By Maria Popova

December 3, 2025

What Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are presenting to the world as peace talks are not peace talks.

Peace talks are a form of diplomacy that require the two belligerents, in this case, Russia and Ukraine, talking to each other about the terms and conditions of a cessation of hostilities, including red lines and areas of potential compromise, while an honest broker tries to facilitate productive discussion. They are usually held at a neutral location (Oslo, Camp David, Geneva) and when not, tend to fail (Munich).

They are usually attended and managed by actual diplomats.

In Moscow this week, nothing remotely like this has happened and no progress has been achieved. The cause-and-effect relationship between those two facts is not a mystery.

The process that unfolded at the Kremlin included no representative from Ukraine, and no honest broker. Kyiv’s interests were purportedly represented by proxies of the same U.S. president who publicly degraded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and has made no secret of his autocratic affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Those representatives are Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his fellow real-estate developer Steve Witkoff.

This apparent substitution of genuine diplomacy with something wholly implausible at best and corrupt at worst both betrays and doubles down on serious problems in the trilateral dynamic at the core of this conflict status quo. (Europe is also a player in representing Ukraine’s interests, but it was not invited to the Kremlin).

Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to refuse to sit down with Ukrainian president Zelensky. The refusal stems from Russia’s consistent denial that Ukraine is a sovereign nation in charge of its fate — a claim that obviously raises a conflict of interest in terms of the Russia’s attempts to delegitimize negotiations and is belied by the fact that Ukraine’s president remains in office, running his country.

It is also an attempt to portray Ukraine as a Western proxy even as Ukraine has steadfastly refused Trump’s pressure to surrender to Russian demands and Putin’s treatment by Trump has been unprecedentedly favourable and breathtakingly credulous, especially for a habitual liar.

At the same time, the Russian leadership does not even pretend to look for compromise with Ukraine. Putin said Russia is prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian. Russia keeps rejecting the ceasefire offer that Ukraine agreed to in March of this year. After the meeting in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin even rejected the Trump administration’s version of Russia’s own plan—scandalously slipped to envoy Witkoff by Putin advisors Kirill Dmitriev and Yuri Ushakov.

Russia claims a ceasefire would allow Ukraine to arm itself better for more effective defence, indicating clearly that Russia is not planning to end its quest for conquest. Putin, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and Russian parliamentarians continue insisting that the original goals of Russia’s war against Ukraine need to be achieved for lasting peace to be possible.

This is a ludicrous argument that, if it had been made in any other conflict resolution context mediated by a more honest broker, would be laughed off the table. It essentially amounts to the unlawful aggressor who has failed to achieve his aims saying, “I won’t agree to peace until I win the war,” which, if it were going to happen, would presumably have happened or he wouldn’t be at the table.

This apparent substitution of genuine diplomacy with something wholly implausible at best and corrupt at worst both betrays and doubles down on serious problems in the trilateral dynamic at the core of this conflict status quo.

Since the goals are the end of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty through demilitarization and de-Ukrainization, Russia is the classic aggressor that Prussian military theorist Carl von Clawsewitz described as “peace-loving as he would prefer to take over our country unopposed”. While the Russian military continues murdering civilians in nighttime strikes, chief negotiator Dmitriev tweets “please repost if you support peace” with dove emojis. The trolling knows no bounds.

Instead of talking to Ukraine, Russia has focused its efforts on playing the two potential and supposed mediators against each other. Russia calls Ukraine’s European allies “warmongers”, but praises Trump as a “peacemaker”. While Putin openly threatens Europe with war and destruction, his envoys attempt to bribe the U.S. with promises of lucrative deals and mutual enrichment.

Putin has had more success trying to decouple the U.S. from Europe and Ukraine than his army has had trying to capture Donbas villages. The Trump administration, rather than acting as neutral broker or mediator, has repackaged a set of Russian demands and tried to impose them on Ukraine and Europe.

The initial 28-point plan, mocked quite aptly as the Dim-Wit plan after the diplomatic amateurs who produced it—Dmitriev and Witkoff—refers to the US as potentially mediating between NATO and Russia, an absurd suggestion given that the US is a member of NATO and an ally of its European members. On the other hand, Donald Trump does seem to have dragged America into a geopolitical category that Putin might be quite right in assessing as closer to his dictatorship than to the North Atlantic alliance of democracies.

While Putin appears to be using these doomed, performative talks as a way to stall and keep the U.S. administration off Russia’s back in terms of diplomatic pressure and tougher sanctions, the Trump administration seems to be using them to pursue a reset of the Russo-American relationship to a friendly and personally lucrative one. The Trump administration seems oblivious or unconcerned about the fallout from this strategy for Ukraine, Europe, or the international order.

The U.S. national interest is not served by any of the proposals that the Trump administration has floated in recent days. Recognizing Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territories would undermine international norms of territorial integrity. Returning Russia’s frozen assets would help Russia prepare for a new war against Europe.

Providing Russia with an amnesty for its war crimes would weaken international law. Allowing Russia to dictate terms not only to Ukraine but to NATO (who can join the alliance and who cannot) dramatically weakens NATO. All of these would strengthen Russia and weaken the U.S. and the international order it has championed since the end of WWII.

Not only are the American amateurs unqualified and ignorant about diplomacy and the Russo-Ukrainian war, but evidence trickles in that they have personal business interests intertwined with Russian companies. The glue of the budding Russo-American reset might be corruption. But the consequence will be Russia’s continued and likely widening aggression in Europe.

So, these are not peace talks. At this point, they are not even worthy of the label “diplomatic theatre”. They are distracting noise on the sidelines of the ongoing war. A distraction that Russia uses to shift attention away from its war criminal attempted conquest of Ukraine; to scuttle the potential imposition of crushing U.S. sanctions; and to strain the Transatlantic relationship between long-time allies by pitting the “peace-seeking” U.S. against “warmongering” Europe, even though the only warmonger in this equation is Vladimir Putin.

Maria Popova is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. With Oxana Shevel, she recently published a book titled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States.