Can Trump Really Negotiate Peace in Ukraine, Russians Wonder

Many Russians cheered President Trump’s election because they thought he could make a deal for a negotiated peace in Ukraine that would satisfy the Kremlin.

Three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the disappointment in Moscow is palpable.

In interviews, people in the Kremlin’s orbit have revealed frustration both with Mr. Trump’s whirlwind approach to the talks and with President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparent inflexibility in the negotiations. With Mr. Trump and his top diplomat warning on Friday that the United States could walk away from the discussion, some of them fear that a collapse in talks could lead to a further escalation of the fighting.

Movement toward peace is going “much more slowly than it should be, and not the way one would want it to be,” said Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a liberal politician in Moscow who held a rare meeting with Mr. Putin in 2023 to urge a cease-fire. In the meantime, he said, Mr. Putin “is just fighting, he’s seizing the moment. He wants to achieve the maximum before substantive talks.”

The question now is whether Mr. Putin climbs down from demands that seem little changed from the cease-fire conditions he outlined last summer, when he said Ukraine would have to agree not to join NATO and also withdraw from a large swath of territory before Russia stopped fighting.

For now, the increasingly blunt warnings from Mr. Trump and his lieutenants that they could run out of patience have had little effect. Mr. Putin has not budged from his rejection of a monthlong cease-fire that Ukraine agreed to in March.

Given Mr. Trump’s lack of sympathy for Ukraine and his deepening conflict with American allies, Mr. Putin only appears to be gaining in confidence that Russia can eventually defeat Ukraine in a war of attrition. The Kremlin is dangling the possibility of lucrative American business deals in Russia in the hopes of appealing to Mr. Trump no matter what happens on the battlefield.