Head-on | Putin and Trump play out the Queen’s Gambit in Ukraine

United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. Will the two leaders find a way to end the debilitating conflict now in its fourth year?

Trump responded aboard Air Force One on his way to Washington: “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

A division of land and assets, including power plants, could be on the agenda in the Trump-Putin call. Putin will be a hard nut to crack for Trump. He will use a chess Grandmaster’s tactic of the Queen’s Gambit to checkmate Ukraine while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his European allies seethe on the sidelines.

Russia wants a permanent solution to the conflict, not a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine could use to regroup and rearm with US and European weaponry.

Moscow also wants to highlight the root cause of the conflict. The provocation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lay at several inflection points between 1989 and 2022.

In 1989, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to demolish the Berlin Wall and reunify West Germany with East Germany.

In 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev received the following pledge from US President George H. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker III: once the Soviet Union is dissolved, and the Warsaw Pact Powers abolished, NATO will not move “an inch eastwards” from West Germany.

That promise was broken almost immediately.

Within years of taking office as US president in January 1993, Bill Clinton began planning NATO’s future expansion. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary became NATO members in 1999.

Between 2001 and 2009, under President George W. Bush, nine more countries were admitted to NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Albania and Croatia.

In order to placate Russia while planning NATO’s expansion, the West in 1997 made Moscow a member of the exclusive G7 club, renamed the G8 to include Russia. Putin, who took office as Russian President in 1999, saw through the artifice but played along, hoping that NATO’s eastwards expansion would now stop.

It didn’t. By 2009, NATO had doubled from 16 members in 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, to 32 members in 2025. Two countries (Finland and Sweden) joined NATO during the current Russia-Ukraine war, taking Western missiles to the doorstep of Russia.

Putin had warned Western political and military leaders at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO expansion was provocative and unacceptable. Russia, he said, would respond.

The West, confident in the status of the US as the world’s sole superpower, ignored Putin’s 2007 Munich warning. It had helped dismember Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Without authorisation of a UNSC resolution, NATO bombed Serbia for 78 continuous days in 1999. The US and the UK invaded Iraq, again without UNSC authorisation, on the false pretext that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In February 2014, the US organised a CIA-led coup in Ukraine to overthrow pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin had by now seen enough. He annexed Crimea in March 2014 and sent troops into ethnic Russian-majority eastern Ukraine a month later.

‘Not one inch eastwards’

For over 30 years, from the 1990s to the 2020s, NATO expanded not just “one inch eastwards” but thousands of miles eastwards, brazenly breaking the solemn pledge President Bush (senior) and James Baker III had given President Gorbachev.

It was this betrayal that brought NATO to the doorstep of Russia. By 2022 only Ukraine remained a buffer.

Had Russia placed ICBMs in South and Central America gradually over 20 years, from Chile and Venezuela to Colombia and Guatemala, the US would have created a second Cuban Missile crisis before the Russian missiles had even reached their silos.

President Trump, unlike President Joe Biden, has publicly acknowledged that NATO’s eastwards expansion is the root cause of the conflict in Ukraine. He has, unlike Biden, publicly ruled out Ukraine’s future membership of NATO.

To agree to a truce, however, Russia will seek the following:

One, freezing the Ukrainian battlefield with 20 per cent of the territory Russia holds in eastern Ukraine to remain a permanent Russian buffer zone.

Two, a formal treaty with the West that bars Ukraine from NATO membership.

Three, a permanent truce, not a 30-day ceasefire that helps Ukraine regroup and rearm.

Four, an end to the supply of Western weaponry to Ukraine.

Five, a fair division of land and assets.

For Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, these conditions are deal-breakers. He has the backing of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. But neither Britain nor France has the army to fight Russia without America. The British army, for example, is down to 74,000 soldiers. That’s less than the number of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed every year in the three-year war.

Zelenskyy had agreed to a ceasefire three years ago at a meeting in Istanbul in March 2022, within a month of the Russian invasion. But President Biden rushed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kyiv to urge Zelenskyy to fight on. The idea was to weaken Russia militarily on the battlefield and economically with sanctions. That would complete the West’s agenda to end Russia’s great power status.

The last time America intervened to stop Britain and France from imperial overreach was in 1956 when it stopped the two European powers from militarily seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt.

With the ball now in Trump’s and Putin’s court, Europe’s role may be limited. Putin has rejected European troops as peacekeepers. He will seek UN peacekeepers in a demilitarised buffer zone.

How much of Ukraine’s territory that Russia currently holds remains with it permanently could be the focus of the Trump-Putin talks. Putin is unlikely to surrender an inch.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.