Three years into his war on Ukraine, what does Putin really want?
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What a difference a week can make. One week, President Trump is feeling good about a ceasefire in Ukraine. It's a terrible situation going on over there. 5,000 young people every single week are being killed. So hopefully we did something. Then? We're going to find out whether or not

He's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a little bit differently. Those comments came amid Russia's massive aerial attacks on Ukraine, the largest since the start of the war. At least 12 people were killed and dozens more injured. And President Trump, who has long championed his relationship with Putin, has made it clear he is not pleased. I'm not happy with what Putin's doing. He's killing a lot of people. And I don't know what the hell happened to Putin. I've known him a long time.

Always gotten along with him. But he's sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don't like it at all. The Kremlin has proposed a second round of ceasefire talks in Istanbul, but some experts don't believe Putin is serious. It doesn't strike me as genuine. William Taylor was the ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He spoke to Michelle Martin on Morning Edition this past week. If President Trump allows President Putin to outplay him,

to continue to step him along, as President Trump has said. And if President Putin kind of wins this game that he seems to be playing, just stringing him along, then that will be a major defeat for the United States, a major defeat for international security, but a major defeat for President Trump. Consider this. President Trump wants to make a deal with Vladimir Putin. Other Western powers want to rally around Ukraine. Three years into this war on Ukraine, what does Putin want? ♪

From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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It's Consider This from NPR. What does Russian President Vladimir Putin want? It is a question leaders around the world are trying to figure out. He's talking to President Donald Trump about peace talks, but also ordering the most widespread and violent aerial attacks against Ukraine in years. That and other things have led Trump to criticize Putin more and more in public, a step that has been rare over the course of Trump's two terms in office.

To sort this out ahead of the latest round of potential peace talks, we called up an expert, Angela Stent. She studied Putin and Russia extensively. She's a professor emeritus at Georgetown University and author of the book Putin's World, Russia Against the West and With the Rest. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be on your show. Let's go back to 2014 here at first and that initial invasion of Crimea. What were Vladimir Putin's goals then and how have they changed over the years?

So his goals then were certainly to take back Crimea. He claimed it was because he was concerned about, quote unquote, NATO ships appearing in Crimea. Even though NATO in 2008 had said that one day Ukraine would join, it had made absolutely no progress in doing that. So it was to take over Crimea and then destabilize Ukraine. And then, of course, we get the full-scale invasion of

And as that war has continued and become this strange mix of an old-fashioned trench war and a futuristic drone war, we are continuing to try to figure out what Putin wants out of this. What do you think here in 2025 he's after? Is this all about NATO and NATO borders? Yeah.

No, that's just a subterfuge. I mean, he didn't object to NATO enlargement when it happened in 2004. He doesn't like NATO because if Ukraine were in NATO, Russia couldn't control it. And he wants to be able to control and absorb Ukraine. So what he's after is he still thinks he can win the war. He wants a Ukraine that's smaller, that's weaker, that's demilitarized.

that will have to promise never to join NATO, and he wants regime change. He wants President Zelensky to go, and they would prefer to have someone in power in Kiev that's more pro-Russian. But given what's happened in Ukraine in the last three years, that's going to be impossible to find. So when he is insisting that as part of any agreement, NATO, Ukraine does not join NATO at any point ever, that that's walled off forever. That's more about Ukraine than NATO to you. Yeah.

It's much more about Ukraine. But, of course, we know now the Trump administration has said they will not agree to Ukraine joining NATO as long as they're in office. And the next U.S. administration may say no, too. But the idea that in 2025 you can say that Ukraine will forever be neutral, I mean, that's not very real. This may be true for a number of years, but not in perpetuity, if NATO still exists.

I mean, it seems like you're kind of dismissing a lot of a lot of the things that Putin at least, again, says and says is different than actual view he wants out of this war. Despite President Trump's scolding on social media in recent weeks, he still seems to, by and large, support a lot of Russia's end goals suddenly. What is the strongest card that Ukraine has at this point? Or is Russia in a position to really dictate the endgame of this war at this point?

Well, it's not in a position to dictate the endgame, but Ukraine is in a weaker position in as much as the United States is now not supporting Ukraine as the previous administration did. But the Europeans are stepping up. I mean, it'll take a lot more, but they do support Ukraine, and they believe that if Russia wins this war, then Ukraine

Europe itself will be threatened and the likelihood of a wider war is there. So I think that's what they're trying to do. And you said in the beginning, this is on the one hand, very old fashioned trench warfare, but it's also very 21st century electronic warfare, cyber warfare, things like that. And the Ukrainians are getting pretty good. They're building their own drones. They're getting help with electronic warfare. So they may going forward be able to push the Russians back more than they are at the moment.

What do you think Putin wants out of the United States? So there are two sets of negotiations going on. What Putin wants from the United States is the bilateral reset. I mean, President Trump has offered him something that no U.S. president really, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has. They all tried resets, but they failed. But President Trump is saying we can have a fantastic economic relationship. We can end your isolation from the West.

You can come back to all of these global fora. So, and we will lift the sanctions. So those are the things that Putin wants. And I think he still believes he may be able to get this without making any real concessions on the Ukraine war, but stringing this along and having perpetual negotiations. There will be some more negotiations on Monday, uh,

Let's see what happens there. The Russians have been very evasive about what it is they're going to present. But that's what he wants. He wants the reestablishment of U.S.-Russian relations in a way that they haven't been since the 90s. And stringing along, or as Trump memorably put it on social media, tapping him along. Does that benefit Russia at this point to you?

So I think the Russians are a little perplexed now because if you look at some of the sort of propagandists in the media, they're now criticizing President Trump for being emotional, for being volatile and things like that. So they're concerned about what's happening. And that's why they keep dangling things like, okay, let's sit down and negotiate to prevent him from in fact –

either imposing sanctions, and there's a very tough sanctions bill in Congress. Senator Graham and Senator Blumenthal were in Kiev on Friday promising that, you know, if Russia didn't improve its conduct in these negotiations, that sanctions bill would be imposed. They don't want that sanctions bill. So they're trying to prevent that.

We've talked about sanctions a few times. What's the best way to think about sanctions from your point of view? Have they worked? Have they weakened Russia? Because this is, what, three years in of sanctions, and the war is continuing at the same pace it always has. Well, they certainly haven't worked if they were supposed to change Putin's calculus. They have imposed costs on the Russian economy, but actually the most severe costs are happening now with low oil prices.

And if the low oil prices continue and Russia's, you know, major revenue is from the sale of hydrocarbons, that would be much more serious. The problem is that there's been huge sanctions evasion. So part of this Senate bill that might be passed next week, it's veto proof, I think it has 81 members supporting it, would be to punish Ukraine.

that are still trading and buying Russian oil and to punish the people who helped the sanctions evasion. But that's all – it's very tricky, and that's the reason really why they haven't worked the way they were supposed to is because so many countries are helping Russia evade them. And do you think an extended round like we're talking about, do you think that would change it, or do you think it's still there's a cost but there's a workaround? Yeah.

I mean, I think it would impose more costs on Russia, but I'm not sure that it would persuade Putin that he has to end the war. What would persuade him much more would be if the Trump administration were willing to give more support, financial support to Ukraine, and to sell it the weapons it desperately needs, like the Patriot batteries for their air defense. I think that's, if Russia really thought that it was being challenged more on the battlefield, I think that could change Putin's calculus. So that's what matters from the U.S. much more than whatever Trump posts.

I think so, yeah. That would be, yeah. I mean, whatever he posts, and of course he's criticized Putin, but if there's no action, it doesn't really have any consequences. Like you said, peace talks are allegedly supposed to resume in Istanbul this upcoming week. Whether it's this round or the next round, what are the big questions you have? What will you be looking for to get a sense of whether Russia is serious in any way about these talks? Yeah.

Well, I'd be looking at what are the Russian demands? Are they changing or are they still the maximum demands? They were supposed to present their memorandum of terms before the meeting. That hasn't happened. The Ukrainians, in fact, have presented theirs. So it's whether Russia is willing to make any modification to its maximum demands. And then, of course, whether the Ukrainians are willing to do that too, because obviously they've rejected the

most of what Russia has suggested, although it's quite possible that Ukraine might accept some kind of a territorial compromise for the moment, but as long as they can continue to control those areas in the four so-called annexed territories that Ukraine, in fact, still controls. From the American point of view, many presidents have tried

wildly different approaches with Vladimir Putin over the last two decades. None of them seem to have really worked. Why do you think it's been so hard for any American president to rein in Vladimir Putin? Because what Putin wants is a recognition by the United States that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence, both in the post-Soviet space, but now in the former Warsaw Pact countries. In December of 21, two treaties were presented to the U.S. and

to NATO in the run-up to the war. And they essentially demanded that NATO return to the borders it had before the first enlargement when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined. And that's what Putin has always wanted. He wanted, in the words of one Russian expert, an equal partnership of unequals, and he hasn't gotten that.

Angela Stent is a professor emeritus at Georgetown and author of the book Putin's World, Russia Against the West and With the Rest. Thank you for taking the time with us today. Thank you. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by John Ketchum and Sarah Robbins. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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