President Trump has described President Vladimir V. Putin as “savvy” and “genius” for invading Ukraine, while bragging about his “very, very good
relationship” with the autocratic Russian leader.
Trump has helped the Kremlin recast Ukraine as the villain rather than the victim in the war, and has publicly berated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office and blamed him for starting the conflict and undermining peace negotiations.
But four months into his term, Trump’s preference for praising and excusing Putin has not stopped the bloodshed in a war he once bragged he would end in just 24 hours.
After weeks of Trump claiming he could leverage his relationship with the Russian leader to bring peace, Putin’s continued aggression has prompted even Trump to question whether he has been strung along.
“We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not and if he is we’ll respond a little bit differently,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed at what happened, a couple of nights now where people were killed in the middle of what you would call a negotiation.”
After a call between the American and Russian leaders last week yielded no breakthroughs, Trump appeared ready to distance himself from negotiations altogether and said it would be up to Russia and Ukraine to stop the fighting.
Russia then, over the weekend, unleashed one of its largest aerial campaigns against Ukrainian civilian targets. That prompted Trump to describe Putin as “absolutely CRAZY!” and to warn that Russia was “playing with fire.” Putin’s spokesman in turn dismissed Trump’s comments as an “emotional reaction.”
It is unclear that the friction signals a fundamental breach between Trump and the Russian president. Putin has been a central character in both of Trump’s terms in office — Trump suggested in 2018 that he believed his Russian counterpart more than US intelligence agencies about whether Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election — and Trump has often spoken admiringly of Putin.
And although Trump has hinted at the possibility that he could impose a new round of sanctions on Russia if Putin does not budge on peace talks, he has yet to take any action. Trump said on Wednesday that he was still intent on negotiating with Russia and he wanted to see how talks played out over the next two weeks.
“At this point we’re working on President Putin and we’ll see where we are,” Trump said.
But Trump is facing growing pressure to take a harder line. A chorus of foreign policy experts and members of Congress says it has seen enough to conclude Trump is the one getting duped.
Senate Republicans have increasingly called on Trump to ditch his friendly approach to Putin and impose penalties on Russia. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a close Trump ally leading a bipartisan push to place sanctions on Russia, has argued Mr. Putin is “playing us all.”
“The president is the last one to figure out that Vladimir Putin doesn’t want a peace deal, that he’s playing for time, and he’s been playing the president, and it’s about time the president wakes up and understands that,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
The White House declined to answer specific questions about how Trump would proceed with Putin or the effectiveness of his approach thus far.
“President Trump has been clear he wants to see a negotiated peace deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement, which also cast blame on the Biden administration. “President Trump has also smartly kept all options on the table.”
Until now, Trump’s preferred option appeared to be enticing Putin. After publicly berating Zelenskyy, Trump sent a personal emissary to Moscow, Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer serving as his special envoy, to negotiate with Putin. Witkoff picked up Mr. Trump’s rosy language, saying that he spent the meeting developing “a friendship, a relationship” with Putin.
After his clash in the Oval Office with Trump, Zelensky has refrained from criticising Trump’s approach, making it difficult for the administration to use him as a scapegoat. Zelenskyy this week called for himself, Trump and Putin to have a three-way summit, something Trump said he was willing to participate in if necessary. For now, he said, the administration was focused on speaking with Putin.
At the same time, Trump has shown little willingness to send additional foreign aid or weapons to bolster Ukraine.
Trump at times has approached Putin as if they have a shared bond.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said of the Russian president as he sat alongside Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, alluding to the investigations into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with what the intelligence agencies determined had been a Russian operation to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favour.
This year, Trump dismantled the Justice Department effort to collect evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine for eventual prosecution in international courts.
The result is a more emboldened Putin with little incentive to end the war, according to foreign policy experts, an outcome they argue Trump should have been anticipated.
“It does sound like from his various comments that Trump is starting to understand what was clear from the beginning of all of this, which is Russia is the problem here,” said Richard Fontaine, who is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former Republican national security official. “Russia is the obstacle, Russia is the reason this war started in the first place, not Ukraine.”
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supports taking a more hard-line stance against Russia, welcomed Trump’s “acknowledgment that Vladimir Putin is a brutal dictator — a fact that Ukrainians have been living with every day since Russia’s unprovoked invasion began.”
But Trump has made threats of economic penalties against Russia before, only to back off. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Trump’s recent comments about Putin represent a “change of words, not a change of actions.”
“There are things he can do right now — sanctions is one, but also giving the Ukrainians what they need to defend themselves,” Meeks said. “He’s been played by Putin for a long time. He’s been played by Putin from the very beginning.”
Meanwhile, Russian forces are advancing on Ukrainian battlefields at the fastest pace this year. They are bombarding Ukrainian cities with some of the biggest drone and missile strikes of the war. They have even opened another front in northern Ukraine. The Kremlin’s summer offensive appears to be underway.
Military analysts say it is clear that Russian forces this month began their latest concerted attempt to achieve a breakthrough, even as Moscow’s representatives have engaged in the first direct peace talks with Ukraine since 2022.
In particular, Russian forces are pushing into the remaining Ukrainian-controlled territory in the Donbas area in the east, in the fourth year of a conflict that has become a war of attrition. They used the winter lull to build up equipment reserves, improve battlefield communications and tweak the tactics and technical abilities of attack drones, the military analysts said.
Despite some localised battlefield successes, the pace of Russia’s advances remains slow, and few analysts expect it to achieve a decisive victory this summer that would reshape the war.