For President Vladimir V. Putin, one phone call marked a turning point as great as any battle in his three-year war.
In a lengthy call on Wednesday, President Trump delivered a message to Mr. Putin that encapsulated much of how the Russian leader sees today’s world: that Russia and the United States are two great nations that should negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly and move on to addressing even weightier global affairs.
It was the clearest sign yet that Mr. Putin, despite Russia’s disastrous failures at the outset of his Ukraine invasion in early 2022, could still emerge from the war with a redrawn map of Europe and an expansion of Russia’s influence in it.
The call came on the same day that Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership. It also came as the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as sympathetic to Mr. Putin, as the next director of national intelligence.
Taken together, the developments marked a payoff for Mr. Putin’s monthslong campaign of lavishing praise on Mr. Trump — apparently in the belief that the American president has the power to deliver a Russian victory in Ukraine.
“Putin is playing a very clever game,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said. “He’s investing 100 percent into the effort to seduce Trump.”
In Moscow, news of the long-awaited call ushered in a wave of barely contained glee. Commentators claimed that the American-led three-year effort to isolate Russia had emphatically ended. They celebrated Mr. Trump’s glowing social media post after the call about “the Great History of Our Nations” and noted that the American president had spoken to Mr. Putin before he had called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
One Russian lawmaker said that Mr. Putin’s call with Mr. Trump “broke the West’s blockade.” Another said that Europeans were surely reading Mr. Trump’s post about it “with horror and cannot believe their eyes.” A third said it was a “day of good news.”
In a sign of the burst of optimism, Russia’s main stock market index jumped 5 percent on Thursday morning to its highest point since last summer, and its battered currency, the ruble, gained against the dollar to its strongest level since September.
Russian businesspeople hope that a peace deal with Mr. Trump could lead to sanctions against their country being dropped. The Kremlin said that, beyond Ukraine, Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin touched on “bilateral Russian-American relations in the economic sphere.”
Not all were happy. Some Russian cheerleaders of the war grumbled on social media that a deal with the United States could sell out the soldiers on the battlefield. A pro-war blog with more than a million followers, Two Majors, quoted a fighter who said that the discussion of Wednesday’s call “demoralizes and irritates me.”
Ms. Stanovaya and many other commentators noted that Mr. Putin’s chances of getting all he wants were far from assured. In particular, while Mr. Trump appears focused on ending the fighting in Ukraine, Mr. Putin wants a broader agreement with the United States that would push back NATO and allow Russia to reclaim a sphere of influence in Europe.
“Donald Trump spoke in favor of a speedy end to hostilities,” the Kremlin said in its summary of the call, hinting at that divergence. “Vladimir Putin, for his part, mentioned the need to eliminate the root causes of the conflict.”
The call sets up a complex negotiation whose contours — and participants — are still unclear. Mr. Zelensky will try to make the case for American support in a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance in Munich on Friday.
Mr. Putin is likely to keep the military pressure on Ukraine while appealing to Mr. Trump’s ambitions as a peacemaker. Analysts say that what Mr. Putin cares about most is not how much territory he captures in Ukraine; rather, he wants a more comprehensive deal that keeps Ukraine out of NATO, limits the size of Ukraine’s military and reduces the Western alliance’s presence across Eastern and Central Europe.
Analysts doubt that Mr. Putin will agree to stop the fighting before he receives assurances that at least some of those wider demands will be met.
Ilya Grashchenkov, an analyst of Russian politics based in Moscow, said that the call with Mr. Trump made Mr. Putin’s repeated doubling down on the Ukraine war “look like a successful bet in a casino.”
Russia absorbed huge losses in Ukraine, gambling that, eventually, “the global paradigm would change” and the West would tire of supporting the country, Mr. Grashchenkov said in a phone interview. “This change has happened, and now it is unclear how this bet will play out in the future.”
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
