US-Russia relations – Trump in fantasyland

The first time Donald Trump assured the world that he could end Russia’s devastating all-out war on Ukraine in a day was on March 5, 2023, when he was campaigning for re-election to a second term. “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the war settled. It will take no longer than one day,” he told a cheering crowd.

The one-day solution promise to end a war, which at the time had just entered its second year, became a routine part of speeches in a campaign he won in 2024. Trump stressed that he based his prediction on good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. US military experts and diplomats familiar with Russia scoffed at the claim. America’s European allies shrugged it off as campaign hyperbole.

The biggest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II continued without a halt. Ceasefire negotiations failed.

It took Trump 812 days from his first one-day promise to admit that he had misjudged his influence on Putin. After voicing frustration in a series of social media statements, he wrote on May 25: “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY, needlessly killing a lot of people as missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”

That followed what the Ukrainian government described as the biggest Russian drone attack since the start of the war in 2022. Overnight, Russia launched 355 drones, following up on 298 the previous night.

Just a week before, Trump had a two-hour telephone conversation with Putin to bring about a ceasefire. Putin did not agree, but both he and Trump said Russia and Ukraine would soon start talks towards a future peace.

After the conversation with Putin, Trump arranged a conference call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, Finland and the European Union. If they expected that Trump would announce concrete steps to tame the Russian leader, they were disappointed.

While the European Union, a solid backer of Ukraine, has slapped new sanctions on Russia in response to Putin refusing a ceasefire, Trump threatened to step up existing sanctions and impose tariffs on Russia but has not acted so far.

A bipartisan bill in the 100-seat Senate to impose additional sanctions on Russia has won 81 co-sponsors – a rare feat in deeply divided America – but Republican leaders are waiting for endorsement from the White House.

It took a prominent Democratic senator to spell out what most experts in the US and Europe have been thinking for years. “Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle,” Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “He keeps extending the time because he sees time as being on the side of Russia.”

The way Trump is handling Russia looks like the geopolitical equivalent of the way he has been handling the global tariffs he imposed on April 2, “liberation day” as he put it. His on-again, off-again tactics earned him a nickname from Wall Street he deeply resents: TACO.

It stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. A reporter who mentioned the term in a press conference earned a stern rebuke: “nasty question.”

One possibility Trump has mentioned in the first 100 days of his second term is for the US to walk away from negotiations and let Zelenskyy and Putin sort it out between them. It is open to conjecture whether that would mean a halt to the supply of weapons and intelligence support. The US has been the main supplier of both.

Europe has been stepping up military support. Germany, the second biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the US, changed its long-standing policy on how its weapons can be used.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in a decision that highlighted hardened resolve to back Ukraine, lifted long-standing restrictions on the range of German-delivered missiles. The new policy means that Ukraine can reach targets deep inside Russia. Merz did not mention a weapon high on the Ukrainian wish list – the Taurus missile, which has a range of 500 kilometres.

But the German defence ministry said it would finance the production of long-range weapons systems in Ukraine, and “the first of these systems could be deployed by the Ukrainian armed forces in just a few weeks.”

Ukrainian and Russian officials met in Turkey earlier in May for the first direct peace talks since the Russian invasion. No decisions came out of the meeting, but another one is scheduled for Istanbul early in June. Expectations for a breakthrough are low, and Trump himself has asserted that “nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together.”

Both in his first term and the first three months of his second, Trump has spoken of his good relationship with the Russian leader, which appears to be the reason he was so confident he could solve the conflict in one day.

It’s worth noting that Trump is not the first American president who saw Putin through rose-tinted glasses. At a summit meeting in Slovenia in 2001, George W. Bush said of the ex-Soviet spymaster, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Almost a quarter century later, Putin retains the ability to impress senior American officials. In March, Trump sent a special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to gauge the mood in the Kremlin at a time when Washington appeared receptive to Moscow’s version of the reason for its war.

Witkoff, a real estate investor and friend of Trump, met Putin and told a US television anchor later he had “liked” the Kremlin leader. “I thought he was straight up with me. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.”