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Classified U.S. intelligence reports, including one earlier this month, cast doubt on Vladimir Putin's willingness to end the war against Ukraine, assessing that the Russian president has not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating his western neighbor, according to people familiar with the analysis.
One of the secret assessments distributed to Trump administration policymakers, dated March 6, says Putin remains determined to hold sway over Kiev, a person familiar with the document said. Like others in this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence.
The reports are not intended to assess President Donald Trump's high-stakes diplomacy to end the three-year Ukraine war or the prospects of a 30-day ceasefire proposal that U.S. and Ukrainian officials agreed on this week. But they underscore the tough task Trump and his national security team face, and raise the question of whether the White House is misreading Putin's willingness to seek peace.
Putin on Thursday reacted cautiously to the ceasefire proposal. While not rejecting it outright, he hinted that Moscow might place conditions on any agreement. The Russian leader spoke in advance of a planned meeting in Moscow with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the ceasefire plan. Russian troops, meanwhile, appear to be making significant progress in ousting Ukraine from a sliver of territory in Russia's Kursk province that Kiev had hoped to use as a territorial bargaining chip.
Some current and former U.S. officials said that the Russian leader, even if he agreed to a temporary truce, would use it to rest and refit his troops - and was likely to break the terms of the deal by creating a provocation that he would blame on Ukraine.
Other officials said the reports were more cautious on what peace terms Putin might accept. But they acknowledged that there is no sign Putin has relented in his demand that Ukraine be brought into Russia's security and economic orbit. "He has a long-standing desire to restore ‘Mother Russia,'" one official said.
The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
"I don't believe a ceasefire or even a truce or a treaty will be an end to the story," said Eugene Rumer, a former U.S. intelligence official and Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "This is the new permanent standoff between Russia and the rest of Europe."
Other analysts said they thought the talks could yield a positive outcome if Washington and Europe play their cards right.
"For Putin to stop fighting, he has to think he can win in a negotiation," said Eric Ciaramella, who is also a former U.S. intelligence official and Russia expert at Carnegie. "But that doesn't mean he will win. The key to making a favorable and lasting ceasefire deal will be setting up security arrangements for Ukraine that would allow it to rebuild its military strength and deter a renewed attack."
While it is unclear whether Trump was personally briefed on the March 6 intelligence report, the person familiar said it is the type of analysis that has traditionally been shared with the president.
Some of the U.S. assessments on Putin's intransigence have appeared to irk Trump, another person familiar with the matter said. Indeed, Trump and his aides in recent days have raised the prospect of stiff new sanctions on Russia if it refuses to agree to end the war. They have not specified what those sanctions would be, though Trump on Wednesday said they "could be devastating."
"The president desperately wants a deal," the person said. "And the Russians are showing no signs of relenting. They're ramping up their demands."
The ceasefire proposal announced Tuesday after U.S.-Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia would include a 30-day halt in fighting to freeze military positions along 1,800 miles of front lines. It was the latest turnabout in a two-week stretch that saw a near-rupture in relations between Washington and Kiev following a confrontational Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump cut off U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine last week to prod Zelensky to engage in peace talks. Once the agreement in Saudi Arabia was reached, Washington said it was lifting the prohibition on arms and intelligence.
On Wednesday, Trump refused to assess the odds of striking a deal with Putin. "I think it makes sense for Russia," Trump told reporters. "We've also discussed land."
Russia, which seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 before launching a full-scale invasion in 2022, controls about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed four eastern provinces near Russia's borders. Ukrainian officials say they want to restore the totality of the country's pre-2014 borders, although many officials and analysts say it is unlikely to regain Crimea through diplomacy or force.
The contours of an eventual territorial settlement are unclear. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last month briskly rejected a French-British proposal for European peacekeeping troops to deploy to Ukraine to safeguard any peace agreement.
Throughout President Joe Biden's tenure, U.S. spy chiefs said publicly that they saw no sign the Russian leader had scaled back his aims for Ukraine, despite significant military setbacks in the months after Russia invaded in February 2022.
Putin has stated publicly that his terms for a peace deal include keeping full control of the four eastern Ukrainian provinces Russia has occupied, preserving a "land bridge" between Russia and Crimea, and gaining possession of territory that Ukraine currently controls, such as the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. He also wants Ukraine to be nominally independent but subservient to Moscow, a former U.S. official said.
Putin's calculations could change if his military situation begins to deteriorate, the former official said. While much larger and more populous than Ukraine, Russia has seen more than 95,000 of its soldiers killed in the past three years, according to a BBC analysis. Some estimates put the total of killed and wounded near 500,000.
Meanwhile, a European intelligence official, citing intelligence gathered within the past month, said officials in Moscow believe that Trump is weak, lacks a core set of principles and may be open to manipulation.
The European intelligence official said that if a permanent ceasefire is achieved, Moscow probably will revert to "hybrid" or nonmilitary means of undermining Ukraine, as it did in 2014 after it invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine and on through the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Those means include economic and diplomatic coercion; penetrating Ukrainian elites, business circles, security services and the military; and exerting influence through the Russian church in Ukraine, the official said. Russia's leaders have long painted Zelensky as a puppet of the West and tried to undermine his legitimacy.
"The 2022 invasion happened because the hybrid tools did not bring results," the European official said.
Russia has stepped up its use of hybrid techniques in Europe in recent years, attempting an assassination of the CEO of a German arms maker, carrying out arson in Britain and other European countries, and meddling in elections in Moldova.
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