Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing President Donald Trump like a balalaika.
That is how to understand Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s airy announcement Tuesday in Turkey that Putin and Trump have agreed to exchange Americans held in Russian prisons for Russians detained by the United States.
You can hear the soothing tinkle of music intended to lull the U.S. into yet more weeks of inaction while the tyrant in the Kremlin continues on his mission to murder Ukrainian civilians. He launched his largest-ever attack Sunday with explosive drone and cruise missiles. Murder with one hand, swap prisoners with the other.
If the exchange takes place, it will come not by coincidence at a time when, for political and diplomatic reasons, both Putin and Trump need a development that can be presented to the public as a breakthrough and as a possible harbinger of improved relations and peace in Europe.
Trump’s need for progress is rising because his efforts to bring Putin into serious negotiations to end Russia’s imperial war have been getting nowhere, even though he has been back in the White House for more than four months. This is embarrassing for the 47th president because it scoffs at his campaign boast that he would end hostilities on the first day he sat down again in the Oval Office.
It was always a transparent and therefore more-or-less acceptable campaign exaggeration, but it irreducibly implied that Trump’s vaunted negotiating skills could bring good results quickly in a policy area where President Joe Biden muddled and fuddled the flames of war into a raging fire in 2022 and then proved unable to put them out.
If the past is prologue, Putin will secure the release of double agents and murderers for the reciprocal release of Americans detained for petty drug offenses or manufactured espionage allegations. Doing so will, into the bargain, buy Russia more time, weeks or perhaps months, of Trump’s tolerance while Putin’s invaders rampage through Ukraine.
Why does Putin need a sideline deal now? Because over the weekend, Trump began voicing frustration with the Russian president somewhat more intensely than he has in the past. This signaled that his patience might, just might, run out.
Trump bitterly lamented not only the lack of progress in peace negotiations but also a sense of presidential surprise and outrage at the betrayal by his intransigent Russian counterpart. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Trump posted on Truth Social, “but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people … for no reason whatever.” He added to reporters, “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin.”
The truth, however, is that what happened didn’t happen to Putin but to Trump himself. Putin has not changed. What has changed is that it is finally dawning on our president that Putin is who most people have long understood him to be. That is, Putin is not his friend or someone to be admired, but a bloody former KGB officer who has been manipulating Trump.
Unfortunately, there is no sign of the manipulation ending. Indeed, the prisoner swap, though welcome broadly, is a clear sign it will continue. The prisoner swap is intended to lure Trump and the American public opinion on which he depends into a false sense of progress.
Putin has heard Trump at last suggest openness to toughening policy by imposing secondary sanctions on Russian energy sales, notably to China and India. Such a move could bring Putin’s imperial war machine to a juddering halt, draining its sources of funding and crippling the Russian economy.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) are leading a bipartisan group of 82 senators pushing legislation to impose 500% tariffs on nations that buy Russian oil and gas. Trump is musing about approving it, although he clearly would rather not do so.
To head off this threat at least for a while, without making substantive concessions in his war of aggression against Ukraine, Putin has looked for a way of deflecting Trump, and the prisoner swap came readily to hand. The Russian president is determined to take Ukrainian territory and weaken Ukrainian resolve, to gobble up whatever he can while dangling the prospect of a ceasefire and maybe a permanent peace tantalizingly just beyond immediate reach.
Let the prisoner swap go ahead, but let the Senate sanctions bill also proceed without delay. Putin only speaks the language of coercion. The dulcet notes of binding treaties, honorable agreements, international comity, and the vague prospect of improved economic relations float by him unnoticed or as an irritation. The balalaika music is tinkling for Trump. But the man playing it can be made to listen only when the air is filled with much harsher sounds.