A month ago, this would have been celebrated as an encouraging signal that President Donald Trump’s promise to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine was on the verge of being fulfilled.

But after bilateral phone calls, preliminary peace deal drafts, and mediated meetings in Saudi Arabia all ended with Russia instantly reneging on basic steps toward a ceasefire, Dmitriev’s visit feels more like a mocking victory lap.

In fact, Russia’s short-term goals have completely left the realm of peace in Ukraine. Initial discussions seeking an immediate end to the invasion were replaced with preliminary suggestions for limiting hostilities.

Those suggestions were replaced by Russian demands to lift Western sanctions before talks could move forward.

Now, the Kremlin is postponing the idea of peace talks altogether and seeking instead to “normalize” its relationship with the U.S. as if nothing ever happened.

“Putin retains maximized goals, and his long-standing objective, which he has not abandoned, is to make Ukraine a vassal state and to more broadly restructure the security order in Europe and Ukraine is at the heart of that latter ambition,” said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “He’s still in pursuit of those goals despite his military struggles in Ukraine.”

Putin “believes time is on his side,” Hardie continued. “The military situation is trending in his favor, and he is also kind of dragging out negotiations because he thinks that he can keep pressing his battlefield advantage and capturing more territory and gain more leverage at the negotiating table.”

Trump’s inability or unwillingness to exert control over the peace process has been evident in the vastly different rhetoric coming from Washington and Moscow.

On March 19, White House officials said peace in Ukraine has “never been closer” as they prepared for a meeting with Russian envoys in Saudi Arabia. That meeting soon established a limited ceasefire on energy infrastructure and outlined peace on the Black Sea — both of which were immediately breached by Russian forces.

Just over a week later, Putin told the International Arctic Forum in Murmansk, Russia, that “there are reasons to believe that we will finish [Ukraine] off.”

These setbacks irked Trump, who said he was “pissed off” with Russia stalling on a peace deal. The president warned that if he thinks it’s “Russia’s fault” that he is “unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine,” he was prepared to issue secondary tariffs on the nation’s oil exports.

Unbothered, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cautioned the very next day that the end of hostilities would be a “time-consuming process.”

And now, Dmitriev is in Washington, not to broker peace, but to get friendlier with U.S officials and normalize bilateral relations.

The chasm of dissonance in rhetoric and attitude makes clear Putin has no sincere desire to let his invasion end — a military campaign that continues to reclaim lost territory and push forward its front lines.

Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes the purpose of Russia’s obfuscation is simple: Russia benefits from a longer war.

“From Russia’s perspective, there’s this idea that you can continue to have peace talks with the United States and advance the U.S.-Russia bilateral agenda, to try to normalize relations, to ask for sanctions, relief, and so on, without a full ceasefire,” Fix said. “That’s what they’re hoping to achieve because a full ceasefire is something that Moscow doesn’t see in its interest now, given that it is on a stronger footing right now in Ukraine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has long urged Trump and other U.S. officials to recognize that Putin is “looking for excuses to drag this war out even further.”

“For several weeks now, there has been a U.S. proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, and almost every day, in response to this proposal, there are Russian drones, bombs, artillery shelling, and ballistic strikes,” Zelensky said last month in a video posted to social media.

The dire situation is all the more frustrating for Zelensky due to the fact Trump treated the Ukrainian prime minister as a hostile actor when their visions for peace conflicted in February.

Zelensky was unceremoniously tossed out of the White House following a televised disagreement with Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, during which the U.S. leaders accused him of being ungrateful and demanding too much.

Now, Trump is forced to come to Zelensky’s defense as Putin offers more and more demands for a ceasefire, including the Ukrainian president’s resignation.

“I was very angry, pissed off when Putin started getting into Zelensky, his credibility, and started talking about new leadership in Ukraine,” Trump said.

“The aims on both sides are just completely different,” Fix said of the negotiations. “The Trump team wants a ceasefire, they don’t care about anything else. They just want the fighting to stop for a certain period of time to say, ‘We ended the war.’ They don’t care about long-term security guarantees, they don’t care about the postceasefire order that will emerge — they just want, literally, people to lay down their arms.

“Russia doesn’t want the ceasefire,” Fix continued. “They want to limit U.S. reach in Europe, they want to limit NATO reach in Europe, they want to roll back the advancement of NATO in the last decades, they want Ukraine to be neutralized as a country, so those are much broader aims.”

It is highly unlikely that Dmitriev will leave Washington having brought his country any closer to a peace deal it does not even want. The question is how much longer Trump is prepared to let Russia waste his time before “secondary sanctions” go from threat to reality.

“Moscow may actually underestimate right now that there’s not little patience in the White House and that having a full ceasefire is for Donald Trump a major aim of his policy,” Fix said.

Even if the sanctions come down on Russia soon, Hardie said he does not believe sanctions and economic leverage alone will be a simple solution.

“I don’t think sanctions or any economic tool alone is going to be the end-all-be-all,” he told the Washington Examiner, acknowledging that “even if it doesn’t make Putin budge, at the very least, it might reduce the amount of time that Russia’s economy can continue to sustain the war.”

KREMLIN WARNS UKRAINE PEACE WILL BE ‘TIME-CONSUMING’ BUT PUTIN ‘OPEN’ TO TRUMP TALKS

Russia was not included in the list of 180 countries targeted for retaliatory tariffs Trump unveiled Wednesday at the White House.

That was because “sanctions from the Ukraine war have already rendered trade between the two countries as zero,” a White House official told the press.