In a Truth Social post after a major Russian aerial assault on Ukraine, Trump laments that Vladimir Putin is not the Vladimir he used to know.

No, “something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” It seems that Putin “is needlessly killing a lot of people,” and “missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”

None of this, of course, is a sign of a new, more bloodthirsty Putin; he’s the same guy who launched a second, brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, following up from his initial invasion in 2014. His goal is shameful — to bring a functional end to Ukraine as a sovereign country — but it isn’t irrational. If he’s miscalculated along the way, Putin hasn’t acted like a madman, and his latest assault on Ukraine is of a piece with his broader campaign and entirely in keeping with the incentives that Trump has set up for him (there’s zero cost to his intransigence).

At this rate, Trump is going to have a lot more reason to be disappointed by Vladimir.