to make sure not to offend Trump. “We are putting on a theatre performance for just one audience member,” said a Ukrainian security source this week. It can sometimes be an excruciating dance, but if it goes wrong, as it did for Zelenskyy in the White House in late February, the consequences can be even worse.
Putin was never likely to show up in Turkey, but a three-day silence from the Kremlin before this was confirmed suggested he was at least considering various options. In the end, he sent a negotiating team to Istanbul led by Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister with a sideline in writing pseudo-history books about the west’s long-running mission to destroy Russia.
By Thursday evening, Zelenskyy was in Ankara complaining the Russians hadn’t shown up, Medinsky was in Istanbul complaining the Ukrainians hadn’t shown up, Putin was in the Kremlin saying not much at all, and Trump was coming to the end of his lavish Middle East tour and still hinting there could be an 11th hour meeting with Putin.
On Friday, negotiations between a Ukrainian delegation and Medinsky’s Russian group did finally happen. But they were over in less than two hours. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, dismissed the negotiations (which Ukraine had attended only because the Americans insisted) as pointless and at a “logjam”, and, echoing the US president, said it would probably take a meeting between Trump and Putin to end the conflict.
The week ends with no sign of a lasting peace being any closer, little talk of the US implementing the tough measures that Starmer and Macron had promised against the Russians, and Trump sounding excited about the prospect of a bilateral meeting with Putin.
Zelenskyy, earlier in the week, said he felt confident if cautious while sitting at the geopolitical poker table. “I’m in general a confident person. Though in negotiations there should always be doubts … You have to have some reflections, to be able to step to the side, to veer off the fast-moving track everyone else is on,” he said.
The problem for Zelenskyy, and for Europe more broadly, is that all the carefully calibrated poker plays count for nothing if it turns out Trump is not even bothering to follow the game, but instead playing his own game, according to his own rules.
