US President Donald Trump’s negotiating team must not be made up of “choir boys” who fall into the Kremlin’s traps through a lack of preparation and experience, an official who observed previous ceasefire talks with Moscow has warned, The Telegraph reports.

The US negotiators will be ruthlessly exploited by their Russian counterparts if they priorities speed over a durable agreement, said the official, who was close to the implementation of the 2014 Minsk Agreement, which reduced fighting between Ukraine and Russia but failed to end hostilities or prevent the outbreak of a wider war.

Trump issued a call for Ukraine to hold elections before the agreement of a ceasefire, after a US delegation met with Russian officials for the first official talks in Riyadh on Tuesday. It sparked accusations that the US president was adopting Moscow’s key demands before serious negotiations had even begun.

On Wednesday, the president added that “[Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded Trump that he had promised to end the war in “24 hours” and urged the president to “go faster” in an interview with local television.

The US president has a “wish to get a quick fix,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, “and a quick fix that is a shortcut will—even with all the good intent to end the war—in the end prolong it.”

Moscow will seek to delay the implementation of the deal, extracting further concessions from hurried American negotiators while weakening its main adversary in Ukraine.

Declassified CIA briefings from as early as 1953 warn that Soviet officials view negotiations as a chance to exhaust their adversaries rather than an opportunity to reach a broadly acceptable compromise.

“For the Russian negotiator, an agreement reached on Monday is the basis for a renegotiation on Tuesday,” the official said.

“This is not a choir boy’s negotiation. This is tough. This requires preparation and you need to be ready.”

On Wednesday, the Moscow Times reported that Russia’s team for the next phase of negotiations will likely include Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR), Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, and Middle East envoy Mikhail Bogdanov.

“All of this will cost money and resources,” the official said.

Failure to strike a comprehensive deal will encourage further Russian aggression. One tactic used by Moscow’s negotiators is to focus on an extremely narrow element of the deal which has been left unclear, insisting it be raised to the highest levels.

After the Minsk agreement, agreed over just one night in February 2014, they focused on a mundane municipal issue on a small stretch of the front line.

They “started to engage on this and wasted everyone’s time and re-channelled all the attention to this small area along a front of almost 500km, while in all other areas, violations continued, but nobody paid attention to it.”

“The bigger picture of, you know, stabilising and trying to find a way out of the violence was coming completely second or third in the agenda.”

Focus on communication and timetabling

A second tactic was to focus on communication and timetabling rather than substance. Without any clear go-between on the front lines, Moscow and its proxy forces often said they were unable to contact their Ukrainian counterparts to sort out a problem.

A clear method for resolving disputes, likely involving a third-party to convey messages between Moscow and Kyiv, must be established before any deal is signed, or the lack of one will be exploited by Putin, the official said.

Russia’s negotiators in Minsk and the negotiations that followed were extremely well prepared, bringing binders full of documents to the table at a level beyond their Ukrainian, French or German counterparts.

“You would not encounter anyone that was unprepared and would therefore agree to something [without knowing] it would work in their advantage,” the official said.