Yes, but. That is President Putin’s response, delivered yesterday, to the Trump Administration’s 30-day ceasefire approved Tuesday by Ukraine. In a delicate balancing act, Russia’s leader seeks to preserve his relationship with the American president — while he sets the stage for drawn out talks that could lead nowhere.

“We agree with the proposals to cease hostilities,” Mr.Putin told reporters yesterday at a news conference at the Kremlin. “The idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it. But we proceed from the fact that this cessation should be such that it would lead to long-term peace and would eliminate the original causes of this crisis.” 

In the past, “eliminating the original causes” has been a code phrase for Ukraine’s capitulation. Ukraine’s nearly million-man army would be reduced to a lightly armed 50,000-man national guard. Foreign military aid would be banned. Foreign peacekeepers would be banned.

President Trump is using carrots and sticks to move Russia in the direction of accepting a ceasefire. For carrots, American business executives are talking about restoring Russian oil and gas flows to Europe. On the stick side, the Trump Administration yesterday allowed the expiration of a loophole that had permitted banking transactions for Russian exports.

“Now we’re going to see whether or not Russia is there, and if they’re not, it will be a very disappointing moment for the world,” Mr. Trump told White House reporters yesterday. “In a financial sense, we could do things [that are] very bad for Russia. It would be devastating for Russia. But I don’t want to do that because I want to see peace.”

The core obstacle seems to be that Mr. Putin and his entourage seem to believe they are winning the three-year-old war. This conviction is strengthened this week by the slow motion collapse of Ukraine’s occupation of a small part of Russia’s Kursk region.

“In Russia, a consensus has emerged in the militaristic segment of the elite and society that Ukraine cannot hold out for much longer,” Russian exile journalist Alexander Baunov writes in an essay issued yesterday by the Carnegie Endowment. “Stopping the campaign now will be perceived as giving up an inevitable victory.”

“Putin himself has said repeatedly—including recently—that Russia was only a few months short of victory in World War I when the Bolshevik government withdrew the country from the war on disastrous terms,” he continued in the essay, titled: “What Incentives Are There for Russia to Agree to a Ceasefire in Ukraine?”

Many Ukrainians recall that Mr. Putin tried to install a pro-Russian president in Ukraine in 2004,  carried out a limited invasion in 2014, and then carried out a full scale invasion in 2022.

“[Ukrainians] are convinced Putin will never be satisfied with limited territorial gains because he is not actually fighting for land in Ukraine,” a researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, Mykola Bielieskov, writes for the Atlantic Council from Kyiv. “Instead, he is waging a war against the very existence of a separate Ukrainian state and nation.” 

The only upside to Russian stonewalling, Ukrainians say, could be spreading recognition inside the Trump Administration that the Russian government does not really want peace.

“In Moscow they are imposing upon these conditions on the idea of a ceasefire, so that nothing happens at all, or so that it cannot happen for as long as possible,” Mr. Zelensky said last night in his regular video address. “Putin is of course scared to tell President Trump that he wants to continue this war, that he wants to kill Ukrainians.”

Faced with Russian intransigeance, President Trump may decide the  path of least resistance would be  to adopt Russia’s talking points and blame Ukraine. However, this would come at a political cost.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday 56 percent of the 1,422 American adults polled agreed with the statement that Mr. Trump is “too close” to Moscow. Of Republicans, 27 percent agreed. Of Democrats, it was 89 percent.

Mr. Trump is hoping that his longtime friend Steve Witkoff can bring Mr. Putin around in talks today and tomorrow in Moscow. Kremlin officials may assert that the war is trending in their direction, but Mr. Witkoff undoubtedly spied yesterday afternoon a unique scene as his motorcade sped to his hotel from Vnukovo airport.

A thick column of black smoke billowed from a Mosenergo plant that provides heat and power to 1.5 million people in western Moscow. The fire was the fruit of a Ukrainian long distance bombing raid that hit an oil pumping station in Krasnodar, and a gas compressor station in Tambov.