Zelensky’s attempt to get Trump on his side falls flat

Now, it appears the deck has always been stacked against him.

Zelensky agreed to an unconditional cease-fire proposed by the U.S. leader, signed up to a minerals deal that the White House had pushed as a condition for further support, and flew to Turkey for talks called for by Russian President Vladimir Putin—all while gently urging Trump to pressure Russia to agree to the truce.

Three months later, that approach has brought him next to nothing. On Monday, after a two-hour call with Putin, Trump again pivoted to the Russian president’s sequencing toward ending the war: negotiations before a cease-fire. And he signaled the U.S. could walk away if the two sides didn’t reach an agreement.

When Putin refused to sign on to a 30-day cease-fire on Monday, Trump didn’t impose further sanctions on Russia, as he has threatened to do, but instead said Russia and Ukraine should carry on negotiations among themselves.

Ukrainian officials met the continued lack of pressure on Putin wearily on Tuesday. After speaking with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Zelensky called for more sanctions on Moscow to coerce the Kremlin to end its three-year invasion.

“It is obvious that Russia is trying to buy time in order to continue its war and occupation," he said. “We are working with our partners to ensure that pressure forces Russians to change their behavior."

Trump’s willingness to tolerate Putin’s prevarication over a cease-fire contrasts with his explosive reaction to Zelensky’s wariness in February over Russian intentions. In the Oval Office, Trump assailed Zelensky and accused him of not supporting U.S. diplomacy or wanting a cease-fire.

“I want a cease-fire," Trump told the Ukrainian president. “Because you’ll get a cease-fire faster than an agreement."

“Of course we want to stop the war," Zelensky said.

Zelensky’s willingness to comply with Trump’s demands after the meeting won him a sit-down with the U.S. leader at the Vatican in late April, where the two appeared to make up. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently," Trump said after that meeting referring to Putin.

Now, Trump appears to have endorsed Putin’s approach that a cease-fire can only be agreed to if Ukraine agrees to Russian conditions, which boil down to leaving Ukraine as a vassal Russian state.

“Unfortunately, following the Trump-Putin phone call, the status quo has not changed," Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on X.

Podolyak said that Trump’s mistake is to assume that Russia is capable of negotiating and willing to end the war for the sake of strategic or business interests. Meanwhile, Russia’s position, he said, is unchanged.

Putin says he is open to ending the war, but he has repeatedly declined to endorse the 30-day cease-fire agreed to by Kyiv in March. He has insisted that a litany of complex issues must be resolved before any such pause in fighting can take effect. Those include a mechanism for enforcing such a cease-fire and a commitment from Ukraine not to use it as a window to bolster its forces. Russia has made no such commitments.

Before any peace deal can be discussed, Putin said the two sides must address what he describes as the “root causes" of the war. Russia set those out in a draft treaty drawn up with Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul in April 2022, weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion. Putin has cited the terms of that treaty as a basis for current negotiations.

The Russian document envisioned a postwar Ukraine that is a disarmed, permanently neutral state, unaligned with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or any other military blocs. Putin wants to reverse policies that have sidelined Russian cultural influence in Ukraine. And he wants to keep at least the 18% of Ukrainian territory Russia already controls, an area equivalent to Virginia in size.

“Russia’s position is clear: The main thing is to remove the root causes of this crisis," Putin said in comments after the call with Trump on Monday. He didn’t say the two sides had made progress in reaching an agreement, but voiced optimism that a memorandum could soon be drafted that commits them to working on one.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said Putin is comfortable with his negotiators sitting down with the Ukrainian side in coming weeks because he knows the Russian side is resolute in its demands.

The Kremlin on Monday said that Putin had discussed with Trump a possible meeting between the Russian president and Zelensky, but it said there was no timeline for talks and that they would take as long as necessary. It said no location had yet been set for further talks between Kyiv and Moscow.

The vague memorandum Putin called for on Monday, Stanovaya said, is a way of offering Trump something that the U.S. president can claim as a Russian concession, even if it is little more than an agreement to keep talking.

Russia can use this memorandum to push through clauses on a cessation of Western military aid to Ukraine and to codify other demands it has before any cease-fire—including a new insistence on securing Kyiv’s withdrawal from the four Ukrainian regions Russia partially occupies.

“Putin will now try to push the Ukrainians to endorse an ‘Istanbul 2’ agreement," said Stanovaya, referring to the 2022 terms pushed by Russia, plus the territories. “If that doesn’t work, he can always say it was the Ukrainians who didn’t want peace."

Stanovaya said that the U.S.’s potential withdrawal from the process is an acceptable outcome for Putin, who is focused on wringing as many concessions out of Ukraine as possible.

The Kremlin leader conceives the Ukraine war as a chance to right what he sees as historical injustices that go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and an opportunity to roll back Western influence across Eastern Europe. As such, he is unlikely to settle for an interim deal that fails to address his maximalist demands.

“Putin will be fighting for Ukraine by any means until his death," Stanovaya said. “He’s absolutely obsessed. He believes that if Russia doesn’t get what it wants in Ukraine, then it faces its own possible destruction. And one way or another, he believes he will get what he wants."

Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com and Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com