When will Trump get tough on Putin? Maybe never

By Marc Champion

It’s been 42 days since President Donald Trump gave Russia a 10-to-12 day ultimatum to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face “very severe consequences,” and 229 since he took office boasting could end the war in 24 hours. The result so far: A brutal Russian escalation of its invasion. So, what will it take for Trump to follow through on his repeated threats, made again last week, to start using sticks as well as carrots in his dealings with Vladimir Putin?

You might think that moment was drawing close. In Beijing, Putin seemed to troll Trump, as he admired a military parade of Chinese arms clearly pointed at Taiwan and its US protector. For good measure, he invited North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to share a ride in his armored Aurus Senat limousine, mimicking Trump’s gesture just weeks before in Alaska, when he did the same for the Russian leader in the 10-ton US presidential Cadillac known as “The Beast.”

This rankled, judging by Trump’s reaction on Truth Social, and so it should. Over the weekend, Putin piled on further, firing a record salvo of more than 800 drones and missiles at Ukraine and, for the first time, struck the main government building in Kyiv.

Since his inauguration, Trump has offered Putin most of what he wants in Ukraine. He has flattered, blamed his own country for Russia’s unprovoked invasion, defunded military aid for Kyiv and even — wittingly or not — helped Russia recover lost territory by cutting Ukrainian access to US intelligence at the critical moment.

So what more can Trump plausibly try before acknowledging what should have been clear from the start: that Putin is not interested in peace unless it involves Ukraine’s surrender and Europe’s retreat? Now, as the US President again says he needs to wait and see what Putin wants (really?), Russia has, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, amassed 100,000 troops for a new offensive to take the strategic mining town of Pokrovsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province.

This was all predicted long ago. I wrote from Pokrovsk, soon after Trump’s November 2024 election, to warn against exactly the course he has taken, urging him instead to use the considerable leverage he would have as president to cajole Putin into genuine peace talks.

This remains the best course of action for both Europe and the US, not to mention Ukraine, yet there’s no sign that Trump is interested. When he dialed in to speak with European leaders and Zelenskyy on Thursday, as they tried to nail down plans for an international force to keep any peace brokered by the US, Trump seemed more interested in making sure he didn’t get the blame when none emerges.

Trump reportedly expressed frustration on the call that Europe was still buying oil from Russia. He urged them to stop and to pressure China to do the same, just as the US was pressuring India with punitive tariffs. This is strange on several counts.

First, while it is true that Europe continues to buy oil from Russia, a rerouting loophole is getting plugged and the majority is bought directly by just two countries — Hungary and Slovakia — as a result of an exemption they won in exchange for not blocking an EU ban. Both countries are run by populist, Putin-friendly leaders who are hostile to the EU majority and close to Trump. If anyone can persuade Viktor Orban and Robert Fico to forgo their cheap, piped, Russian oil, it’s the 47th US president.

Equally, Trump hasn’t tried to strongarm China into halting its imports of Russian oil because, as he likes to say, he doesn’t have the cards. He already found out in the initial rounds of a tariff war with Beijing that President Xi Jinping has too many ways of retaliating. If the US isn’t strong enough to force Xi’s hand, then Europe certainly isn’t, as Trump surely knows.

But if these are just excuses for inaction, what explains Trump’s choice of kid gloves when it comes to dealing with Moscow?

One answer (if you discount conspiracy theories) is that he has simply boxed himself into a corner, much as he did on the Epstein files. Having fired up his base with the accusation that Democrats were hiding a list of people to whom Jeffrey Epstein had pimped underage girls, Trump paid a political price when his administration said it had looked everywhere and found no list.

Trump has also spun a tale about Ukraine. It is, the narrative goes, a corrupt place, far away, irrelevant to US interests and doomed to surrender sooner or later, because Russia is simply bigger and stronger. Moreover, the conflict is anybody’s fault but Russia’s. It was started by NATO, former US President Joe Biden, or the Ukrainians themselves — take your pick — just not Putin, the man who gave the order to invade. The US, according to this ghoulish fantasy, has wasted vast sums of taxpayer money that was needed at home. Luckily, as soon as Trump was president and could get in a room with Putin, this needless war would be over.

That hasn’t worked out, because Putin did start the war and has so far failed to achieve his goals. Pokrovsk has been under siege for the best part of a year and with the US now chasing shadows crafted in the Kremlin, he has his best chance to succeed in taking it. There is no reason to stop and make peace.

I suspect that at some level Trump understands the trap he fell into. That's why he has raised tariffs on India, citing its purchase of Russian oil. Over the weekend, he also told reporters he was ready to move to a second phase of sanctions against Russia. Still, the US president gave no indication of when or how he planned to do this, or that he grasped that changing Putin's calculus will require a broad change of his strategy that goes well beyond economic pressure.

Trump's preference remains to wash his hands of Ukraine and leave it to Europe, because he seems to believe — as did former US Secretary of State James Baker at the start of the 1990s Yugoslav wars — that the US doesn’t “have a dog in that fight.” If that’s the case then he, like Baker, is wrong. As that war, World Wars I and II, North Korea’s deep involvement in Ukraine and last week’s summit and military parade in Beijing demonstrate, what happens in Europe rarely stays in Europe.