President Donald Trump took what arguably could be his fiercest criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin during his Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

“We get a lot of bull**** thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

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The comments come after the U.S. decided to temporarily halt military aid shipments to Ukraine last week. In the days that followed, the president spoke with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and he publicly rebuked the Russian leader afterward while saying his conversation with Zelensky went well.

On Monday, Trump announced that the United States would be resuming defensive aid shipments to Ukraine.

“We’re not happy with Putin,” Trump said. “I’m not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now, since he’s killing a lot of people, and a lot of them are his soldiers, his soldiers and their soldiers mostly, and it’s now up to 7,000 a week, and I’m not happy with Putin.”

Trump added: “I will say this: The Ukrainians, whether you think it’s unfair that we leave all that money or not, they were very brave, because somebody had to operate that stuff. A lot of people I know wouldn’t be operating it. They wouldn’t have the courage to do it. So they fought very bravely. But we gave them the best equipment in the world.”

Ukraine’s primary defensive needs are air defense systems to fend off incoming drones and missiles. Such equipment is hard to replenish and expensive. Defense Department officials said the pause of U.S. assistance was done in accordance with a review of all U.S. foreign aid and the impact on existing U.S. stockpiles.

Top Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell alleged last week that the previous administration did not adequately track U.S. aid to Ukraine, prompting the shortfall.

“I think that for a long time, four years under the Biden administration, we were giving away weapons and munitions without really thinking about how many we have,” Parnell said Wednesday.

Trump, who was flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during the Cabinet meeting, declined to answer who called for the aid to be halted, responding to a question, saying, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

Trump came into the White House in January with a goal of quickly ending foreign conflicts abroad in his dealmaker-in-chief mentality that has permeated his two terms. The U.S. has not made much progress on negotiations in the Trump administration’s first roughly six months.

UKRAINE EMPHASIZES NEED FOR AIR DEFENSE IN WAKE OF US AID BEING WITHHELD

The administration has argued restarting diplomatic overtures with Moscow was a positive, given the state of U.S.-Russian relations since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, though Putin has maintained his hard-line position in negotiations, which calls for Russia to meet all of its military objectives diplomatically.

The U.S. has been one of Ukraine’s biggest backers in the war, but the Trump administration has demonstrated that its goal is a peaceful resolution to the conflict, not necessarily Ukrainian battlefield successes.