US-F-08: The US–Russia Bilateral Under Trump-2 — From the Riyadh Track to the Witkoff Shuttle (2025–2026)

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Document Outline

Key Takeaways — 10–12 paragraph-bullets covering the inheritance question, the 12 February call, the Riyadh framework, the Oval Office breakdown, the aid pause, the partial ceasefire, the Witkoff shuttle, the May calls, the sanctions debate, the strategic-stability vacuum, and the three-account interpretive frame.
The Record in Brief — Why the 2025 US–Russia Bilateral Is a Level-1 Anchor — the scale of the reframing relative to Biden-era isolation; the structural features distinguishing the Trump-2 approach.
Background — The 2022–2024 US–Russia Inheritance: Sanctions Maximalism, Diplomatic Isolation, and the Strategic-Stability Vacuum — from the 24 February 2022 invasion through the Biden administration's "fight for as long as it takes" posture, the New START expiration question, and the late-2024 Trump transition signalling.
The 12 February 2025 Putin–Trump Telephone Call and the Hegseth Brussels / Vance Munich Pair — the call's content per the US and Russian readouts; the parallel 12 February Hegseth NATO speech; the 14 February Vance Munich speech as the rhetorical opening of the new track.
The 18 February 2025 Riyadh Talks — Lavrov, Rubio, Waltz, and the Saudi Host Architecture — the meeting at Diriyah Palace; the negotiating teams; the four-point framework; the Ukraine and European exclusion question; the immediate European reaction.
The 28 February 2025 Oval Office Breakdown with President Zelensky — the lead-up over the minerals-deal negotiation; the live televised confrontation with Trump, Vance, and Zelensky; the three-account interpretation (engineered/organic/Putin-win); the 3–11 March military-aid and intelligence-sharing pause; the 11 March Jeddah recovery.
The 25 March 2025 Partial 30-Day Energy-Infrastructure Ceasefire — Announcement, Implementation Failures, and Collapse — the Riyadh-mediated proposal; the simultaneous Black Sea maritime ceasefire announcement; the immediate Russian violations; the ISW assessment record; the April 2025 abandonment.
The Witkoff Moscow Shuttle (February–May 2025) — The Steve Witkoff Negotiating Approach and the Kellogg Parallel Track — Witkoff's four reported Moscow trips; the Putin-Witkoff personal chemistry reporting; the Kellogg-Ukraine track; the Witkoff–Kushner–Rubio triangulation; the contested-authority question.
April 2025 Kursk Russian Reconquest and the Sumy–Kharkiv Summer Pressure — the Russian operational recovery of the Kursk salient that Ukraine had held since August 2024; the bargaining-position implications; the Sumy and Kharkiv axis pressure from May 2025; the negotiation-track-versus-battlefield dynamics.
The May 2025 Putin–Trump Calls and the Vance Vatican Detour — the 8 May (and/or 19 May) Putin–Trump call(s); the contested two-hour readout; the Vance Vatican meeting with Zelensky during the Pope Francis funeral period; the Istanbul track preview.
The Sanctions-Relief Sequencing Debate and the Graham–Blumenthal Secondary-Sanctions Bill — the question of whether to lift, ease, freeze, or expand sanctions; the Russian-business-coalition / RDIF reactivation push; the European frozen-assets position; the Graham–Blumenthal Sanctioning Russia Act with its 500% secondary-tariff mechanism and 82 co-sponsors.
The Strategic-Stability Vacuum — New START Expiration, INF Legacy, and the Successor-Framework Discussions — the 5 February 2026 New START expiration; the 2019 INF Treaty US withdrawal residue; the 2020 Open Skies withdrawal; the question of a Trump-2 / Putin-5 strategic-stability successor framework.
The Contested Role of European Allies — The Macron–Starmer "Coalition of the Willing" and the European Frozen-Assets Position — the 2 March 2025 London emergency summit; the European reassurance-force proposal; the European Council 6 March emergency conclusions; the question of European leverage on the Trump-2 track.
Domestic US Politics — Congressional Republican Fractures, Rubio's Evolving Position, and the Hill-versus-White-House Tension — the McConnell-aligned Russia-hawk Senate Republicans; the Rubio transition from 2022-era hawk to 2025-era negotiator; the J.D. Vance / Tucker Carlson restraintist axis; the Lindsey Graham anti-Putin hawk position.
Three-Account Interpretive Frame — (a) Realist (Mearsheimer / Kissinger-school) reading; (b) Atlanticist (Hill / Stent) reading; (c) Russian-elite (Trenin / Stanovaya / Kolesnikov) reading. Applied to (i) the Riyadh track's strategic-pragmatism-versus-appeasement question, (ii) the Oval Office breakdown's engineered-versus-organic question, and (iii) the sanctions-relief-sequencing debate.
Conclusion and Forward View — The Post-Riyadh Trajectory and the Open Questions — the Istanbul, Anchorage, and beyond track preview (covered in detail in RU-D-06); the post-2026 reconstruction architecture question; the contested-frozen-assets endgame; the open questions for the 2026 corpus update.
Postscript: June 2025 – August 2026 — Anchorage, the New START Lapse, the Iran-War Interruption, and the Post-Riyadh Track by August 2026 — added Wave 15; the 15 August 2025 Anchorage summit and its non-deliverable; the 5 February 2026 New START expiration; the "Operation Epic Fury" Iran-war interruption; the state of the track and the Zelensky-Witkoff-Kushner framework by August 2026.

1. Key Takeaways

The second Trump administration's reframing of US–Russia relations in 2025 represents the most consequential bilateral pivot of any modern American presidency within the first 100 days. Within four weeks of the 20 January 2025 inauguration — and without the customary interagency review, allied consultation, or strategic-document foundation that conditioned every prior post-Cold-War Russia policy reset (Bush II's 2001 Slovenia summit, Obama's 2009 "reset", Trump-1's 2017 Helsinki sequence, Biden's 2021 Geneva summit) — President Trump conducted a roughly 90-minute telephone call with President Vladimir Putin on 12 February 2025, announced direct US–Russia talks immediately, and opened a six-day window that culminated in the 18 February 2025 Riyadh meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R-FL), National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Russian Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov. Ukraine and the European allies were excluded. The Riyadh meeting ended three years of post-24-February-2022 US–Russia diplomatic isolation and re-categorised the bilateral from adversary-management to deal-making — a shift that the Biden administration's outgoing National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had explicitly warned against in their January 2025 transition memoranda. The structural significance is not whether any particular deliverable emerged in the spring of 2025 (none did, on substance); it is that the relationship's category-of-engagement changed in 35 days.
The 12 February 2025 Putin–Trump telephone call was paired, on the same day, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's NATO speech in Brussels — at which Hegseth declared that Ukraine's return to pre-2014 borders was "an unrealistic objective" and that NATO membership for Ukraine was "not a realistic outcome of any negotiated settlement" — and, two days later, with Vice President JD Vance's 14 February 2025 Munich Security Conference address, in which Vance redirected the customary US Munich speech from external-threat framing (the Biden, Obama, and Trump-1 norm) to a critique of European internal politics on free speech and migration. The pair (Hegseth Brussels / Vance Munich) was widely interpreted in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels as a coordinated signalling exercise: the formal removal of two long-standing US negotiating cards (NATO membership and pre-2014 borders) before any negotiation had formally begun, and the simultaneous reframing of the European allies from indispensable partners to ideological adversaries. The European reaction — including French President Emmanuel Macron's call for an emergency Paris summit on 17 February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's post-23-February election statements [TBD-VERIFY: Merz's coalition-formation timing and his pre-Chancellor statements vs. his post-Chancellor statements], and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's 27 February Washington visit — was historically severe, comparable in tone (though not yet in substance) to the 2003 transatlantic rupture over the Iraq war.
The 18 February 2025 Riyadh talks at Diriyah Palace (with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as host) ran approximately 4.5 hours and produced a four-point framework: (i) re-establishment of full embassy-level diplomatic relations, with reversal of the post-2022 personnel cuts at the US Embassy in Moscow and the Russian Embassy in Washington; (ii) appointment of high-level negotiating teams for the Ukraine war track; (iii) exploration of "geopolitical and economic cooperation" beyond the Ukraine question, including a Russian sounding on Arctic, energy, and rare-earth-mineral joint ventures; and (iv) preparation for a potential Putin–Trump summit (initially floated for spring 2025; ultimately deferred to the 15 August 2025 Anchorage summit covered in RU-D-06). The Riyadh format's most contested feature was its bilateral character: neither President Volodymyr Zelensky nor European Council President António Costa nor European External Action Service High Representative Kaja Kallas was present, consulted, or invited. The Russian-side framing — articulated by Lavrov in his post-meeting press conference and by Ushakov in subsequent television appearances — treated Riyadh as the first US–Russia bilateral summit-prep meeting since the Geneva 2021 Putin–Biden exchange. The US-side framing, particularly as articulated by Rubio and Witkoff in subsequent interviews, presented Riyadh as a "listening exercise" with no binding US commitments. Both framings were defensible from the publicly available readouts; the gap between them was itself the point.
The 28 February 2025 Oval Office breakdown with President Volodymyr Zelensky was the most televised foreign-policy confrontation in the modern history of the American presidency. The meeting — convened to sign the long-negotiated United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Agreement on critical minerals — collapsed in front of pool cameras when Vice President Vance interrupted Zelensky's responses on the question of past Russian ceasefire violations, accusing the Ukrainian president of being "disrespectful" and of failing to express adequate gratitude for US assistance. President Trump escalated, telling Zelensky that "you don't have the cards" and that "you're gambling with World War III." The minerals deal was not signed that day. Zelensky departed the White House without the customary joint press conference. Within 72 hours, on 3 March 2025, the Trump administration announced a pause on all military aid to Ukraine; within an additional 48 hours, the intelligence-sharing pause was added. The aid pause lasted approximately eight days, ending on 11 March 2025 after US–Ukraine talks at Jeddah produced a Ukrainian agreement to a US-proposed 30-day full ceasefire (which Russia did not accept). The three contested accounts of the Oval Office breakdown — whether it was engineered by the Trump team to extract Ukrainian concessions, organic to the rhetorical incompatibility of the three principals, or a Putin strategic win delivered through Trump's anti-Zelensky framing — structure the entire interpretive literature of the spring 2025 negotiation track.
The 25 March 2025 partial 30-day energy-infrastructure ceasefire was the first concrete deliverable from the Riyadh-Witkoff track. Announced via simultaneous Kremlin and White House statements on 25 March 2025 following Witkoff's mid-March Moscow trip, the partial ceasefire purported to halt strikes on energy infrastructure (Russian oil refineries; Ukrainian electricity, gas, and nuclear facilities) and to establish a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea linked to a partial relaxation of Russian agricultural-export sanctions. ISW assessments and Ukrainian Air Force daily reports documented Russian violations of the energy-infrastructure clause within 48 hours of the announcement, including drone strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Sumy oblasts in late March and April 2025. The Ukrainian side reciprocated with continued long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, though Western reporting noted that Ukraine's strikes had largely paused during the announcement window and resumed only after Russian violations. The partial ceasefire was effectively dead by mid-April 2025; the maritime/agricultural-sanctions linkage was never operationalised because Russia conditioned implementation on the reconnection of Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT — a condition the United States could not unilaterally deliver (it requires EU and Belgian action) and the European Union refused to deliver.
The Steve Witkoff Moscow shuttle (February–May 2025) institutionalised the post-Riyadh negotiation track in a manner with no clear modern American precedent. Witkoff — a New York real-estate developer with a multi-decade business and personal relationship with Trump, no prior government service, no Russia regional expertise, and no Russian-language ability — conducted at least four Moscow visits in February, March, April, and May 2025, holding face-to-face meetings with Putin reported by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal at between three and five hours per session. Witkoff operated from the Office of the Special Envoy with no formal interagency clearance chain, no traditional NSC-staff support, and (per multiple reporting accounts including the New York Times and the Financial Times) no consistent State Department or CIA briefing. His communications with Putin were reportedly conducted through Kirill Dmitriev (head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund) and Ushakov as principal Russian-side interlocutors. The personal-chemistry-based, business-deal-style approach was characterised by Witkoff himself in a March 2025 Tucker Carlson interview [TBD-VERIFY: exact date and platform] as a deliberate alternative to the "career-State-Department approach" that he claimed had failed for three years. Career Russia analysts (Hill, Stent, McFaul) characterised it as structurally vulnerable to Russian information operations, a charge Witkoff and the administration rejected.
The April 2025 Russian Kursk reconquest transformed the negotiation track's military-balance baseline. Ukrainian forces had seized and held a salient of approximately 1,000 square kilometres inside Russia's Kursk Oblast since the August 2024 incursion (covered in UA-E-07, forthcoming). Through March and April 2025 — reportedly with North Korean infantry reinforcements on the Russian side, with Russian glide-bomb and drone-strike density exceeding Ukrainian air-defence capacity in the salient, and with the US intelligence-sharing pause during the 3–11 March window degrading Ukrainian targeting — Russian forces recovered the bulk of the Kursk salient. The operational reconquest was substantially complete by late April 2025 (precise date contested between Russian, Ukrainian, and ISW accounts) [TBD-VERIFY: ISW's specific dating of the Sudzha recapture and the broader salient closure]. The bargaining-position significance was immediate: Ukraine had counted on holding Russian territory as a swap-for-Crimea negotiating card; Russia's recovery of the salient removed that card before the Witkoff track had operationalised any framework. Ukrainian critics, including Carl Bildt and Anders Åslund, attributed the loss in part to the US intelligence-sharing pause; pro-administration accounts attributed it to ordinary battlefield attrition.
The 8 May 2025 (and contested 19 May 2025) Putin–Trump telephone calls marked the inflection point at which the Riyadh-Witkoff track formally yielded to the Istanbul track. The 8 May call (Russia's Victory Day eve) — reported at approximately one hour — produced no announced ceasefire but did produce Russia's announcement of a unilateral 8–10 May three-day Victory Day ceasefire (which Ukraine declined to reciprocate). The 19 May 2025 call [TBD-VERIFY: whether 19 May was a distinct call or a recurring reporting of the 8 May call — multiple Western outlets reported a roughly two-hour call on 19 May 2025; Reuters and the Wall Street Journal differ on whether this was the same call as 8 May or a separate engagement] was reported at approximately two hours and was followed by Trump's public statement that "Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations" and that "the conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties" — a phrase widely interpreted as the US-side acceptance of a Russia–Ukraine direct bilateral, without continuous US mediation, as the next-stage architecture. Vice President Vance's meeting with President Zelensky at the Vatican during the funeral of Pope Francis (26 April 2025) [TBD-VERIFY: precise date of the Pope's death and the bilateral] was the only senior US–Ukraine engagement of that window; it produced no announced deliverable but reportedly resolved the personality residue of the 28 February Oval Office breakdown.
The sanctions-relief sequencing debate of spring–summer 2025 is the most consequential unresolved policy question of the bilateral and the central test of the three interpretive accounts. The Russian negotiating position — articulated by Lavrov in his post-Riyadh press conference, by Dmitriev in Bloomberg and RBC interviews, and by Putin in his 12 February call readout — sequenced sanctions relief before substantive concessions on territory or security architecture, framing the post-2022 sanctions architecture as illegitimate Western coercion that must be removed as a precondition. The US-business-coalition position, articulated in Wall Street Journal op-eds by figures including former CEOs of major US energy and industrial firms with pre-2022 Russia exposure, urged sanctions easing on a transactional basis to enable joint ventures (notably the rare-earths and Arctic-energy framings Witkoff was reportedly exploring). The European frozen-assets position — articulated by Macron, EU Foreign Affairs Council, and successive ECB statements — held that the approximately €210 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves immobilised in Euroclear, plus the May 2024 REPO Act US frozen-assets architecture, must be preserved as Ukrainian reconstruction collateral regardless of any US–Russia bilateral track. The Graham–Blumenthal Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 — a bipartisan bill introduced in spring 2025 with 82 reported co-sponsors, proposing a 500% secondary tariff on countries purchasing Russian oil, gas, uranium, and other strategic materials — represented a Senate-Republican-led alternative track that the White House neither endorsed nor blocked through May 2025. The unresolved sequencing question is the central determinant of whether the Riyadh track ends in a 2026 deal, a frozen post-armistice status quo, or a repudiation.
The strategic-stability vacuum opened by the 5 February 2026 expiration of New START is the longer-arc structural inheritance against which the 2025 negotiation track must be evaluated. New START — signed in Prague on 8 April 2010 by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, ratified by the Senate on 22 December 2010 by a 71–26 vote (with 13 Republican yes votes, including Lugar, Alexander, Corker, Collins, Snowe, Murkowski, and Cochran), and extended for five years by Presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin on 3 February 2021 — is the last remaining bilateral US–Russia strategic-arms-limitation treaty. Russia suspended its participation in inspections and data exchanges on 21 February 2023 (announced in Putin's Federal Assembly address) while remaining within the deployed-warhead and launcher caps. The 2 August 2019 US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (Trump-1) and the 22 November 2020 US withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty (Trump-1) had already hollowed the prior strategic-stability architecture. As of May 2025, no Trump-2 / Putin-5 successor framework had been formally tabled; Witkoff's reported soundings on strategic-stability questions during his March and April Moscow trips were the first US engagement on the post-New-START architecture since early 2023. The bilateral is, structurally, the test case of whether great-power negotiation in wartime can simultaneously address (a) the Ukraine war end-state, (b) the post-2022 sanctions architecture, (c) the strategic-stability successor framework, and (d) the European security order — or whether these must be decoupled.
The three interpretive accounts — Realist (Mearsheimer/Kissinger-school), Atlanticist (Hill/Stent), and Russian-elite (Trenin/Stanovaya/Kolesnikov) — produce systematically different readings of the same events. The Realist reading frames the Trump-2 pivot as overdue strategic pragmatism, accepting that Russia is a permanent great power, that NATO expansion to Ukraine was the proximate cause of the war, and that any durable settlement requires accepting Russian territorial gains and Ukrainian neutrality; on this reading, Riyadh was correct in form even if Witkoff was suboptimal in execution. The Atlanticist reading frames the pivot as appeasement of the kind that produced the 1938 Munich and 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop antecedents, treating Russian aggression as a generative cause requiring sustained military pressure and sanctions maintenance; on this reading, Riyadh was a strategic gift to Putin whose returns will compound over years. The Russian-elite reading — itself bifurcated between the in-Russia Trenin pole (which sees the 2025 track as Russian diplomatic vindication after three years of attrition) and the in-exile Stanovaya / Kolesnikov / Baunov pole (which sees Putin as exploiting Trump's transactional impulses while making no real concessions) — converges on the assessment that the Trump-2 track is structurally favourable to Russian strategic objectives in ways the Trump-2 team itself does not fully appreciate. The corpus's discipline requires documenting all three accounts with attribution; it does not require adjudicating between them.
The domestic American political environment within which the 2025 US–Russia bilateral has been conducted is itself the most polarised since the early Cold War. Republican congressional opinion is fractured between a McConnell-aligned Russia-hawk Senate cohort (including Wicker, Cornyn, Tillis, Murkowski, Collins, McConnell himself in his post-leadership role, and notably Graham — whose hawkishness exceeds the administration's), a Trump-aligned negotiation-supportive cohort (Hawley, Vance-aligned Senate freshmen, the House Freedom Caucus core), and an Ukraine-aid-fatigued centre. Democratic congressional opinion is unified in opposition to the Trump-2 negotiation framework but divided on tactics — between Schumer-led institutional opposition, Murphy / Coons / Shaheen Senate Foreign Relations Committee technical critique, and AOC / Khanna / Sanders progressive critiques that share elements of the Realist reading without endorsing the Trump frame. Secretary Rubio's transition from a 2014–2024 senatorial record as one of the Senate's most outspoken Russia hawks (architect of multiple sanctions bills; vocal critic of Tillerson's Russia approach in 2017) to his 2025 role as the lead US Russia negotiator is the most studied personnel pivot of the administration. The Hill-versus-White-House tension between Senate Republican hawks and the White House — particularly visible in Graham's repeated public statements that contradict the administration's negotiating posture — is the structural constraint on any settlement that requires Senate ratification (which a strategic-stability successor treaty would).

2. The Record in Brief — Why the 2025 US–Russia Bilateral Is a Level-1 Anchor

The US–Russia bilateral relationship as remade in the first 120 days of the second Trump administration deserves Level-1 Anchor status for four reasons that compound: scale of category-shift, asymmetry of preparation, breadth of policy surface, and reversibility question.

Scale of category-shift. Across the post-Cold-War period, US–Russia relations have moved between phases of cooperation (the 1991–1998 Yeltsin period of post-Soviet integration; the 2001–2003 Bush II post-9/11 counter-terrorism cooperation; the 2009–2011 Obama "reset"), competition (the 2007–2008 post-Munich-speech / Georgia-war period; the 2014–2021 post-Crimea period), and confrontation (the 2022–2024 post-full-scale-invasion period). Each prior transition between phases was preceded by either months of inter-agency staffing (the 2009 reset followed a Carnegie-Brookings working-group cycle and a March 2009 Clinton "reset button" framing event), formal summit preparation (the 2018 Helsinki summit followed three months of NSC and State staffing), or a specific precipitating event (the August 2008 Georgia war; the March 2014 Crimea annexation). The 2025 Trump-2 transition from confrontation to engagement compressed this entire cycle to 24 days — from the 20 January inauguration to the 12 February Putin call — without an interagency review, without a Russia-team staffing process (the State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs was reportedly read into the call only hours before it occurred [TBD-VERIFY: precise timing of EUR briefing]), and without a Russia policy document of any kind. The category change was effectively a presidential decision conveyed by a single phone call.

Asymmetry of preparation. The Russian side approached the 2025 opening with extensive preparation. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) head Kirill Dmitriev had reportedly maintained back-channel contact with Trump-1 alumni (including reported communications with Jared Kushner and figures in the New York Trump organisation) since 2017, and through 2024 had positioned RDIF as the Russian-side commercial-diplomacy vehicle for a Trump-2 opening. The Foreign Ministry under Lavrov had drafted multiple frameworks during 2024 for resumption of US engagement. Putin himself, in his June 2024 Russian Foreign Ministry collegium speech, had laid out conditional terms for negotiation. By contrast, the Trump-2 transition produced no public Russia framework before the 20 January inauguration, no Senate-confirmed Russia ambassador (the post remained vacant through spring 2025), no transition Russia working group of the kind that had operated in 2008–2009 and 2020–2021, and no Heritage Project 2025 chapter focused on Russia policy of the depth of the Ukraine chapter. The asymmetry of preparation shaped every subsequent meeting: the Russian side knew its talking points; the US side improvised. Hill and Stent in successive Foreign Affairs essays in March and April 2025 made this point explicitly.

Breadth of policy surface. The 2025 bilateral covers, simultaneously, four policy domains that prior bilaterals had largely decoupled: (i) the Ukraine war end-state, including territorial disposition, security guarantees, and post-war reconstruction; (ii) the post-2022 sanctions architecture, including SWIFT exclusions, frozen assets, OFAC SDN listings, and secondary-sanctions exposure; (iii) the strategic-stability successor framework after New START's 5 February 2026 expiration; and (iv) the European security order, including NATO posture, missile-defence architecture in Poland and Romania, and the future of the post-1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act. No prior US–Russia bilateral has attempted to address all four simultaneously. The Obama "reset" focused primarily on (iii) and a narrow Iran-cooperation slice of (iv); the Trump-1 Helsinki sequence focused on (iii) and an unstructured rhetorical engagement with (iv); the Biden-Geneva sequence focused on (iii) and crisis-management protocols. The Riyadh-Witkoff approach explicitly attempts a "grand-bargain" framing that addresses all four — a structural ambition that no US administration has attempted since the 1972 Moscow Brezhnev–Nixon summit on SALT I and the broader détente architecture.

Reversibility question. Whether the 2025 reframing will outlast the Trump-2 administration is the structurally most important question for the corpus's purposes. The Obama 2009 reset survived eighteen months before deteriorating (with Putin's September 2011 return announcement and the Magnitsky Act of December 2012); the Trump-1 Helsinki engagement deteriorated within months under the Mueller investigation pressure and the 2018 Salisbury poisoning. The 2025 reframing's reversibility will depend on three variables this document tracks: the durability of the Witkoff-Putin personal channel, the question of whether sanctions are formally lifted (which requires Congressional action for some categories), and the question of whether the European frozen-assets architecture is liquidated for Ukrainian reconstruction (which would be effectively irreversible). The 2026 corpus update will adjudicate these.

3. Background — The 2022–2024 US–Russia Inheritance: Sanctions Maximalism, Diplomatic Isolation, and the Strategic-Stability Vacuum

The Trump-2 administration inherited, on 20 January 2025, a US–Russia bilateral structured by three years of post-24-February-2022 confrontation. The structural inheritance has five components that condition every subsequent 2025 negotiation move.

The sanctions architecture. Beginning on 24 February 2022, the Biden administration coordinated with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, and additional partners on the most comprehensive sanctions regime ever imposed on a major economy. The architecture included (a) the SDN designation by the US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of approximately 1,500 Russian individuals and entities through January 2025, including President Putin personally (added 25 February 2022), Foreign Minister Lavrov, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (and successor Andrei Belousov from May 2024), and the heads of major state banks (Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank for limited transactions, Alfa-Bank, Otkritie, Promsvyazbank, Sovcombank, Rosselkhozbank, Novikombank); (b) the immobilisation of approximately $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves held in G7 jurisdictions — roughly $5 billion in US-jurisdiction holdings, the bulk (approximately €210 billion or $230 billion) held by Euroclear in Belgium, with smaller holdings in France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom; (c) the December 2022 G7+EU+Australia oil-price cap of $60 per barrel on seaborne Russian crude, with periodic adjustments; (d) the exclusion of the seven largest Russian banks from SWIFT messaging beginning March 2022, with additional banks added in successive tranches; (e) export controls on advanced semiconductors, advanced manufacturing equipment, and luxury goods coordinated through the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security; and (f) a broad secondary-sanctions framework under Executive Order 14114 of 22 December 2023, which authorised sanctions against foreign financial institutions facilitating transactions with the Russian defence-industrial base.

The Ukraine-aid architecture. Between February 2022 and January 2025, the United States obligated approximately $175 billion in Ukraine-related appropriations across three supplemental packages (May 2022's $40.1 billion, December 2022's $44.9 billion, April 2024's $60.84 billion) plus FY-baseline funding, covered in detail in US-F-06. The military aid was bifurcated between the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA, drawing from existing DoD stocks) and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI, contracting new production from industry). By January 2025, the running total of announced PDA packages exceeded 60, and the capability-tranche had progressed from Stinger and Javelin (February–March 2022) through HIMARS (June 2022), Patriot (December 2022 announcement; April 2023 operational), Abrams tanks (September 2023), ATACMS (October 2023 short-range; April–June 2024 long-range), to F-16 operational debut (August 2024) and the September 2024 long-range strike restrictions easing.

Diplomatic isolation. From 24 February 2022 onward, the Biden administration explicitly avoided high-level US–Russia direct engagement. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Lavrov only twice during the Biden administration after 24 February 2022 — once on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting in Bali on 8 July 2022, and once at the G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting in Delhi on 2 March 2023, each meeting brief and confined to specific narrow agenda items (the WNBA player Brittney Griner's release; the renewal of the Black Sea Grain Initiative). President Biden himself did not communicate directly with Putin between 12 February 2022 (a pre-invasion call) and the end of the Biden administration on 20 January 2025. The diplomatic channels that survived included CIA Director William Burns's contacts with Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergei Naryshkin — Burns met Naryshkin in Ankara on 14 November 2022 to warn against nuclear-weapon use — and Burns's meetings with Russian Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov on prisoner-exchange and crisis-stability matters. The Trump-2 reframing's contrast point is precisely this Biden-era posture of channel-minimisation.

The strategic-stability vacuum. The five-year extension of New START signed on 3 February 2021 by Presidents Biden and Putin was the last bilateral strategic-stability action. Russia announced suspension of its participation in inspections and data exchanges on 21 February 2023 (in Putin's Federal Assembly address), and the bilateral consultative-commission mechanism has been dormant since. The 2 August 2019 Trump-1 withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (signed 8 December 1987 by Reagan and Gorbachev) and the 22 November 2020 Trump-1 withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty (signed 24 March 1992, entered into force 1 January 2002) had already removed the proximate confidence-building architecture. As of January 2025, the strategic-stability successor question — what bilateral arms-control framework, if any, would replace New START after its 5 February 2026 expiration — had received no public US–Russia engagement of any depth.

The political-domestic context of January 2025. The Trump campaign in 2024 had repeatedly stated that the Ukraine war would be resolved within 24 hours of Trump's return to office. Trump's own framing emphasised personal-relationship-based diplomacy with Putin and a deal-making approach. Senate-confirmed senior personnel were positioned to execute this framing: Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), confirmed as Secretary of State on 20 January 2025 by a 99–0 vote, despite his 2014–2024 record as one of the Senate's most consistently hawkish voices on Russia (Rubio was a principal author of the 2017 Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, CAATSA); Pete Hegseth, confirmed as Secretary of Defense on 24 January 2025 by a 51–50 vote with Vice President Vance breaking the tie, with a record of public statements consistent with the Trump campaign's negotiation framing; Mike Waltz (R-FL), serving as National Security Advisor without confirmation requirement; and Steve Witkoff as Special Envoy to the Middle East (initially) and then expanding into the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. The cabinet's Russia stance was, in aggregate, materially more negotiation-supportive than any post-Cold-War administration's starting position.

4. The 12 February 2025 Putin–Trump Telephone Call and the Hegseth Brussels / Vance Munich Pair

The 12 February 2025 Putin–Trump telephone call is the formal opening event of the 2025 US–Russia bilateral. The call's documented features establish the framework against which all subsequent engagements have been read.

The call itself. The Kremlin announced the call first, posting its Russian-language readout on en.kremlin.ru on the afternoon of 12 February 2025 (Moscow time, which preceded the White House readout by approximately two hours). The Kremlin readout described a call of approximately 90 minutes, characterised as "a long and substantive conversation" covering Ukraine, the Middle East, energy, and "the strategic stability of international relations." Putin reportedly invited Trump to Moscow and accepted Trump's invitation in principle; the Kremlin readout emphasised that the two presidents "agreed to maintain personal contact." The White House readout, posted on whitehouse.gov shortly thereafter, characterised the call as productive and noted that "President Trump and President Putin agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy of Ukraine to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now." The Trump readout's structural choice — informing Zelensky of the substance of the call only after it had taken place, rather than coordinating Ukrainian positions in advance — was widely characterised in European and Ukrainian commentary as the first concrete signal of the new bilateral architecture's exclusionary form. President Zelensky's own public response on the afternoon of 12 February (via Telegram and a brief press statement) acknowledged the call and stated that he had spoken with Trump after the Putin call. Trump's subsequent Truth Social post characterised the conversation with Putin as "highly productive" and indicated that future meetings would likely occur in Saudi Arabia.

The Hegseth Brussels speech. On the same day — 12 February 2025 — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered the United States's statement at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG, the "Ramstein format") in Brussels, the first Ramstein meeting of the Trump-2 administration. Hegseth's statement contained two analytically explicit removals of negotiating cards. First, on territorial status: Hegseth said that "returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders [is] an unrealistic objective" and that "chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering." Second, on NATO membership: Hegseth said that "the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement." Both statements removed positions that the Biden administration had publicly held through January 2025. The 11 July 2024 NATO Washington Summit communiqué had described Ukraine's path to NATO membership as "irreversible"; Hegseth's 12 February statement in effect reversed this US position at the first opportunity. The Hegseth statement also addressed burden-sharing: "European allies must lead from the front" on Ukraine, and "the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency." The phrase "we are also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe" became the most-quoted line of the speech in European reactions.

The Vance Munich speech. On 14 February 2025, Vice President JD Vance delivered the United States's principal address at the Munich Security Conference. The customary US Munich speech, across the Bush II, Obama, Trump-1, and Biden administrations, had focused on the transatlantic security agenda and external threats (terrorism, China, Russia variously). Vance's speech inverted this convention: rather than addressing external threats, Vance addressed what he characterised as the European internal democratic backsliding — restrictions on free speech, the United Kingdom's buffer-zone laws around abortion clinics, the cancellation of the Romanian first-round presidential election results on 6 December 2024 by the Romanian Constitutional Court, and the German Brandmauer practice of refusing coalition cooperation with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Vance argued that "the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within." Two days after the speech, Vance met privately with AfD candidate Alice Weidel in Munich, a meeting widely interpreted as a deliberate breach of the Brandmauer convention. The Munich audience response — including standing ovations from select sections and visible discomfort from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other European leaders — was historically unusual; the speech was the most-discussed transatlantic event of February 2025 after the Riyadh meeting four days later.

European reaction to the pair. The Hegseth Brussels speech and the Vance Munich speech, read together with the 12 February Trump–Putin call, were interpreted in European capitals as a coordinated signalling exercise rather than a sequence of independent events. French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency Paris summit for 17 February 2025, attended by the leaders or senior representatives of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the European Council and Commission Presidents. The summit produced no concrete announcements but established the political space for the subsequent 2 March 2025 London "coalition of the willing" summit. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's response — strong on rhetoric, weak on policy departure — was overtaken by the 23 February 2025 federal election that brought CDU leader Friedrich Merz to the chancellorship-designate. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's response was the most operationally substantive of the European leaders: the 27 February 2025 Starmer Washington visit, followed by his proposal at the 2 March London summit for a UK-French-led "reassurance force" of European troops to support a Ukrainian ceasefire if one materialised.

5. The 18 February 2025 Riyadh Talks — Lavrov, Rubio, Waltz, and the Saudi Host Architecture

The 18 February 2025 Riyadh meeting at Diriyah Palace was the first US–Russia ministerial-level engagement on a material bilateral agenda since before the 24 February 2022 invasion. The Saudi host architecture, the negotiating teams, the four-point framework, and the immediate aftermath each warrant documentation.

The host architecture. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) hosted the meeting at the Diriyah Palace complex in the western suburbs of Riyadh, the same venue that had previously hosted Saudi–Russia and Saudi–US bilateral meetings during the post-October-7-2023 Middle East crisis period. MBS's role was meaningfully more than hospitality: Saudi Arabia had emerged as a principal third-party diplomatic venue for the Trump-2 administration (Riyadh would also host subsequent rounds of US–Ukraine, US–Iran, and US–Hamas-related engagements during 2025). MBS's personal relationship with both Trump and Putin — including his 5 December 2022 in-person reception of Putin during the latter's first post-invasion Gulf trip — positioned Saudi Arabia as the only major economy capable of hosting a US–Russia bilateral that would be acceptable to both sides. The United Arab Emirates had reportedly competed for the role; the choice of Riyadh reflected both the depth of the MBS–Trump relationship and the post-2022 Saudi–Russia OPEC+ working architecture.

The negotiating teams. The US delegation was led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R-FL), with National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and a small State Department support team. CIA Director John Ratcliffe was reportedly not present at the Riyadh meeting itself, though he was significantly engaged in pre-meeting planning. The Russian delegation was led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov as the senior White House interlocutor (Ushakov having served as Russian Ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2008 and as Putin's foreign-policy aide since 2012, making him the most experienced Russian diplomat on US affairs). RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev was reportedly present in the broader Russian delegation. The Ukrainian government was not represented at any level. European Union representation was not present at any level. The press were excluded from the meeting room; readouts came from Lavrov's post-meeting press conference, Rubio's subsequent press availability in Riyadh, and a joint statement that was substantially shorter and less specific than typical US–Russia post-meeting statements.

The four-point framework. The meeting's outcome, as articulated in the post-meeting statements and the subsequent Lavrov and Rubio interviews, comprised four working tracks. First, re-establishment of diplomatic relations: both sides agreed to reverse the post-2022 personnel cuts at their respective embassies, restoring the US Embassy in Moscow and the Russian Embassy in Washington to operational staffing levels. The technical implementation of this track proceeded through spring 2025, with the appointment of new diplomats and the resumption of consular services that had been suspended. Second, appointment of high-level negotiating teams for the Ukraine track: this track was the explicitly Ukraine-related one, and would be operationalised through Witkoff (US side) and Ushakov/Dmitriev (Russian side) in the subsequent Moscow shuttle. Third, exploration of broader geopolitical and economic cooperation: this track was the most expansive and the most contested in subsequent reporting, including reported Russian soundings on Arctic energy joint ventures, rare-earth-mineral cooperation, RDIF reactivation, and the broader sanctions-relief sequencing. Fourth, preparation for a potential Putin–Trump summit: initially floated for spring 2025 at a Saudi or UAE venue, ultimately deferred to the 15 August 2025 Anchorage summit covered in RU-D-06.

The Ukraine-exclusion question. The Riyadh meeting's exclusion of Ukraine and the European allies was, by the public framing of all participating parties, deliberate. Lavrov in his post-meeting press conference characterised the bilateral format as "the natural format for resolving questions between great powers." Rubio in his post-meeting press availability characterised the format as "a first conversation" that would be followed by trilateral or multilateral engagements as warranted. Witkoff in subsequent interviews described the format as practically efficient: "you can't negotiate with twenty parties in the room." The European reaction — articulated in Macron's 17 February Paris summit, the European Council emergency statement of 19 February, and Kallas's High Representative statement — was that any negotiation on Ukrainian territory without Ukrainian participation violated the United Nations Charter, OSCE Helsinki principles, and the European Union's own foreign-policy framework. President Zelensky's public response — "Ukraine will not accept any agreements without our participation" — became the principal Ukrainian rhetorical anchor of the spring 2025 period.

The post-Riyadh news cycle. In the 96 hours following the Riyadh meeting, the public commentary from US and Russian officials diverged sharply. The Russian side characterised Riyadh as a strategic breakthrough; Lavrov in his TASS interview of 19 February stated that "we have started a serious dialogue based on understanding our interests." The US side characterised Riyadh as a tentative first step; Rubio in his ABC News interview of 19 February emphasised that "this is the beginning of a conversation that includes Ukraine, that includes our European partners." The gap between the two framings was itself analytically significant: the Russian framing was designed to lock in the bilateral format as the principal track; the US framing was designed to preserve flexibility on subsequent multilateral inclusion. As subsequent events showed (the Witkoff shuttle's continued bilateral form, the absence of Ukraine from the 25 March partial-ceasefire announcement structure), the Russian framing has been the more accurate description of how the track has actually operated.

6. The 28 February 2025 Oval Office Breakdown with President Zelensky

The 28 February 2025 Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the most televised foreign-policy confrontation in the modern history of the American presidency. Its substance, choreography, and consequences require careful documentation; its three contested accounts — engineered, organic, Putin-win — structure the interpretive literature.

The lead-up. The 28 February meeting was convened to sign the long-negotiated United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Agreement on critical minerals. The agreement's antecedents lay in President Zelensky's November 2024 "Victory Plan" presented to President-elect Trump, which proposed Ukrainian critical-minerals access (lithium, titanium, graphite, rare earths) as a US strategic-interest anchor for continued security assistance. Through January and February 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Yulia Svyrydenko had negotiated successive drafts, with the considerable terms — royalty rates, US-Ukraine joint governance, scope of covered minerals — substantially settled by mid-February. Bessent had travelled to Kyiv on 12 February 2025 (the same day as the Putin–Trump call), met Zelensky, and tabled what was reported as a "first-version" agreement that the Ukrainian side characterised as appreciably unacceptable (the first version reportedly proposed US claim on $500 billion of Ukrainian mineral resources without explicit US security guarantees in return). A revised version, with reduced US claim and partial guarantee language [TBD-VERIFY: the precise security-guarantee language in the 28 February draft remained contested in subsequent reporting], was agreed sufficiently for Zelensky's 28 February Washington trip to be scheduled.

The meeting itself. The pool-press portion of the meeting in the Oval Office, scheduled for the customary five-to-ten-minute photo opportunity before private discussion, ran approximately 50 minutes and collapsed into open confrontation in front of cameras. The triggering exchange began when a reporter asked Zelensky whether he trusted that Putin would abide by any ceasefire. Zelensky began to respond by citing Russia's past ceasefire violations — including the 2014 Minsk-1 agreements that broke down within weeks. Vice President Vance interrupted, stating that "the path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy" and characterising Zelensky's framing as disrespectful to the diplomatic effort under way. Zelensky pressed back, asking Vance "have you ever been to Ukraine?" and pointing out that 2014 was followed by 2022. The exchange escalated through Vance's accusations of ingratitude and Trump's intervention: Trump told Zelensky that "you don't have the cards," that "you're gambling with World War III," and that Zelensky was "either going to make a deal or we're out." The meeting was terminated; the planned signing of the minerals agreement did not occur; the planned joint press conference did not occur. Zelensky departed the White House without the minerals deal signature, and Trump issued a Truth Social post within hours stating that Zelensky was "not ready for peace" and was "disrespectful" to the United States.

The 72-hour aftermath. On 3 March 2025, the Trump administration announced a pause on all military aid to Ukraine. The pause covered ongoing Presidential Drawdown Authority deliveries and the planned Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative contracting; it was implemented through the Pentagon's hold on the cargo flow from the Jasionka logistics hub in Poland (the principal US-to-Ukraine transit point). On 5 March 2025 (the precise date contested between US and Ukrainian sources), the administration added a pause on intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, suspending the targeting-data flow that Ukraine had been using for ATACMS long-range strikes into Russia and Russian-occupied territory. The intelligence-sharing pause was the more militarily significant of the two; it degraded Ukrainian capabilities particularly in the Kursk salient (then under sustained Russian pressure) and in long-range deep-strike operations. ISW's daily assessments through the 5–11 March window documented operational shifts attributable to the pause. The European reaction was severe: the 2 March 2025 London "coalition of the willing" emergency summit, hosted by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer with French President Emmanuel Macron and attended by leaders of approximately 18 countries including Trudeau, Meloni, Tusk, and Stubb, produced a Starmer-Macron-led framework for European reassurance-force planning that would be presented to the European Council on 6 March.

The Jeddah recovery (11 March 2025). On 11 March 2025, US and Ukrainian delegations met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The US delegation was led by Secretary Rubio and National Security Advisor Waltz; the Ukrainian delegation was led by Andriy Yermak (Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine) and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov. The talks produced a joint statement in which Ukraine agreed to a proposed 30-day full ceasefire, conditional on Russian acceptance. The US side announced that it would resume military aid and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, and the pause was lifted within hours of the Jeddah statement. Witkoff was reportedly dispatched to Moscow within days to present the ceasefire proposal to Putin. Russia did not accept the 30-day full ceasefire; the Russian counter-proposal — announced approximately ten days later — was the partial 30-day energy-infrastructure ceasefire that became the 25 March announcement.

The three contested accounts. The engineered account, articulated most fully in essays by former Trump-2-administration-skeptical Republican commentators (including Bill Kristol and David Frum) and by some Atlanticist analysts, holds that the Oval Office confrontation was deliberately structured by the Trump-Vance team to break the existing minerals-deal terms and to extract additional Ukrainian concessions through the threat of aid pause. The engineered reading points to (a) the unusually long pool-press window, (b) Vance's interruption pattern as consistent with prepared talking points rather than ad-libbed reaction, and (c) the speed with which the aid pause was operationalised (suggesting pre-planning). The organic account, articulated by Trump-aligned commentators and by some neutral observers, holds that the confrontation arose from genuine rhetorical incompatibility between three principals operating in front of cameras — Zelensky's wartime-leader frame, Trump's deal-maker frame, and Vance's restraintist-prosecutorial frame — and that no specific concession was extracted because none was the goal. The Putin-win account, articulated by Russian-elite commentators (Stanovaya, Baunov) and by Hill in her 5 March 2025 Foreign Affairs essay, holds that whether engineered or organic, the practical effect of the confrontation was to deliver Putin's principal strategic objective of the Trump-2 era — a public US–Ukraine rupture — without any reciprocal Russian concession. On this reading, the question of intentionality is analytically secondary; the structural effect was the same. The corpus does not adjudicate between these three accounts; the documentation discipline is to note that all three are seriously argued and that the empirical record (as of May 2025) does not foreclose any of them.

7. The 25 March 2025 Partial 30-Day Energy-Infrastructure Ceasefire — Announcement, Implementation Failures, and Collapse

The 25 March 2025 partial ceasefire was the first concrete deliverable from the Riyadh-Witkoff track and the principal notable test of whether the bilateral could produce verifiable outcomes. Its announcement, implementation failures, and collapse provide the empirical record against which all subsequent claims of negotiation progress must be measured.

The announcement. On 25 March 2025, simultaneous statements from the Kremlin and the White House announced agreement on a partial 30-day ceasefire covering energy infrastructure, accompanied by a Black Sea maritime ceasefire linked to a partial relaxation of Russian agricultural-export sanctions. The energy clause prohibited (a) Ukrainian long-range drone and missile strikes on Russian oil refineries, oil storage facilities, and electricity infrastructure, and (b) Russian strikes on Ukrainian electricity generation, transmission, and substation infrastructure, gas infrastructure, and nuclear facilities. The maritime clause established a Black Sea ceasefire intended to allow safe passage for grain and other commercial shipping. The agricultural-export-sanctions linkage was the principal Russian-demanded counterpart: the partial reconnection of Rosselkhozbank (the Russian Agricultural Bank, sanctioned and excluded from SWIFT in 2022) to the SWIFT messaging system, and the unfreezing of certain Russian agricultural-export-related transactions. The partial-ceasefire announcement was structurally significant: it represented the first agreed US–Russia concrete bilateral action since the 22 December 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative renewal, and the first since the 24 February 2022 invasion in which the United States acted as one of two principal mediators (with Saudi Arabia and the broader Riyadh-Witkoff process).

The implementation failure on energy infrastructure. Within 48 hours of the 25 March announcement, ISW's daily assessments documented Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The Ukrainian Air Force daily reports for 26–28 March cited drone strikes on power infrastructure in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv oblasts. The Ukrainian Ministry of Energy issued statements documenting damage to substations and distribution infrastructure. The Russian side argued, in subsequent statements, that the strikes targeted military rather than civilian-energy targets and were outside the scope of the agreement. The US side initially attempted to mediate the dispute through Witkoff's continuing Moscow engagement and through the State Department's Russia-Ukraine desk. Through April 2025, Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure continued and in some weeks intensified. Ukrainian reciprocation — including long-range drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery (Krasnodar Krai), the Saratov oil refinery, and other Russian energy targets — resumed after an initial pause, with Ukrainian officials citing the Russian violations as nullifying the partial-ceasefire obligation. By mid-April 2025, the energy-infrastructure clause was effectively dead in substance; neither side announced a formal termination, but the operational tempo on both sides had returned to pre-25-March levels.

The maritime-and-agricultural-sanctions linkage failure. The Black Sea maritime ceasefire was conditional on the Russian-demanded sanctions relief — particularly the Rosselkhozbank-to-SWIFT reconnection — which the United States could not unilaterally deliver. SWIFT is a Belgium-headquartered cooperative organisation governed by its member-bank shareholders and subject to European Union jurisdiction; US OFAC actions do not directly control SWIFT membership. The reconnection of Rosselkhozbank would have required EU action (specifically, a Council of the European Union decision to amend the sanctions regulation that defines SWIFT exclusions). The European Union, in successive statements through April 2025, refused to make this change without broader settlement progress. The structural mismatch — the US-side negotiating with Russia on a deliverable that required European-side action — emerged as one of the principal architectural failures of the Riyadh-Witkoff track. Russia conditioned implementation of the maritime ceasefire on US delivery of the SWIFT reconnection; the United States could not deliver; the maritime ceasefire was never operationalised.

The ISW assessment record. ISW's daily assessments through late March, April, and into May 2025 documented Russian battlefield operations that contradicted the partial-ceasefire framing. The April 2025 Russian operations in Kursk Oblast (covered in Section 9) intensified rather than slowed during the ceasefire window. The Russian summer-offensive preparations on the Sumy–Kharkiv axis (also Section 9) accelerated. ISW's specific finding — articulated in successive weekly assessments — was that Russia was using the diplomatic-track window to consolidate and prepare rather than to wind down operations. Justin Bronk at RUSI made the parallel observation on the air-defence dimension: Russia continued and in some weeks expanded its drone-and-missile strike density, treating the partial ceasefire as a unilateral Ukrainian constraint rather than a mutual one.

The collapse and the lessons. By 25 April 2025, the partial-ceasefire's 30-day window had expired with no renewal announced. The structural lessons drawn by the participants and observers varied. From the Russian side, the partial ceasefire demonstrated that Russian negotiating leverage extended to imposing conditions (the SWIFT reconnection) that the United States could not unilaterally meet. From the Ukrainian side, the partial ceasefire confirmed the pre-existing Ukrainian assessment that Russia would not honour limited ceasefires. From the US-administration side, the partial ceasefire's failure was attributed by Witkoff and other officials primarily to European intransigence on sanctions; the structural critique — that the Riyadh format had been ill-suited to producing verifiable outcomes — was not publicly accepted. The broader interpretive significance was that the first concrete deliverable of the 2025 bilateral failed within four weeks of announcement, on terms that revealed both the structural limits of the Riyadh-Witkoff format and the strategic-positioning differences between the US administration and the European allies.

8. The Witkoff Moscow Shuttle (February–May 2025) — The Steve Witkoff Negotiating Approach and the Kellogg Parallel Track

The Steve Witkoff Moscow shuttle is the most institutionally novel feature of the 2025 US–Russia bilateral and the one with the least clear modern American precedent. Documenting Witkoff's background, his negotiating approach, his Moscow trips, and the parallel Kellogg track is necessary to evaluate the negotiation architecture.

Witkoff's background and the appointment. Steve Witkoff (born 1957) is a New York real-estate developer who founded the Witkoff Group in 1997, with major holdings in Manhattan, Miami, and Los Angeles real estate. He has been a close personal friend of Donald Trump for several decades, attending Trump's son's wedding and reportedly playing a regular golf-and-personal-friendship role. Witkoff endorsed Trump publicly during the 2024 campaign, spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention, and contributed financially to the campaign. After the November 2024 election, Witkoff was named Special Envoy to the Middle East, with the initial focus on the Gaza ceasefire negotiations (which produced the January 2025 phased ceasefire announced shortly before Biden left office, brokered jointly by Brett McGurk on the outgoing side and Witkoff on the incoming side). Following the 12 February 2025 Putin–Trump call and the 18 February Riyadh meeting, Witkoff's portfolio expanded to include the Russia/Ukraine track. The expansion was not announced through a formal Special Envoy redesignation but emerged from Witkoff's de facto inclusion in successive engagements. Witkoff had no prior government service, no prior Russia regional expertise, no Russian-language ability, and no prior public engagement with arms-control or strategic-stability frameworks.

The Witkoff negotiating approach. Witkoff has characterised his approach in successive interviews — most extensively in a Tucker Carlson interview of [TBD-VERIFY: precise date in March 2025] and in Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg profile pieces — as deliberately distinct from career-State-Department diplomacy. The approach emphasises (a) personal-chemistry-based dyadic engagement with Putin, (b) extended single-session meetings (reportedly three to five hours per Putin meeting), (c) business-deal framing (Witkoff has repeatedly used real-estate-deal vocabulary in describing the Russia-Ukraine question), (d) deliberate minimisation of interagency briefing chains (Witkoff has stated that he prefers to operate "without the State Department around me"), and (e) reported reliance on Russian-side translation rather than US-government translation (a feature that career-diplomacy critics including Hill and McFaul have characterised as structurally problematic). The approach's defenders — including Witkoff himself, Vance, and Trump — characterise it as cutting through bureaucratic ossification that had prevented progress for three years. The approach's critics characterise it as structurally vulnerable to Russian information operations, dependent on the Russian-translation accuracy, and unsupported by the analytical infrastructure necessary for grand-strategic engagement.

The Moscow trips. Witkoff conducted at least four reported Moscow trips during February–May 2025. The first trip in February 2025 (precise date contested in reporting; possibly conducted before or in conjunction with the 18 February Riyadh meeting [TBD-VERIFY: exact dates]) was characterised as exploratory. The second trip in mid-March 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise date — widely reported as around 13 March] produced the negotiating framework that became the 25 March partial-ceasefire announcement. The third trip in mid-April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise date — widely reported as around 11 April] addressed the partial-ceasefire violations and explored broader terms. The fourth trip in late April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise date — widely reported as around 25 April] is reported to have lasted approximately four hours in a single Putin meeting at the Kremlin's Catherine Hall, with Dmitriev and Ushakov also present. Subsequent Witkoff Moscow trips occurred during May–August 2025; the August trip preceded the 15 August 2025 Anchorage Putin–Trump summit (covered in RU-D-06). The cumulative pattern — at least one Moscow trip per month, with extended Putin face-time on each — is without modern American precedent at the Special Envoy or Cabinet level. The closest historical parameters are Henry Kissinger's 1969–1972 Moscow shuttle and the Strobe Talbott Russia engagements of the 1990s; both operated within a much more elaborated interagency framework than Witkoff has.

The Kellogg parallel track. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Keith Kellogg, named Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia in November 2024, operated a parallel track focused primarily on the Ukrainian side. Kellogg's December 2024 trip to Kyiv, his subsequent Kyiv visits during January–April 2025, and his Ramstein-format engagements positioned him as the principal US senior interlocutor with Zelensky's team. The Kellogg–Witkoff division of labour — Kellogg with Ukraine, Witkoff with Russia — was never formally codified but emerged from practice. The two tracks operated with apparent coordination but not formal integration. Kellogg in interviews characterised the Ukrainian-track work as the harder of the two assignments. The Kellogg track's structural significance is that it preserved a continuous senior US presence in Kyiv during a period in which the broader administration's posture appeared to be downgrading Ukraine in priority.

The Witkoff–Kushner–Rubio triangulation. Jared Kushner, despite holding no formal Trump-2 administration role, was reportedly engaged in the Russia track through informal channels — including his pre-2024 contacts with RDIF's Dmitriev and his Gulf-Arab business relationships that overlapped with the Saudi-host architecture. Reporting in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg through spring 2025 indicated that Kushner participated in successive strategic-planning conversations with Witkoff and Trump, particularly on the economic-cooperation track. Rubio's role triangulated against the Witkoff-Kushner channel: as Secretary of State, Rubio held the formal interagency authority for Russia policy, but the real policy direction was emerging from the Witkoff-Kushner-Trump nexus. Rubio in successive statements characterised the relationship as one of close coordination; in subsequent reporting (particularly New York Times and Politico accounts), the relationship was characterised as one of formal coordination masking genuine marginalisation of the State Department on Russia. The triangulation became visible in subsequent staffing decisions: the prolonged vacancy of the US Ambassador to Russia position, the slow staffing of the State Department European and Eurasian Affairs Bureau, and the apparent absence of a Russia-specific NSC senior director position with actual authority.

9. April 2025 Kursk Russian Reconquest and the Sumy–Kharkiv Summer Pressure

The April 2025 Russian reconquest of the Kursk salient and the Russian summer pressure on the Sumy–Kharkiv axis transformed the negotiation-track's military-balance baseline. The interaction between battlefield events and negotiation positions is a structural feature of any wartime negotiation, and the spring–summer 2025 sequence is the clearest illustration of how battlefield events drove negotiating positions in the 2025 US–Russia bilateral.

The Kursk incursion baseline. Ukrainian forces had launched the Kursk incursion on 6 August 2024, achieving operational surprise and seizing approximately 1,300 square kilometres of Kursk Oblast territory (the largest foreign-military seizure of Russian territory since World War II). The strategic-political rationale was the establishment of a Russian-territory bargaining card for future negotiations: a salient that Russia would feel compelled to recover or to compensate for. The salient included the town of Sudzha and surrounding villages, with the operational focus on holding the Sudzha logistical hub. Through autumn and winter 2024–2025, Ukrainian forces held the salient against sustained Russian counter-attacks. Russian forces were reinforced with reported North Korean infantry deployments (estimates ranging from approximately 10,000 to 14,000 North Korean personnel deployed to the Kursk theatre from October–November 2024 onward; ISW and Western intelligence assessments converged on these figures). Through winter 2024–2025, the salient slowly contracted as Russian and North Korean forces pressed.

The March–April 2025 Russian reconquest. Through March 2025, Russian operations against the Kursk salient intensified. The 3–11 March US intelligence-sharing pause coincided with a critical operational window: ISW assessments documented the degradation of Ukrainian targeting capability for Russian logistics and command-and-control nodes during the pause window, and Russian forces accelerated their pressure on Sudzha. The pause was lifted on 11 March 2025 (following the Jeddah US–Ukraine talks), but the operational consequences of the pause persisted: Ukrainian forces had lost momentum and could not re-establish it. Through late March 2025 and into early April 2025, Russian forces (with continued North Korean infantry support) pushed Ukrainian forces back from Sudzha and the surrounding villages. The Russian Ministry of Defence announced the recapture of Sudzha on or about 13 March 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: ISW's specific dating]; the broader operational recovery of the salient continued through April 2025. By late April 2025, the bulk of the salient had been recovered by Russia; Ukrainian forces retained only a small residual foothold in the border zone. The cumulative loss to Ukraine was the strategic-political card the August 2024 incursion had been designed to create.

The bargaining-position implications. The Russian reconquest of Kursk eliminated the principal Ukrainian non-territorial-of-Ukraine bargaining card. Through the autumn–winter 2024–2025 period, Zelensky and his negotiating team had explicitly framed the Kursk salient as a swap-for-Crimea card. The reconquest removed this option from any subsequent negotiation. The timing — that Russia recovered the salient during the Riyadh-Witkoff diplomatic window, not before it — meant that the bargaining-position shift occurred in real time during the negotiation, with the US administration neither preventing the shift nor leveraging it as an indicator of Russian bad-faith negotiating posture. The Ukrainian-side critique — articulated by Carl Bildt, Anders Åslund, Defence Minister Umerov, and others — was that the US intelligence-sharing pause had materially contributed to the loss. The pro-administration counter-narrative was that the salient had been militarily unsustainable since November 2024 and that the pause's contribution was marginal.

The Sumy–Kharkiv summer pressure. Beginning in late April 2025 and accelerating through May–August 2025, Russian forces resumed offensive operations on the Sumy–Kharkiv axis, with the apparent strategic objective of creating a buffer zone along the international border. The Sumy-axis pressure focused on the Yunakivka direction (the territory immediately south of Sudzha, mirroring the geometry that had defined the Kursk incursion); the Kharkiv-axis pressure focused on the Vovchansk and Lyptsi directions. Russian gains through summer 2025 were measured in tens of square kilometres per week — slow by manoeuvre-warfare standards but material in aggregate. The Russian operational logic, as analysed by ISW, RUSI's Jack Watling, and CSIS, was to keep Ukrainian forces stretched while the diplomatic track ran its course, with the objective of presenting Ukraine with a deteriorating battlefield position that would compel acceptance of less favourable terms.

The negotiation-track-versus-battlefield dynamics. The structural feature of the 2025 period is that battlefield momentum favoured Russia while the diplomatic track favoured the Russian framing. The two reinforced each other: Russian negotiators in the Riyadh-Witkoff track could point to continuing battlefield gains as evidence that Russian terms reflected the actual military balance; Russian battlefield commanders could continue operations without facing the diplomatic risk that would have accompanied a Biden-administration response. The Trump-2 administration's response to this dynamic was contested within the administration: Witkoff reportedly characterised the battlefield deterioration as confirming the necessity of a deal sooner rather than later; Kellogg and some Senate-Republican voices including Graham characterised it as evidence that Russian bad faith required harder US pressure. The empirical record through May 2025 indicates that the Witkoff framing dominated the administration's operational decisions; the Graham-Kellogg framing dominated the Congressional-Republican rhetoric.

10. The May 2025 Putin–Trump Calls and the Vance Vatican Detour

The May 2025 Putin–Trump calls and the Vance Vatican meeting with Zelensky mark the inflection point at which the Riyadh-Witkoff track formally yielded to a Russia–Ukraine direct-bilateral framing that would carry through to the June 2025 Istanbul talks and the August 2025 Anchorage summit (both covered in RU-D-06).

The 8 May 2025 call. On 8 May 2025, the eve of Russia's Victory Day (9 May), President Putin and President Trump conducted a telephone call reported at approximately one hour. The Kremlin readout and the White House readout both characterised the call as meaningful; the significant deliverable was Russia's announcement, on 8 May, of a unilateral three-day Victory Day ceasefire covering 8–10 May 2025. Ukraine did not reciprocate; the Ukrainian position was that a three-day ceasefire timed to Russian commemorative purposes provided no operational benefit to Ukraine and was inconsistent with the proposed 30-day full ceasefire that Ukraine had accepted at Jeddah on 11 March. The unilateral Russian ceasefire was widely reported as observed in some sectors and violated in others.

The 19 May 2025 call. [TBD-VERIFY: the question of whether 8 May and 19 May were two distinct Putin–Trump calls or whether some reporting conflates them — multiple Western outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported a roughly two-hour call on 19 May 2025; the Kremlin's official readout for 19 May is the most authoritative reference but should be cross-checked.] The 19 May call, on the publicly available accounts, ran approximately two hours and was followed by Trump's public statement that "Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations" and that "the conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties as it can only be." The considerable significance was the US-side acceptance of a Russia–Ukraine direct bilateral, without continuous US mediation, as the next-stage architecture. The Ukrainian-side response was cautious acceptance: Zelensky indicated readiness for direct talks while emphasising that no territorial concessions were on the table.

The Vance Vatican meeting. Pope Francis died on 21 April 2025 (Easter Monday), and the funeral was held at St. Peter's Square on 26 April 2025 [dates confirmed 2026-08-30 Tier-1 audit via Wikipedia's "Death and funeral of Pope Francis," USCCB, and Vatican.va]. Vice President JD Vance attended the funeral as the US delegation head and used the trip to hold a bilateral meeting with President Zelensky at the Vatican. The bilateral, by all public accounts, was appreciably cordial and resolved the rhetorical residue of the 28 February Oval Office confrontation. The meeting did not produce any specific deliverable, but it re-established a senior US–Ukraine channel at a moment when the Russia-focused Witkoff track was the principal US activity. The structural significance is that Vance — the architect of the 14 February Munich critique of Europe and a principal antagonist in the 28 February Oval Office confrontation — was deployed as the relationship-repair vehicle. Hill in her May 2025 Foreign Affairs essay characterised the deployment as a calculated move to preserve the appearance of normalisation while tangibly maintaining the post-28-February-2025 reduction in US commitment to Ukraine.

The Istanbul track preview. The 19 May call's framing — direct Russia–Ukraine bilateral negotiations — translated into the 2 June 2025 Istanbul Russia–Ukraine talks (covered in detail in RU-D-06). The Istanbul talks produced a prisoner-exchange protocol and a return-of-remains protocol but no concrete ceasefire framework. The US-side role at Istanbul was reduced from mediation to observation; the principal US engagement at Istanbul was conducted through Kellogg and a small State Department team. The 15 August 2025 Anchorage Putin–Trump summit (also covered in RU-D-06) reactivated the principal US engagement, but the summer 2025 period was characterised by reduced US operational involvement in the negotiation architecture.

11. The Sanctions-Relief Sequencing Debate and the Graham–Blumenthal Secondary-Sanctions Bill

The sanctions-relief sequencing debate is the most consequential unresolved policy question of the 2025 bilateral and the structural test of the three interpretive accounts (Realist, Atlanticist, Russian-elite). Documenting the Russian position, the US-business-coalition position, the European frozen-assets position, and the Graham–Blumenthal alternative track is necessary to evaluate the bilateral's real trajectory.

The Russian position. The Russian negotiating position on sanctions, articulated by Lavrov in his post-Riyadh press conference, by Dmitriev in successive Bloomberg and RBC interviews, and by Putin in his 12 February call readout and successive statements, sequences sanctions relief before genuine concessions on territory or security architecture. The Russian framing characterises the post-2022 sanctions architecture as illegitimate Western coercion that must be removed as a precondition to durable settlement. The Russian-side specific demands have included (a) reconnection of major Russian banks to SWIFT, particularly Rosselkhozbank as the immediate ceasefire-linked deliverable; (b) unfreezing of the approximately $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves immobilised in G7 jurisdictions; (c) removal of OFAC SDN designations on individuals and entities; (d) lifting of US export controls on dual-use and consumer-electronic goods; and (e) reversal of the December 2022 oil-price cap. The sequencing logic — sanctions relief first, then negotiation — is in direct opposition to the customary US-and-EU negotiating logic that sanctions are leverage to be relaxed in exchange for actual concessions.

The US-business-coalition position. A coalition of US business interests with pre-2022 Russia exposure — articulated through Wall Street Journal op-eds, Financial Times commentary, and the US Chamber of Commerce's quieter advocacy — urged sanctions easing on a transactional basis to enable joint ventures. The principal exposures included pre-2022 oil-and-gas joint ventures (notably ExxonMobil's pre-2014 Sakhalin and post-2014 limited engagements; Halliburton, Schlumberger oilfield-services exposure pre-2022), industrial joint ventures, and the broader category of consumer-goods and consumer-services firms that had operated in Russia pre-2022 (McDonald's, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, the major US tobacco companies, the major US software firms). The coalition's position was framed not as outright sanctions removal but as transactional easing — partial removals tied to specific commercial deliverables. The framing aligned with the broader Witkoff "deal-making" approach and with Kushner's reported Gulf-Arab business-relationship overlap with RDIF. The Russian-and-business-coalition framing converged on the framework Witkoff was reportedly exploring during his Moscow trips: rare-earth and Arctic-energy joint ventures, RDIF reactivation, partial sanctions easing tied to commercial flows.

The European frozen-assets position. The European frozen-assets position — articulated by President Macron, by the EU Foreign Affairs Council, by successive European Central Bank (ECB) statements, and by Euroclear's own public communications — held that the approximately €210 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves immobilised in Belgium-based Euroclear, plus the smaller amounts in other European jurisdictions and the May 2024 REPO Act US frozen-assets architecture, must be preserved as Ukrainian reconstruction collateral regardless of any US–Russia bilateral track. The June 2024 Apulia G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) loan mechanism — under which approximately $50 billion was extended to Ukraine, repaid from windfall profits on the immobilised Russian assets — established the partial precedent for using the assets without full legal confiscation. The European position through spring 2025 was that any sanctions relief on the central-bank reserves themselves would require either Russian post-war reparations payment or formal Russian Central Bank consent — neither of which was operationally available. The European position effectively imposed a structural constraint on US sanctions-relief flexibility: even if the United States wanted to release Russian assets in US jurisdiction, the much larger European-held assets could not be released without European consent.

The Graham–Blumenthal Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the principal Senate Republican and Democratic Russia hawks, introduced the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 in spring 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: exact introduction date and bill number]. The bill's central mechanism was a 500% secondary tariff on countries purchasing Russian oil, gas, uranium, and other strategic materials — a mechanism designed to force China, India, and other major Russian-energy importers to choose between Russian and US markets. The bill achieved 82 reported co-sponsors by late April / early May 2025, including the bulk of the Senate Democratic conference and a substantial portion of the Senate Republican conference. The White House neither endorsed nor blocked the bill through May 2025; the bill's procedural status was that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) had declined to schedule a floor vote, on what was widely understood to be administration request. The Graham–Blumenthal bill's structural significance is that it represented a Senate-Republican-led alternative track to the administration's Witkoff approach — a track that would, if enacted, fundamentally constrain the administration's negotiating flexibility by establishing secondary-sanctions architecture that the administration could not easily reverse.

The unresolved sequencing question. As of May 2025, the sanctions-relief sequencing question was unresolved. The Russian position (relief first) was unaccepted by the US administration; the US-business-coalition position (transactional easing) was being explored by Witkoff but had not produced concrete easing actions; the European frozen-assets position (preservation as Ukrainian collateral) was holding; the Graham–Blumenthal alternative (secondary-sanctions expansion) was pending Senate action. The unresolved sequencing question is the central determinant of whether the Riyadh track ends in a 2026 settlement, a frozen post-armistice status quo, or a repudiation. The 2026 corpus update will document the resolution.

12. The Strategic-Stability Vacuum — New START Expiration, INF Legacy, and the Successor-Framework Discussions

The strategic-stability vacuum opened by the 5 February 2026 expiration of New START is the longer-arc structural inheritance against which the 2025 negotiation track must be evaluated. Documenting New START's history, the INF and Open Skies withdrawals' residue, and the 2025 successor-framework discussions clarifies what the Witkoff track is and is not addressing.

New START's history and 2021 extension. New START — formally the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms — was signed in Prague on 8 April 2010 by President Barack Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev. It limits each party to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, 700 deployed strategic delivery systems (intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers), and 800 deployed plus non-deployed strategic delivery systems. The treaty's verification regime — including on-site inspections, data exchanges, notifications, and the Bilateral Consultative Commission — was the principal post-Cold-War US–Russia confidence-building architecture. The treaty was ratified by the Senate on 22 December 2010 by a 71–26 vote, with 13 Republican yes votes. The five-year extension was signed on 3 February 2021 by President Joseph Biden and President Vladimir Putin, extending the treaty through 5 February 2026. Russia announced suspension of its participation in inspections and data exchanges on 21 February 2023 (in Putin's Federal Assembly address) while remaining within the deployed-warhead and launcher caps.

The INF residue. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed on 8 December 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It eliminated an entire class of US and Soviet/Russian missiles — those with ranges of 500–5,500 kilometres. The United States announced withdrawal on 1 February 2019 (under the Trump-1 administration), citing Russian violations of the treaty through the development and deployment of the 9M729 (SSC-8) cruise missile. The withdrawal took effect on 2 August 2019. Russia announced its own suspension on the same day. The INF withdrawal's structural significance is that the entire intermediate-range class of US and Russian missiles is now operationally unregulated by treaty; the United States has tested intermediate-range systems (including the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile and ground-launched cruise variants of the Tomahawk) since the withdrawal, with the question of deployment locations (Asia-Pacific; potentially Europe) live.

The Open Skies residue. The Open Skies Treaty, signed on 24 March 1992 and entered into force on 1 January 2002, established a regime of unarmed observation flights over the territories of the 35 state parties. The United States announced withdrawal on 22 May 2020 (under the Trump-1 administration), with the withdrawal taking effect on 22 November 2020. Russia followed with its own withdrawal in late 2021. The Open Skies withdrawal's structural significance is that the multilateral aerial-confidence-building architecture that complemented New START's bilateral verification regime is also now absent.

The 2025 successor-framework discussions. As of May 2025, no Trump-2 / Putin-5 successor framework had been formally tabled. Witkoff's reported soundings on strategic-stability questions during his March and April 2025 Moscow trips were the first US engagement on the post-New-START architecture since early 2023. The framework discussions — to the extent they occurred during the Witkoff shuttle — were exploratory rather than negotiating. The structural complications are several. First, the modern US strategic-stability architecture must address three nuclear powers (United States, Russia, China) rather than the bilateral US–Russia framework of 1972–2021; China's strategic-arsenal growth (from approximately 200 warheads in 2019 to a projected 1,000+ warheads by 2030, per the Pentagon's annual China Military Power Report assessments) makes any bilateral framework structurally incomplete. Second, the verification architecture that New START established cannot be quickly reconstructed; the inspector cadres, the procedural frameworks, and the political-domestic ratification environments require sustained engagement. Third, any successor framework would require Senate two-thirds ratification, which the current partisan environment makes effectively impossible for any treaty that includes significant US concessions. The successor-framework discussions are, structurally, a question that the 2025 bilateral has opened but has not advanced; the 2026 expiration deadline will force decisions that have not yet been engaged.

13. The Contested Role of European Allies — The Macron–Starmer "Coalition of the Willing" and the European Frozen-Assets Position

The European-allied response to the 2025 Trump-2 reframing is structurally the most consequential variable in determining whether the Riyadh track produces a durable settlement or a transatlantic fracture. Documenting the Macron–Starmer "coalition of the willing", the European Council emergency response, the German chancellorship transition, and the European frozen-assets position is necessary.

The 2 March 2025 London summit. Following the 28 February Oval Office breakdown and the 3 March US aid pause announcement, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened the "coalition of the willing" emergency summit in London on 2 March 2025. Attendees included the leaders or senior representatives of approximately 18 countries: the UK, France, Germany (with Scholz as outgoing Chancellor and Merz as Chancellor-designate), Italy (Meloni), Poland (Tusk), the Netherlands (Schoof), Spain (Sánchez), Denmark (Frederiksen), Norway (Støre), Finland (Stubb), Sweden (Kristersson), Canada (Trudeau), the Czech Republic (Fiala), Romania (Ciolacu), Greece (Mitsotakis), Turkey (Erdoğan — [TBD-VERIFY: whether Turkey's representation was at heads-of-government or foreign-minister level]), and Ukraine (Zelensky). The summit produced the Starmer-Macron proposed framework for a UK-French-led "reassurance force" of European troops to support a Ukrainian ceasefire if one materialised. The proposed force would deploy after a ceasefire to deter Russian violations and to provide credible European security commitment to Ukraine. The reassurance-force proposal was the most concrete European policy departure of the spring 2025 period and the principal European answer to the question of how to maintain Ukrainian security without continued US military commitment.

The 6 March 2025 European Council emergency conclusions. The European Council met in emergency session in Brussels on 6 March 2025 and adopted conclusions endorsing increased European defence spending, the ReArm Europe Plan / Readiness 2030 framework (proposing approximately €800 billion in defence-spending mobilisation over four years, including €150 billion in new EU borrowing capacity for joint procurement and €650 billion in member-state spending enabled through fiscal-rules flexibility), and the continuation of European support to Ukraine. The European Council's response represented the most material European defence-spending commitment since the 2014 Wales Summit 2% target announcement. Whether the actual fiscal mobilisation will reach the announced levels remains the open question.

The German chancellorship transition. Friedrich Merz (CDU) became Chancellor-designate following the 23 February 2025 federal election, with the coalition formation extending through April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise dates of coalition formation and the swearing-in]. Merz's policy departures from Olaf Scholz's approach included publicly stating that Germany would need to develop its own nuclear-deterrence options if US extended deterrence was no longer credible, and accepting more rapid Eurobonds-style defence-spending mobilisation. The Merz government's relationship with the Trump-2 administration was the most explicitly tense of any major European government's, with public Merz statements on US reliability that exceeded the rhetorical-departure level of any previous post-1949 German chancellor.

The European frozen-assets position. The European position on the immobilised Russian Central Bank reserves held in Euroclear was articulated through successive statements by the European Commission, the European Council, and individual member-state governments. The position held that the assets must be preserved as Ukrainian reconstruction collateral and could not be released to Russia as part of any US–Russia bilateral settlement that did not include Russian reparations payment or formal Russian consent. The June 2024 Apulia G7 ERA loan mechanism — under which the windfall profits on the immobilised assets are used to repay the approximately $50 billion in loans extended to Ukraine — established the partial precedent for using the assets. The European position evolved through spring 2025 toward greater willingness to consider full legal confiscation, with successive Macron and Merz statements suggesting that the structural-investment requirements of Ukrainian reconstruction made the question of legal confiscation increasingly urgent. The legal question — whether full confiscation is consistent with international law and with the rights of foreign sovereigns under customary international law — remained contested, with the Belgian, German, and French finance ministries variously expressing concerns about precedent. The European position is the structural constraint on any US–Russia sanctions-relief sequencing that would require liquidating the frozen assets.

The reassurance-force track. Through April–May 2025, the UK-French-led reassurance-force planning advanced through staff-level engagement. The proposed force — estimated at approximately 30,000 European troops with US logistical and intelligence support — would deploy after a ceasefire to support Ukrainian security. The principal contributing nations identified were the UK, France, Germany (post-Merz), Poland, the Nordic states, and the Baltic states. Italy and Spain were more cautious. The US administration's position on the reassurance force evolved through spring 2025: initial public statements were ambiguous, but by April–May, the administration had signalled willingness to provide logistical and intelligence support but not US troops on the ground. The reassurance-force planning is, structurally, the European answer to the question of how to credibly secure Ukraine in a Trump-2 framework that has removed NATO membership as the security architecture; whether the force can be operationalised at the scale required, and on the timeline required for any 2025–2026 ceasefire, remains the open question.

14. Domestic US Politics — Congressional Republican Fractures, Rubio's Evolving Position, and the Hill-versus-White-House Tension

The domestic American political environment within which the 2025 US–Russia bilateral has been conducted is itself the most polarised since the early Cold War. Documenting the Congressional Republican fractures, the Rubio transition, and the Hill-versus-White-House tension is necessary to understand the structural constraints on any settlement.

The McConnell-aligned Russia-hawk Senate Republican cohort. A significant cohort of Senate Republicans has maintained a consistently hawkish position on Russia through the 2025 negotiation track. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in his post-leadership role from January 2025 onward, has issued repeated statements characterising the Russia threat in language consistent with his pre-2022 and 2022–2024 framing. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has used his committee platform to maintain the framework of strong Russia-hawk positioning. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have variously aligned with the McConnell framing. Graham's position is the most rhetorically aggressive: through spring 2025, Graham has repeatedly stated that Putin is a war criminal whom the US should be increasing pressure on, not negotiating with — statements that have repeatedly contradicted the administration's negotiating posture.

The Trump-aligned negotiation-supportive cohort. A second cohort of Senate Republicans has supported the administration's negotiation framework. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has supported the Witkoff approach as consistent with a restraintist foreign-policy frame. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), Senator J.D. Vance's former Senate seat (now held by Senator Jon Husted (R-OH) following Vance's vice-presidential elevation), the Senate freshman class of January 2025 (including Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), Senator Bernie Moreno's framing), and additional members have variously supported the negotiation framework. In the House, the Freedom Caucus core (Massie, Greene, Bishop, Roy) has been aggressively supportive of the negotiation framework and aggressively opposed to additional Ukraine aid.

Democratic congressional opinion. Democratic congressional opinion is unified in opposition to the administration's negotiation framework but divided on tactics. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has led institutional opposition, including procedural objections to administration nominees with Russia-policy roles. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) have led the technical critique of the administration's negotiation posture. Progressive members including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT, caucusing with Democrats) have offered critiques that share some elements of the Realist reading (acknowledging the costs of US strategic over-extension) without endorsing the Trump-2 framework.

Rubio's evolving position. Secretary Marco Rubio's transition from his 2014–2024 senatorial record as one of the Senate's most outspoken Russia hawks to his 2025 role as the lead US Russia negotiator is the most studied personnel pivot of the administration. As a Senator, Rubio was the principal author of the 2017 Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), the architect of multiple subsequent sanctions bills targeting Russia and other adversaries, a vocal critic of Rex Tillerson's Russia approach during the Trump-1 administration, and a consistent voice on Senate Foreign Relations Committee for maximalist Russia pressure. As Secretary of State, Rubio has led the Riyadh delegation, defended the Witkoff approach in public statements, and aligned with the administration's negotiation framework. The transition has been variously interpreted as (a) sincere policy evolution reflecting Rubio's encounter with the diplomatic-track realities, (b) institutional loyalty subordinating personal policy preference to executive-branch direction, or (c) tactical positioning for post-2028 political opportunity. Rubio's public statements have not adjudicated between these interpretations; the empirical record indicates that Rubio has consistently executed the administration's negotiation framework while preserving rhetorical space that could allow a return to his prior hawkish position if circumstances changed.

The Hill-versus-White-House tension. The structural tension between Senate Republican hawks and the White House — particularly visible in Graham's repeated public statements that contradict the administration's negotiating posture — is the structural constraint on any settlement that requires Senate ratification. A strategic-stability successor treaty would require two-thirds Senate ratification (67 votes). Any sanctions-relief framework that included statutory components (CAATSA, the Magnitsky Act, the Russia-related provisions of the 2024 Ukraine Security Supplemental) would require either congressional action or executive-action workarounds that the Senate could challenge. The tension has manifested in three specific 2025 episodes: the procedural delays on administration nominees with Russia portfolios, the Senate's continued advancement of the Graham–Blumenthal Sanctioning Russia Act despite the administration's preference for non-action, and the bipartisan letter (signed by approximately 50 senators across both parties [TBD-VERIFY: precise count and signatories]) urging the administration to maintain sanctions pressure. The 2026 midterm elections will be the principal political test of whether the Hill-versus-White-House tension will resolve in favour of the administration or in favour of the hawk cohort.

15. Three-Account Interpretive Frame

The corpus's discipline requires documenting the three principal interpretive accounts of the 2025 US–Russia bilateral with attribution rather than adjudicating between them. The three accounts produce systematically different readings of the same empirical record.

(a) The Realist (Mearsheimer/Kissinger-school) reading. The Realist account treats the Trump-2 pivot as overdue strategic pragmatism. Its core propositions are (i) that Russia is a permanent great power whose security interests must be accommodated to avoid endless conflict; (ii) that NATO expansion to Ukraine — particularly the 2008 Bucharest Summit declaration that Ukraine "will become" a NATO member — was the proximate cause of the 2014 and 2022 wars; (iii) that any durable settlement requires accepting Russian territorial gains in Crimea and parts of Donbas, plus Ukrainian neutrality (non-NATO status); and (iv) that the structural cost of maintaining the post-2022 confrontation — fiscal, military-industrial, alliance-management, and opportunity cost relative to China — is unsustainable for the United States. The Realist account's principal voices include John J. Mearsheimer (University of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001; sustained 2022–2025 commentary), the late Henry Kissinger's pre-November-2023 framing, Stephen M. Walt (Harvard), and selected restraintist commentators including Andrew Bacevich and the Quincy Institute cohort (Trita Parsi, Anatol Lieven, Jessica Mathews). On the Riyadh-track-as-strategic-pragmatism-or-appeasement question, the Realist reading frames Riyadh as correct in form even if Witkoff was suboptimal in execution. On the 28 February Oval Office breakdown, the Realist reading frames the breakdown as a confrontation between an unsustainable Ukrainian maximalist position and the structural realities the Trump-2 team was trying to convey. On sanctions-relief sequencing, the Realist reading supports transactional easing tied to meaningful progress, opposing both the European frozen-assets preservation position and the Graham–Blumenthal escalation.

(b) The Atlanticist (Hill/Stent) reading. The Atlanticist account treats the Trump-2 pivot as appeasement of the kind that produced the 1938 Munich and 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop antecedents. Its core propositions are (i) that Russian aggression is a generative cause of the war, not a response to NATO expansion; (ii) that Putin's stated objectives — denial of Ukrainian sovereignty, reversal of post-Cold-War European security architecture, restoration of Russian sphere-of-influence over former Soviet space — exceed any defensive interpretation; (iii) that sustained military pressure and sanctions maintenance is the only framework that has demonstrably shifted Russian behaviour; and (iv) that the structural cost of conceding to Russian aggression — to Ukrainian sovereignty, to NATO credibility, to the post-1945 international order, and to deterrence of subsequent Chinese moves on Taiwan — exceeds the structural cost of sustained confrontation. The Atlanticist account's principal voices include Fiona Hill (Brookings, Mr. Putin, 2nd ed. 2015; sustained 2022–2025 Foreign Affairs essay output), Angela Stent (Georgetown, Putin's World, 2019; sustained commentary), Michael McFaul (Stanford, former Ambassador to Russia), Anders Åslund, the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center cohort (Daniel Fried, John Herbst), and selected European voices including Edward Lucas (CEPA), Mark Galeotti (RUSI), and Constanze Stelzenmüller (Brookings). On the Riyadh-track-as-strategic-pragmatism-or-appeasement question, the Atlanticist reading frames Riyadh as a strategic gift to Putin whose returns will compound over years. On the 28 February Oval Office breakdown, the Atlanticist reading frames the breakdown as the deliberate or effective surrender of US strategic credibility to Russian advantage. On sanctions-relief sequencing, the Atlanticist reading supports maintenance and expansion of sanctions, alignment with the European frozen-assets preservation position, and selective support for the Graham–Blumenthal framework.

(c) The Russian-elite reading (Trenin / Stanovaya / Kolesnikov). The Russian-elite account is itself bifurcated. The in-Russia Trenin pole — Dmitri Trenin operating from inside Russia, with continued engagement at Russian state-aligned institutions — sees the 2025 track as Russian diplomatic vindication after three years of attrition, and as confirmation of the structural reality that the West cannot indefinitely sustain support for Ukraine. The in-exile Stanovaya / Kolesnikov / Baunov / Samorukov pole — operating from Carnegie's exile structure and from independent commentary platforms — sees Putin as exploiting Trump's transactional impulses while making no real concessions, and as positioned to lock in the post-2022 territorial gains without paying the price of sanctions relief that would actually constrain Russian behaviour. Both Russian-elite poles converge on the assessment that the Trump-2 track is structurally favourable to Russian strategic objectives in ways the Trump-2 team itself does not fully appreciate. The Russian-elite reading on the Oval Office breakdown is the most analytically generative: Stanovaya in her March 2025 Carnegie Politika essay characterised the breakdown as "a moment Putin could not have engineered if he had tried — a public US–Ukraine rupture without any reciprocal Russian concession." The Russian-elite reading on sanctions-relief sequencing is that Russia's principal achievement is not the relief itself but the establishment of the precedent that sanctions can be relaxed without significant Russian concession on territory or strategic posture.

The three accounts applied to the engineered-versus-organic-versus-Putin-win question on the Oval Office breakdown. The Realist reading is generally compatible with the organic account, framing the breakdown as a confrontation of incompatible positions rather than a strategic engineering act. The Atlanticist reading variably supports the engineered and Putin-win accounts, with the engineered reading framing the breakdown as administration choice to break Ukrainian autonomy and the Putin-win reading framing it as effective whether engineered or not. The Russian-elite reading converges on the Putin-win account, treating the engineered-versus-organic question as analytically secondary to the structural effect.

The three accounts applied to sanctions-relief sequencing. The Realist reading supports transactional easing aligned with the Russian-business-coalition position. The Atlanticist reading supports the European frozen-assets preservation position and the Graham–Blumenthal escalation. The Russian-elite reading documents the contestation while emphasising that the principal Russian strategic objective is not specific sanctions relief but the precedent that sanctions can be negotiated.

16. Conclusion and Forward View — The Post-Riyadh Trajectory and the Open Questions

The post-Riyadh trajectory of the 2025 US–Russia bilateral as documented through May 2025 leaves a set of open questions that the 2026 corpus update will need to address.

The negotiation-track trajectory. The 2 June 2025 Istanbul Russia–Ukraine talks, the 15 August 2025 Anchorage Putin–Trump summit, and the subsequent track (covered in RU-D-06) represent the operational continuation of the framework established at Riyadh. As of May 2025, the considerable deliverables of the 2025 track had been minimal: no ceasefire framework operationalised, no sanctions relief implemented, no territorial settlement framework agreed, no strategic-stability successor framework tabled. The track's significance was structural rather than tangible: the re-establishment of US–Russia bilateral engagement as the framework within which the questions would be addressed.

The reconstruction architecture question. Any post-war Ukrainian reconstruction will require funding on a scale (estimates ranging from $500 billion to $1 trillion across the World Bank, EU Commission, and Ukrainian government assessments) that no individual donor can sustain. The funding architecture must address (a) the immediate humanitarian and security-of-supply needs, (b) the medium-term infrastructure reconstruction, and (c) the longer-term integration of Ukraine into the European single market. The principal financing instruments under consideration include (i) the immobilised Russian Central Bank reserves (preserved as collateral or liquidated as principal), (ii) successive EU and US grant and loan packages, and (iii) the 30 April 2025 US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Agreement on critical minerals (the deal that was almost killed on 28 February but signed two months later by Treasury Secretary Bessent and First Deputy PM Svyrydenko on 30 April 2025). The reconstruction architecture question is structurally entangled with the sanctions-relief sequencing question: if the immobilised assets are released to Russia as part of a settlement, the reconstruction funding gap becomes catastrophic.

The contested-frozen-assets endgame. The European frozen-assets position, the US REPO Act architecture, and the Russian-side demand for reserve return constitute a triangular constraint that the 2025 negotiation track did not resolve. The June 2024 Apulia G7 ERA mechanism's continuation through 2026, the European Council's evolving position on full legal confiscation, and the question of whether the United States would block European confiscation as a Russian-side negotiation deliverable are the principal sub-questions. The 2026 corpus update will document the resolution if it occurs; the 2025 documentation establishes the architecture within which the resolution is being negotiated.

The open questions for the 2026 update. Several questions remain explicitly open as of May 2025 and will be the principal subjects of the 2026 corpus update. First, whether the 15 August 2025 Anchorage summit and its successors produced notable ceasefire or settlement deliverables. Second, whether the Graham–Blumenthal Sanctioning Russia Act was enacted, vetoed, or stalled, and the consequences for the negotiation track. Third, whether the strategic-stability successor framework was tabled before the 5 February 2026 New START expiration, and if so, what its concrete content was. Fourth, whether the European reassurance-force concept was operationalised, and if so, at what scale and on what terms. Fifth, whether the 30 April 2025 Reconstruction Investment Fund Agreement was ratified by the Verkhovna Rada and operationalised. Sixth, whether the Witkoff channel remained the principal US–Russia interlocutor, or whether the State Department reasserted institutional ownership of the relationship. Seventh, whether the 2026 midterm elections shifted the Congressional environment in ways that constrained or enabled the administration's negotiating flexibility.

The interpretive question. Whether the 2025 Trump-2 reframing will be retrospectively assessed as strategic pragmatism (the Realist reading), appeasement (the Atlanticist reading), or Russian strategic vindication (the Russian-elite reading) cannot be determined from the 2025 record. The empirical test will be the real outcomes of 2026–2028: the durability of any settlement, the trajectory of Russian behaviour after sanctions relief (if it occurs), the success or failure of European defence-spending mobilisation, the credibility of US extended deterrence to remaining NATO allies, the consequences for Chinese strategic calculation on Taiwan, and the long-arc effect on the post-1945 international order. The 2026 corpus update, the 2027 update, and the post-2028 retrospective will each document one slice of this question. As of May 2025, the question is genuinely open.

Spiral index. This document connects to and is referenced by: US-F-06 (US-Ukraine bilateral; direct companion on the same period); US-F-07 (US-China decoupling; concurrent great-power-policy comparator); US-D-07 (2024 election; immediate antecedent); US-D-08 (Trump-2 cabinet first hundred days; parent governance architecture); US-D-10 (Trump-2 tariff architecture; concurrent transactional comparator); US-C-01 (Trump-1 architecture; antecedent personnel/relational context); US-C-04 (Mueller Report; residue conditioning the 2025 political environment); US-B-06 (2015 JCPOA; comparator for diplomatic-track sequencing); RU-D-06 (Russian-side counterpart; direct mirror); RU-E-04 (sanctions architecture; Russian-side companion on sanctions question); RU-D-07 (Russia domestic politics 2024–2025; Russian-side companion on political environment); UA-F-01 (Ukraine NATO trajectory; long-arc NATO question); UA-D-05 (Ukraine ceasefire negotiations; forward-stub Ukrainian-side companion); IN-F-02 (India-China Kazan reset; forward-stub on BRICS context); US-R-01 (USA Governance Books Canon; bibliographic anchor).

17. Postscript: June 2025 – August 2026 — Anchorage, the New START Lapse, the Iran-War Interruption, and the Post-Riyadh Track by August 2026

Added in the corpus's August 2026 recency sweep (Wave 15), extending the record beyond the May 2025 coverage horizon without revising the analysis in Sections 1–16. Written for consistency with the Russian-side companion document RU-D-06 §14, which supplies this postscript's principal cross-country source base; claims added beyond RU-D-06's own account are independently search-corroborated per claim, with unconfirmed specifics tagged inline.

The Anchorage summit and its aftermath. Answering the first of Section 16's seven open questions, the 15 August 2025 Anchorage (Alaska) summit between Presidents Trump and Putin — previewed at Section 16 as a pending event — took place as scheduled but produced no ceasefire or settlement deliverable: a three-hour meeting ending without a joint statement or press questions, Putin describing the talks as having reached an "understanding" and a "starting point," and Trump countering that "there's no deal until there's a deal" [VERIFIED — converging CNN, CNBC, and Time reporting, 15–16 August 2025]. The summit's principal durable product proved to be rhetorical rather than textual: the Kremlin's own subsequent domestic framing of a "spirit of Anchorage" — a narrative Putin himself conceded, per the Washington Post's 30 June 2026 reporting, did not correspond to any actual concluded deal (RU-D-06 §14.2). This document's Section 15 three-account frame (Realist / Atlanticist / Russian-elite readings) is, on the Anchorage evidence, most consistent with the Russian-elite reading's expectation of engagement used to buy time and manage both Russian domestic-elite and Western expectations rather than to reach a settlement.

New START's expiration (5 February 2026). Answering Section 16's third open question, no strategic-stability successor framework was tabled before New START — the last operative US-Russia strategic-arms-control instrument, capping each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed launchers — expired on 5 February 2026 [VERIFIED — converging Arms Control Association, Foreign Policy, and US Department of State reporting]. Russia had offered, at a 22 September 2025 Security Council session, to continue observing the treaty's central limits informally for a further year on a reciprocal basis; the Trump administration did not formally respond before expiry. On 5 February 2026 Trump stated the United States would instead pursue a "new, improved, and modernized" successor treaty, while Russian officials confirmed on 11 February 2026 that Russia would abide by the central limits informally so long as the United States reciprocated [VERIFIED — converging Arms Control Association and Foreign Policy reporting, February 2026] — leaving the two nuclear states without a legally binding arms-control instrument for the first time since 2010, but with a mutual informal-restraint understanding in place, consistent with RU-D-06 §14.1.

The February–August 2026 Iran-war interruption. The most consequential disruption to the post-Riyadh track in this period was exogenous to it. On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel opened a joint bombing campaign against Iran, named Operation Epic Fury by the US Department of War (Israel's parallel operation, "Roaring Lion") [VERIFIED — converging whitehouse.gov, war.gov, CENTCOM, CSIS, and Hudson Institute reporting, February–March 2026; the operation's scale is documented at US-F-03 §15 and its US-Israel dimension at US-F-04's Wave 15 postscript]. Russia condemned the strikes diplomatically without joining the fighting, while US officials reported Moscow supplied Iran with intelligence on US force positions and concluded a further Russia-Iran arms package (RU-D-06 §14.1) [TBD-VERIFY: precise arms-package value — search-corroborated via Washington Institute tracking per RU-D-06]. For the US-Russia track specifically, the war's effect was administrative: it absorbed the Trump administration's Middle East-facing diplomatic and military bandwidth at the moment the Witkoff channel had reported "productive" Moscow talks (31 January 2026), a mid-March 2026 trilateral round was postponed, and RFE/RL, Fox News, and CNN characterized the Ukraine-Russia track as in a "situational pause" through much of the year (RU-D-06 §14.1) — a pause this document's own Witkoff-shuttle chapters (Sections 8, 10) suggest is consistent with the personalized, envoy-dependent negotiating architecture this document identifies as structurally vulnerable to principal-level distraction.

The state of the track by August 2026. As the Iran conflict showed signs of resolution, the Witkoff-Kushner channel resumed activity on the Ukraine file: President Zelensky met Trump on 28 July 2026, and on 23 August 2026 disclosed the Zelensky-Witkoff-Kushner ceasefire/free-economic-zone/security-guarantees framework (RU-D-06 §14.3; detailed at US-F-06's Wave 15 postscript). On the Russia side specifically, a subsequently reported Witkoff-Kushner visit to Moscow was described in late-August 2026 reporting carried by TASS as postponed for want of a "substantive agenda" [TBD-VERIFY: precise dates — search-corroborated via Bloomberg and TASS, 8–28 August 2026], and Foreign Minister Lavrov reiterated on 14 August 2026 that Russia would not accept a ceasefire that merely freezes the current front line (RU-D-06 §14.3). Of Section 16's seven open questions, the August 2026 record most clearly answers the first (Anchorage produced no deliverable), the second (the Graham-Blumenthal bill remained un-enacted, a pressure instrument in reserve rather than law), and the third (no strategic-stability successor was tabled by New START's lapse); it leaves the sixth (Witkoff-channel primacy) affirmed rather than displaced, and the interpretive question of Section 16 — pragmatism, appeasement, or Russian strategic vindication — exactly as open in August 2026 as this document's May 2025 drafting anticipated it would remain.

Sources

White House, Readout of President Donald J. Trump's Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, 12 February 2025 — the principal US-side readout of the call that opened the Riyadh track. Cross-referenced with the Kremlin's 12 February 2025 Russian-side readout. [TBD-VERIFY: precise URL on whitehouse.gov; the call was widely reported at approximately 90 minutes by Reuters and the Financial Times.]
Kremlin website (en.kremlin.ru), Russian-side readouts of the 12 February 2025, 19 March 2025, and 8 May 2025 Putin–Trump telephone conversations, and the post-Riyadh Lavrov press conference of 18 February 2025; Russian readouts of the Witkoff–Putin meetings on or about 13 March, 11 April, and 25 April 2025. [TBD-VERIFY: precise URLs and the question of whether the May 2025 call was 8 May or 19 May — multiple Western outlets reported a two-hour call on 19 May 2025; some accounts collapse two distinct May calls into one.]
US Department of State, briefings and transcripts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R-FL) on the Riyadh talks of 18 February 2025 and the Jeddah US–Ukraine talks of 11 March 2025; subsequent press briefings by State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce. [TBD-VERIFY: precise URLs on state.gov.]
National Security Council, statements by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz (and from April 2025 forward, his successor; Waltz was removed from the NSA role in the post-"Signal-gate" reorganisation reported in March–April 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: precise date of Waltz transition and the identity of the successor — Rubio reportedly held the NSA portfolio in an acting capacity for a period.]).
Office of the Special Envoy, statements and press readouts attributable to Special Envoy Steve Witkoff following his Moscow trips of February, March, April, and May 2025; Witkoff appearance on the Tucker Carlson programme of 21 March 2025 [TBD-VERIFY: exact date]; subsequent interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
Vice President JD Vance, Munich Security Conference Speech of 14 February 2025; Vatican statements during the funeral of Pope Francis (died 21 April 2025; funeral 26 April 2025) and the related Zelensky meeting [dates confirmed 2026-08-30 Tier-1 audit].
Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment daily reports, January–December 2025, with particular focus on the assessments of the partial 30-day energy ceasefire announced on or about 18–25 March 2025, the April 2025 Kursk Russian reconquest, and the May–August 2025 Sumy–Kharkiv axis pressure (principal authors Frederick W. Kagan, Karolina Hird, Mason Clark, George Barros, Kateryna Stepanenko, and others on the ISW Russia team).
Foreign Affairs essay sequence 2025 — Fiona Hill (Brookings; co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin with Clifford Gaddy, 2nd ed. 2015), Angela Stent (Georgetown, author of Putin's World, 2019), Stephen Sestanovich (Council on Foreign Relations), Liana Fix (CFR), Michael McFaul (Stanford, former US Ambassador to Russia 2012–2014), Samuel Charap (RAND), Sergey Radchenko (Johns Hopkins SAIS), and the Foreign Affairs roundtable essays on the Trump-2 Russia track. [TBD-VERIFY: precise essay titles and publication months.]
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Politika essay output 2025–2026 by the in-exile Carnegie Russia/Eurasia Center — Tatiana Stanovaya, Andrei Kolesnikov, Alexander Baunov, Maxim Samorukov, Mikhail Korostikov, Aleksandr Gabuev, Dmitri Trenin (the latter operating from inside Russia, distinct in framing from the exile cohort).
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), commentary by Mark F. Cancian (military-aid tracker), Maria Snegovaya (sanctions), Seth G. Jones (military balance), Eliot Cohen, and others on the 2025 negotiation track and on the military-balance implications of the aid pause.
Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), commentary by Justin Bronk on the air-defence and air-power dimensions of the 2025 negotiation track; Jack Watling on the ground-balance evolution; Malcolm Chalmers on the broader Euro-Atlantic dimensions.
International Crisis Group, Negotiating a Just Peace in Ukraine briefing series 2024–2025 (principal author Olga Oliker, ICG Europe and Central Asia Program Director through 2024; successor authors 2025).
Atlantic Council, Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) assessments of Russian information operations and disinformation around the 2025 negotiation track; Atlantic Council Eurasia Center commentary by Daniel Fried, John Herbst, and Anders Åslund (Åslund 2025 commentary continued via Project Syndicate and the Atlantic Council).
Lawfare blog 2025, essays by Scott R. Anderson, Jack Goldsmith, and Bobby Chesney on the legal architecture of US sanctions relief, the secondary-sanctions Section 5 / "Defense Bill amendments" debate, and the executive-authority dimensions of the aid pause.
Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports on Russia sanctions — principal continuing reports U.S. Sanctions on Russia (CRS Report R45415, updated continuously 2018–2025) and Russia's War on Ukraine: Financial and Trade Sanctions (CRS In Focus IF12062). Principal analysts Cory Welt, Christopher A. Casey, Dianne E. Rennack.
US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), sanctions actions and designations January–December 2025, including the question of whether new Russia-related designations slowed or stopped during the Riyadh-Witkoff diplomatic window. [TBD-VERIFY: specific OFAC action dates and the comparative pace versus the Biden administration's January 2025 final tranche.]
Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg — contemporaneous reporting on the Riyadh talks (18 February 2025), the Oval Office breakdown (28 February 2025), the Jeddah talks (11 March 2025), the partial ceasefire (25 March 2025), the Witkoff shuttle (February–May 2025), and the May–August 2025 negotiation aftermath.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 (bipartisan secondary-sanctions bill introduced in spring 2025; principal vehicle for the proposed 500% tariff on countries purchasing Russian oil, gas, uranium, and other strategic materials). [TBD-VERIFY: exact bill number and introduction date; widely reported at 82 co-sponsors as of late April / early May 2025.]
President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom, "coalition of the willing" statements at the 2 March 2025 London emergency summit and subsequent statements; European Council emergency conclusions of 6 March 2025.
Crisis Group, ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations), Chatham House, IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) commentary 2025 on the negotiation track.
CNN, CNBC, and Time, contemporaneous reporting on the 15 August 2025 Anchorage (Alaska) Trump-Putin summit, 15–16 August 2025, added for the Section 17 postscript.
Arms Control Association, Russia Proposes One-Year New START Extension (October 2025) and New START Expires As U.S. Urges "Modernized" Treaty (March 2026); Foreign Policy, "New START nuclear arms control treaty expires between Russia, U.S." (5 February 2026); US Department of State, New START Treaty reference page — added for the Section 17 postscript's account of the 5 February 2026 treaty lapse.
The White House and the US Department of War (war.gov), Operation Epic Fury releases, and CENTCOM public-affairs statements, February–March 2026, cross-corroborated with CSIS and Hudson Institute analysis — the naming of the February 2026 US-Israeli operation against Iran, added for the Section 17 postscript. Cross-referenced with RU-D-06 §14.1, US-F-03 §15, and US-F-04's Wave 15 postscript.
Kyiv Independent, Ukrinform, TASS, and Bloomberg, contemporaneous reporting (August 2026) on the 23 August 2026 Zelensky-Witkoff-Kushner framework and the reported postponement of the Witkoff-Kushner Moscow visit — added for the Section 17 postscript. Cross-referenced with RU-D-06 §14.3 and US-F-06's Wave 15 postscript.

US-F-06: US–Ukraine Bilateral 2022–2025 — direct companion; the Ukraine-track companion in the same period.
US-F-07: US–China Strategic Decoupling, Export Controls and Investment Screening 2022–2026 — concurrent great-power-policy comparator.
US-D-07: 2024 Election and the Biden Withdrawal — the immediate political antecedent of the Trump-2 reframing.
US-D-08: Trump-2 Cabinet and First Hundred Days (January–April 2025) — the parent governance-architecture doc.
US-D-10: Trump-2 Tariff Architecture — IEEPA, Section 232, and the Trade War 2025–2026 — concurrent comparator on the Trump-2 transactional frame.
US-C-01: Trump-1 Government Architecture (2017–2021) — antecedent personnel/relational context.
US-C-04: Mueller Report (March 2019) — the 2016–2019 Russia-investigation residue conditioning the political environment of the 2025 track.
US-B-06: 2015 Iran JCPOA — comparator for diplomatic-track sequencing under Obama-2.
RU-D-06: 2025 Trump-2 Russia Negotiation Track — direct Russian-side counterpart.
RU-E-04: Sanctions Architecture and Evasion 2022–2026 — direct Russian-side counterpart on the sanctions question.
RU-D-07: Russia Domestic Politics 2024–2025 (Post-Election and Belousov MoD) — direct counterpart on the domestic-political environment within which Putin received the Trump-2 overture.
UA-F-01: Ukraine's NATO Trajectory 2008–2024 — direct counterpart on the long-arc NATO question that conditions any 2025 settlement.
UA-D-05: Ukraine 2025–2026 Ceasefire Negotiations — forward-stub Ukrainian-side companion (to be written).
IN-F-02: India–China Galwan-to-Kazan Reset — forward-stub on the BRICS-context within which Putin's strategic patience operated (to be written).
US-R-01: USA Governance Books Canon — bibliographic anchor.
CN-F-01: China-Russia no-limits partnership 2022-2026
MX-E-02: US-Mexico Trump-2 tariff confrontation 2025-2026
UA-G-03: Ukraine reconstruction governance Year 4 + minerals fund 2024-2026
US-F-03: The Iran Nuclear File — JCPOA, Withdrawal, and the 2025 Strikes
US-F-04: US–Israel Relations and the Gaza War (October 2023–2026) — comparator on the Trump-2 transactional diplomatic frame and the Witkoff special-envoy method, which also ran the Gaza ceasefire track
RU-D-08: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
US-H-PRES-02: Barack Hussein Obama II
RU-N-01: Russia in International Perceptions — From Transition Hope to Pariah and Pole
RU-K-01: The February 2022 Full-Scale Invasion Decision
RU-O-01: Russia Megatrends — The 2030s Questions
US-A-00: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
US-F-02: US–Russia Relations Across Four Phases (2005–2026) — back-reference added by symmetry sweep; the long-arc frame document this document's 2025–2026 detail nests within.
US-F-01: back-reference added by symmetry sweep