(WASHINGTON) -- Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are expected to speak on Tuesday as the White House continues its campaign for a ceasefire and eventual peace deal to end Russia's devastating war on Ukraine.
"It's a bad situation in Russia, and it's a bad situation in Ukraine," Trump said on Monday. "What's happening in Ukraine is not good, but we're going to see if we can work a peace agreement, a ceasefire and peace, and I think we'll be able to do it."
Since Trump's return to the White House in January, his new administration has sought to bring an end to Russia's war by berating and pressuring Kyiv. Trump has repeatedly said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zeleneskyy "does not have the cards" to come out on top of the negotiations.
Meanwhile, Moscow has been offered normalization and hinting at territorial gains and sanctions relief.
Thus far, the carrot has been for Russia and the stick for Ukraine.
There remains only a slight indication of what concessions Trump is seeking from Russia. "When we talk about leverage, it suggests that he wants to use this leverage to get some concessions from Russia," Oleg Ignatov, the International Crisis Group think tank's senior Russia analysts, told ABC News.
"But is he really interested in serious concessions from Russia or not?"
Does Trump have 'the cards'?
The president has hinted at ramping up pressure on the Kremlin if it fails to commit to peace talks. "There are things you could do that wouldn't be pleasant in a financial sense," he said last week.
"I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia," Trump added. "I don't want to do that because I want to get peace."
Earlier this month, Trump wrote on Truth Social, "I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS REACHED."
The implementation of tariffs -- a cornerstone of Trumpian foreign and economic policy -- would be only a symbolic measure, given that Russian exports to the U.S. have fallen to their lowest level since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In a possible preview of things to come, the White House has already expanded the unprecedented sanctions campaign kicked off by former President Joe Biden in 2022.
This month, the administration said Russians were among 43 nationalities being considered for travel bans. It also allowed to lapse a sanctions exemption allowing Russian banks to use U.S. payment systems for energy transactions.
Trump may seek to further tighten the screws on Russia's economy, in which inflation is rising and dollars are increasingly difficult and expensive to access.
"What the U.S. can do is put even more pressure on the Russian financing sector, increasing the sanctions against banks that that basically also have a stake in the oil and gas sector in order to compromise the financial sustainability of the Russian Federation and make it basically unsustainable for Russia to continue the war," Federico Borsari of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank told ABC News.
The U.S. may also seek further action to identify and penalize vessels in Russia's so-called "shadow fleet," by which Moscow has been able to continue exporting its fossil fuels and avoid sanctions, Borsari added.
Still, Russia has shown an ability to adapt to and skirt sanctions, even if the measures have undermined the national economy. The impact of new sanctions may not be immediate enough to force Putin to the negotiating table, Ignatov said.
Seeking to further curtail Russia's energy exports or expanding secondary sanctions -- meaning measures against those still doing business with sanctioned entities -- may also bring the U.S. into conflict with key Russian customers like China and India.
"There is no magic bullet in terms of sanctions," Ignatov said.
Putin's hand
Trump has praised Putin's supposed readiness for peace, instead framing Ukraine and Zelenskyy as the main impediments to a deal. Still, Moscow has shown no sign of downgrading its war goals, which still include the annexation of swaths of its neighbor, the "demilitarization" of Ukraine and its permanent exclusion from NATO.
Putin was non-committal to last week's U.S.-Ukraine proposal of a 30-day ceasefire. Moscow is "for" the pause, the president said, but framed any pause as a military benefit for Kyiv and said several difficult conditions would need to be fulfilled before the Kremlin would give its full support.
Russia "needs" a pause in the fighting to reform its own shattered military, Pavel Luzin -- a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy -- told ABC News. "But at the same time, Russia does not have desirable conditions on the battlefield."
"What Russia has been trying to do since the fall of 2022 is defeat a big group of Ukrainian forces as a pre-condition for negotiations about a break," he added. "Russia wanted to demoralize the Ukrainian leadership and society. After two-and-a-half years, Russia was not successful."
Ignatov said Moscow's recent engagement with the Trump administration does suggest an appetite for some kind of deal.
"I think both Russia and the U.S. are looking at this negotiation seriously," he said. "It doesn't mean that both sides are thinking about any good deal for Ukraine, but I think that both sides want to finish this conflict."
The Russians, he added, "want to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump, because they really value this process of normalization. I think what they tried to do is to decouple Ukraine from the normalization of the other issues. Even if they don't succeed on Ukraine, they want to continue to work on other issues."
Still, Moscow is "not ready to sacrifice their interests" in Ukraine, Ignatov continued. "They are not ready to make very big concessions -- serious concessions, to leave territories or something like this."
Opportunity, crisis for Ukraine
Trump's radical pivot away from Ukraine in the opening months of his second term left Kyiv and its other foreign partners reeling. Though the pause to U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing was brief, it rattled leaders and commanders in Kyiv.
"We consider this turbulence to be part of negotiations, which I think was quite often used by Trump in his past when he was in business," Yehor Cherniev -- a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and the chairman of his country's delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly -- told ABC News. "So, we understand."
Trump's inherent unpredictability has given Ukrainians hope that his interactions with Putin may not necessarily play in Russia's favor.
"Trump should say directly: 'Vladimir, if you don't agree unconditionally to my proposal then I'll have to make a deal with a new leader of Russia instead of you,'" Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chair of the body's foreign affairs committee, told ABC News. "If he tried it with Zelenskyy, then why not with Putin?"
A threat to expand American military aid to Ukraine could give such coercion bite, analysts and Ukrainian lawmakers who spoke with ABC News said.
Lifting restrictions on U.S. weapon use inside Russia, requesting more military aid funding from Congress, replenishing supplies of long-range ATACMS missiles and delivering new long-range strike weapons like the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile could all underscore the U.S. demand for Russia to negotiate.
But such steps would run counter to Trump's repeated statements that the war must end as soon as possible -- with or without American involvement.
"I'm not sure if he has any desire to escalate the war, because he's the 'peace president,'" Ignatov said, noting that any request for more funding from Congress could also touch off unwelcome domestic political disputes.
"He's said that if we are not able to succeed, the U.S. will be out of the war," Ignatov added. "So, it means that he is not going to escalate."
It remains to be seen if Trump's ambition for a deal will be enough to overcome the decades-long complexity of Russia's aggression against its "brotherly nation," as Putin was still describing Ukraine months into the 2022 full-scale invasion.
"The Russians have quite clearly showed already that they are not ready," Cherniev said. "Now there are not so many options for Trump's administration."
"Trump wants to be a peacemaker," he added. "If he just leaves these negotiations, that will mean that Putin wins. And I doubt that Trump will allow Putin to win."
Trump's turn against Ukraine begun to erode the trust built up by decades of American backing. But for now, at least, some hope remains.
The president "might" ultimately side with Moscow, Merezhko said. "But that goes against American values -- Americans and public opinion in the U.S. have always been on the side of the underdogs."
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