With a phone call, Putin appears to change Trump’s mind on Ukraine. Again.

Russian President Vladimir Putin put his relationship with President Donald Trump back on track with a phone call just ahead of Trump’s crucial Friday meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that was meant to include discussions of providing Ukraine with powerful new long-range weapons.

Up until the Thursday phone call, Trump had seemed ready to boost Ukraine’s arsenal and negotiating position with Tomahawk cruise missiles. But in its wake and after the subsequent meeting with Zelensky, Trump played down all talk of the missiles and instead focused on yet another summit with Putin.

It was the latest swing in Trump’s back and forth positions on the Russia-Ukraine war that often change following contact with Putin, who has shown a great deal of skill in persuading the U.S. president to his view of the conflict.

So far, Russia has succeeded in deterring Trump from imposing further sanctions — or sending more powerful weapons to Ukraine — by continually dangling hopes of a peace deal, while it ramps up attacks.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks. I think we’re fairly close to that,” Trump said to journalists as he began his meeting with Zelensky. “We don’t want to be giving away things that we need to protect our country.”

Instead of new support for Ukraine or sanctions on Russia, Trump announced a new summit with Putin — a bonus for the Russian leader — “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end.” There was no talk of Russia curtailing its ongoing bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter.

In a similar fashion, after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in August, Trump abandoned pressure on Russia to agree to a ceasefire, and Moscow intensified its attacks even as Putin ignored U.S. urgings to meet Zelensky.

Trump shrugged off concerns Friday that Putin was again trying to buy more time. He was concerned about it, “but you know, I’ve been played all my life by the best of them, and I came out really well,” he said, adding it was “all right” if it took a little time. “But I think that I’m pretty good at this stuff.”

He blamed the continuing fighting not on Putin’s refusal to offer concessions but on “bad blood” between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, apparently blaming both sides for the “hatred of each other.”

“They have tremendous bad blood. It really is what is holding up I think a settlement,” he said Friday.

It remains unclear what proposals Putin may have made to convince Trump that he could achieve a peace breakthrough by meeting the Russian leader in Budapest. Trump offered no clues when he took media questions with Zelensky in the White House on Friday, simply stating his belief that “I think President Putin wants to end the war,” a mantra he has repeated for months as Putin dragged his feet.

On Friday, Putin told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who will host the summit in approximately two weeks, that U.S. and Russian representatives will now “discuss the algorithm for further action in the context of finding ways to peacefully resolve the Ukrainian crisis” — a formula that did not appear to convey hopes for a rapid solution.

“Zelensky’s tour summed up in one sentence: Putin outmaneuvered everyone again,” wrote Kremlin pool journalist Dmitry Smirnov on Telegram. His comment was reposted by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who has been one of the main points of contact with the Trump administration.

Putin’s “new scenario” to resolve the war was “a face-to-face meeting in Budapest, without the small fry getting in the way,” said the post, once more underscoring Putin’s strategy of deflecting calls for a meeting with Zelensky, and his view that conflicts and spheres of influence should be sorted out by world leaders, without the input of smaller states.

Pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei Markov called the meeting “the peak of personal humiliation” for Zelensky, describing how the Ukrainian president was awkwardly seated with his back to the media while Trump mockingly praised his outfit and then was forced to hold his briefing with journalists outside the White House.

European leaders and Ukraine have warned that Putin does not appear to be serious about a just peace deal and have called for tougher U.S. pressure on Putin and more military support for Ukraine, to increase the costs of the war and convince Putin to halt attacks.

But since Trump’s reelection, Putin has used a toolbox of tactics to bend Trump to his will, employing moments of drama, delaying tactics, bluster, false narratives, boasts that Russia is winning the war, expressions of appreciation for Trump’s wife, and above all flattery.

Putin, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court over the abduction of Ukrainian children and their removal to Russia, also praised first lady Melania Trump for her efforts to return children to their families, although Russian state television has twice aired images of her nude and scantily clad since Trump’s election.

Putin has repeatedly suggested that he would never have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president, an assertion that assumes the U.S. president would have accepted Russia’s highly contentious demands at the time, including rolling back NATO’s presence in Europe to 1997 positions, withdrawing NATO troops and weapons from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and the Balkan countries.

Last week, after the Nobel committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Putin said the body had lost its credibility while extolling Trump’s peace efforts.

In the Alaska meeting, Putin fed one of Trump’s pet theories by telling him that the 2020 election was rigged through mail-in voting, although such a voting practice is widespread in democracies.

In Thursday’s call, Putin also told Trump that the Tomahawks would damage U.S.-Russian relations, dash any chance of a peace deal and make little difference on the battlefield, according to Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov — points that Trump appeared to take to heart.

“I’m not against anything. I’m just saying, it may not be perfect timing, but it could happen in a week or two. But it’s at my option,” Trump told reporters after speaking to Putin.

One of Putin’s key arguments is that Russia is on the cusp of victory and Ukraine should accept Russian terms or face defeat and the loss of more territory. But the war increasingly appears to be at a stalemate.

Russia has made some slow advances over the summer but has failed so far to capture the strategic city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, despite battles going back to the summer of 2024 and massive casualties.

Russia has used this claim of imminent victory to justify its continued maximalist demands in the war including that Ukraine hand over territory not conquered by Russia in Donetsk, permanently renounce joining NATO or any other alliances, and slash its military including a bar on future Western military support — part of Putin’s effort to force Kyiv back into Moscow’s sphere of influence.

Despite Putin’s triumphalist talk, however, Western sanctions against Russia and the mounting costs of the war — with the military and security forces gobbling up about 40 percent of Russia’s budget — have taken a mounting toll on Russia’s economy, as revenue falls and officials warn of the risk of recession.