Putin plays the long game - but will it persuade Trump to go in to bat for Ukraine?

Putin appeared to be walking a fine line between avoiding a rebuff of Trump's peace initiative and imposing his own conditions

- Pjotr Sauer

or once, the US president and European leaders were on the same page. Grasping for a familiar metaphor, a chorus of western heads of state declared this week that "the ball was in Russia's court" after Ukraine agreed in talks with the US to a 30-day ceasefire.

Rather than making a play, Vladimir Putin picked up the ball, scrawled a fresh set of conditions across it, and lobbed it back - insisting the game could not progress until the other side played by his rules.

"The idea itself is the right one, and we definitely support it," Putin said, sitting with longtime ally Alexander Lukashenko at a press conference in the Kremlin.

It was the "but" that followed that did all the heavy lifting.

"There are questions that we need to discuss, and I think we need to talk them through with our American colleagues and partner," he added, suggesting that Ukraine should neither rearm nor mobilise and that western military aid to Kyiv be halted during the ceasefire. Meanwhile, the message was clear: Russia had no intention of halting its own rearmament. Ukraine fears that Putin is preparing to do exactly what he accuses Kyiv of: exploiting the ceasefire to rearm and intensify his offensive if talks fall apart, as Russian forces press their advantage on the ground.

Over the past month, the geopolitical landscape has shifted dramatically in favour of the Russian leader, as Donald Trump reshaped US foreign policy to Moscow's advantage while straining relations with allies.