After a long stretch of undeserved patience for the bad faith and brutality of Vladimir Putin, President Trump is now conveying, in action as well as words, that he is done being strung along.
Trump announced Monday that, under a new arrangement, NATO would buy American weapons and pass them on to Kyiv, amounting to billions of dollars in new matériel. Trump said new Patriot batteries could reach Ukraine in days.
Trump also announced his intention to impose new tariffs if there is no cease-fire within the next 50 days, although the details are vague, and he’s made these kinds of threats before.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later said the U.S. could choose to impose either additional tariffs on Russia itself, or sanctions on countries that do business with Russia. The direct tariffs would have minimal effect, but the so-called secondary sanctions could have real bite.
In Monday’s remarks, the president sounded like a man exasperated that he’s put one good offer after another on the table for months, only to watch Putin turn his nose up at every potential deal, and had repeated seemingly constructive phone calls with Putin followed up immediately by Russian barrages against Ukrainian cities.
“I felt that we had a deal about four times, and here we are, still talking about it,” Trump lamented while speaking to reporters alongside Mark Rutte, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Oval Office on Monday. “I thought we should have had a deal done a long time ago, but it just keeps going on and on and on, and every night people are dying. A lot of people — a lot of Russian soldiers are dying, by the way.”
Trump came into office convinced he could quickly cajole Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky into a cease-fire, with almost all the pressure directed at Ukraine. An obvious play for Moscow would have been to use Trump’s appetite for a deal to forge a cease-fire with favorable terms, but Putin clearly hoped he could take Trump for a ride, exploit growing Western divisions, and score a bigger win with continued gains on the battlefield.
The risk was that Trump would eventually cry foul. According to reports, in May, Trump asked his advisers if they thought Putin “has changed since Trump’s last time in office, and expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children.”
He shouldn’t have been so surprised, although it’s possible that Trump is dealing with a Putin with a greater appetite for risk than four years ago, as demonstrated by the scale of his invasion of Ukraine. The Russian leader is likely also influenced by the sunk costs of more than three years of war — likely around 1 million total casualties and more than 250,000 killed in action. (For perspective, the U.S. suffered 58,220 military fatalities during the Vietnam War.)
“He’s fooled a lot of people,” Trump said of Putin on Monday. “He fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me.”
We welcome Trump’s new realism, and hope, for the sake of Ukraine and of Western and U.S. security interests, that it’s enduring.