How Russia’s Tactics Give Them an Advantage in U.S.-led Peace Talks

​Ukraine thought it had a deal in place to suspend the fighting in the Black Sea immediately. Russia said economic sanctions would need be lifted first. And the United States didn’t address the question of timing at all, merely repeating President Trump’s broad demand that the killing stop.

The conflicting statements released this week after midlevel cease-fire negotiations in Saudi Arabia were the latest sign of a chaotic process in which, analysts and experts said, the Kremlin appears to be playing for time and getting the upper hand.

The Trump administration has set out to secure a series of limited cease-fire deals, arguing that the modest agreements will pave the way for a broader truce and eventually a peace deal to end the conflict. But so far, these incremental deals have largely been a way for Russia to win concessions from Ukraine and good will from a White House eager to seen as the peacemaker.

On Tuesday, Moscow said it would agree to the Black Sea truce only if sanctions on its state agriculture bank, Rosselkhozbank, and other restrictions were lifted. If Washington agrees to those terms and pressures European allies to do the same, the proposed Black Sea deal would benefit Moscow more than Kyiv, experts said.

The Black Sea negotiations followed another limited agreement brokered by Washington: a 30-day halt in strikes by Russia and Ukraine against energy targets. That deal also benefits Moscow, given the extensive damage Ukrainian strikes have inflicted on oil and gas installations across Russia, and it came with no clear enforcement mechanism. Both sides quickly accused each other of continuing such strikes.

And earlier this month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia effectively rejected a proposal for an overall 30-day cease-fire brokered by Washington and Kyiv. Mr. Putin set out conditions, including a freeze on Ukrainian personnel recruitment, military training and arms imports, that would have made Kyiv particularly vulnerable were fighting to resume.

“It seems clear that the Russians are stalling, and they are very good at that,” said Daniel Fried, a former top U.S. diplomat and fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, who has negotiated with the Russians in the past. “The Russians are drawing this out and loading it with conditions to send us down a rabbit hole of complexity.”

Mr. Trump on Tuesday acknowledged the Russian tactic without criticism. He thinks Moscow wants to see an end to the war, he said, “but it could be that they’re dragging their feet.”

He then recalled taking the same approach himself in business negotiations in the past, when he didn’t want to sign a contract but wanted to “sort of stay in the game.”

For Russia, staying in the talks has meant raising a series of demands, however unlikely some of them are to be met. Russia framed the proposed Black Sea deal as a way to revive a 2022 U.N.-backed deal that gave it some control over commercial shipping through the sea.

That deal allowed Ukraine to export its grain through an agreed-upon shipping corridor, but also permitted Russia to inspect all commercial ships to ensure they did not carry weapons. Experts say Russia exploited that provision to stall Ukrainian seaborne exports.

After the deal collapsed in 2023, Ukraine successfully pushed the Russian Navy out of the western Black Sea to secure its own shipping corridor. The operation was so successful that seaborne grain exports returned to near-prewar levelsabove the levels reached during the time of the U.N.-backed deal.

Against that backdrop, Kyiv has no interest in acceding to Moscow’s demands, experts say. Mr. Fried noted that for a Black Sea deal to be seen as balanced, it would need to include a clear benefit to Kyiv, such as a commitment by the Russians to halt attacks on the southern port of Odesa or on all Ukrainian agriculture export facilities.

The White House did not explicitly refer to such a commitment in its statements on Tuesday, which referred only to the elimination of “the use of force” in the Black Sea.

The conditions set out by the Kremlin on Tuesday introduced the possibility of the United States lifting sanctions as a precondition to Russian action. Mr. Fried said he saw no substantive concession on the Russian side that would merit such a step.

“The Russians have managed to put this on the agenda, which means they have injected sanctions lifting as part of the early negotiating process,” Mr. Fried said. “Why is it in our interest to do that? What is the reciprocal move we are going to get from the Russians?”

Mr. Trump has threatened Russia with consequences if it doesn’t pursue peace, but his administration so far hasn’t followed through. It has instead accepted and repeated Mr. Putin’s statements about wanting to end the conflict and talking up the possibilities of a renewed era of cooperation with Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Tuesday that Moscow’s conditions on the Black Sea deal were further evidence of the Kremlin seeking more concessions while deceiving the United States about its real intentions.

Mr. Putin has shown few signs of backing off his aim to subdue Ukraine as a satellite nation under Russia’s thumb. He has regularly said that Russian forces are on the front foot on the battlefield and that a cease-fire would only benefit Kyiv. He does, however, want to continue the Trump administration’s rapid rapprochement with Moscow, pointing to joint economic projects that Russia and the United States could pursue.

The conditions Moscow set on the Black Sea agreement have little chance of being met anytime soon. They included a demand to reconnect the Russian state agriculture bank to the international payment system known as Swift. That would require the cooperation of European countries that have been cut out of the talks.

Alexander Kolyandr, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said removing sanctions from the bank would bring significant benefit to Moscow.

“They definitely want a large state-owned bank outside of the sanctions, because the moment you have a financially kosher bank, you can do whatever you want,” he said. “They can clear transactions; they can move money between countries; they can pay for imports in dollars, which is always cheaper; and they can receive dollars for their exports.”

Even if Moscow, Washington and Kyiv resolve the differences in their statements on the Black Sea deal, the discussed cease-fire would do little more than enshrine the status quo, said Andrey Sizov, director of Sovecon, an agriculture market analysis firm.

Mr. Sizov noted that Ukraine has been exporting grain successfully through the Black Sea since late 2023, and Russia has been exporting both oil and grain, even though restrictions have made the activity more expensive for Moscow. He sees the current talks as a formalization of the existing arrangement.

“It’s not a step ahead,” he said. “In my view, it shows that progress toward a full truce, toward a full cease-fire, is quite limited, if any.”

Constant meheut contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.