It has now emerged that Trump and Putin have discussed the Ukraine war over the phone, although without further details. But already when the US President took office last week, he described to his Russian counterpart that there are two alternatives for resolving the war: "the easy way and the hard way".
The easy way is likely to involve Russia and Ukraine reaching some kind of agreement at a negotiating table. The hard way implies significantly tightened sanctions and punitive tariffs, Trump and his associates have signaled.
The focus has been set on Russian oil, where Donald Trump has said he is considering getting the oil cartel Opec to lower the price of oil - so that the Russian war effort gets "an immediate end".
"A clear pain threshold"
The air is about to run out of Russia's war economy, after an initial boost. But the country's most important source of income - the export of oil and gas - grew last year.
If Trump tightens the screws properly, he can end both the war and Putin's time in power, argue Yale academics Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian in Time magazine. They liken it to Putin holding a fire in the open fireplace by throwing in living room furniture.
"Oil revenues constitute a clear pain threshold for the Russian economy, and Trump has realized how powerful an influence it can have, in a way that the Biden administration did not", they write.
But it will take time before the situation becomes really acute for Russia, writes analyst Alexandra Prokopenko in Foreign Affairs:
For a while, "the Kremlin should be able to keep its overheated economy from exploding into a full-blown crisis", she believes. "Putin will likely still have enough resources to continue his brutal campaign in Ukraine - and perhaps an incentive to wait out the West."
Carrots and sticks
Regarding the threat of sanctions, Vladimir Putin says that Donald Trump is smart and pragmatic. He says he looks forward to a meeting between them. Russia has a military advantage in the war and is advancing slowly, albeit at the cost of heavy losses.
The US President is also making demands on Ukraine, where continued support is conditional on the country starting to negotiate. He has also opened up for eased sanctions against Russia if the Kremlin does as he wants.
I hope Trump will have to take a tougher stance against Putin when he realizes that Putin has no intention of negotiating seriously, says Oleksandr Merezjko, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament's foreign affairs committee, to The Kyiv Independent.
