Putin shows his true colours, but will Trump see them?
Blind Freddy can see that Putin is not interested in a ceasefire, much less a peace deal with Ukraine at a time when he believes he is slowly winning the war.
Trump appears to have belatedly reached the same conclusion, saying that he is ready to impose more sanctions on Russia, but giving no further details.
The key question is how Trump will react to Putin after another week of being poked in the eye by the dictator. Putin’s decision to launch more than 800 drones and 13 missiles on Ukraine follows his chummy meeting with China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in China, prompting Trump to claim each was “conspiring” against the US.
So will Trump continue to appease Putin and give him another unenforced “two-week deadline” to prove that he wants peace?
This is unlikely because each missed “deadline” is increasingly embarrassing for Trump when every major European leader, and most of Trump’s own Republican Party, believe Putin is stringing the President along.
Will Trump lose his temper and finally treat Putin with the contempt he deserves by slapping primary and secondary sanctions on Moscow to try to weaken the Kremlin’s wartime economy?
Maybe, but this would require a complete transformation by Trump in his assessment of Putin, a man he has always claimed to have a special personal connection with.
Even if Trump does do a backflip on Putin, what does this mean in practice? Trump is limited in his ability to impose painful new direct sanctions on Russia, given that so many have already been imposed by the Biden administration since the war began.
Trump has threatened broad secondary sanctions on those countries that still import Russian oil. But the President’s decision to impose an eye-watering 50 per cent tariff on Indian imports as punishment for buying Russian oil has backfired, pushing the traditionally non-aligned India away from the West. The optics of Indian leader Narendra Modi cosying up to Putin and Xi in China last week amid doubts about a leaders meeting this year of the four-nation Quad has damaged the West’s ability to harness India in its containment strategy towards China.
Meanwhile, Trump has refused to follow through on his threat to impose secondary sanctions on China – despite its large imports of Russian oil – because he fears it will weaken his ability to strike a separate trade deal with Xi.
Beyond sanctions, it is difficult for Trump to suddenly increase direct US military support for Ukraine given that he campaigned against it and given the isolationist views of his MAGA support base.
The most Trump could do is to persuade European nations to lift their purchases of US military equipment, which they can then provide to Ukraine. But this ultimately means less military support for Ukraine than it received when the US was also providing direct military aid.
It is always possible that Trump will do none of these things and will simply walk away from the role of trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine.
Putin has shown with his ever-larger attacks on Ukraine that he does not fear whatever Trump can throw at him. Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska last month achieved the dictator’s aim of buying time from the President while at the same time pretending to support low-level ceasefire negotiations with Ukraine.
Since then Putin has walked away from his reported agreement to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and has refused to give any ground on Russia’s conditions for ending the conflict. The latest example was Moscow warning that it would never agree to European troops being stationed in Ukraine under a ceasefire deal. This statement came after 26 European nations last week pledged their willingness to contribute troops to such a force if needed.
The Western world has waited for months for the moment when Trump finally loses patience with Putin. This massive attack on Ukraine is another sign of Putin’s disdain for the peace process and another reason for Trump to finally turn on him.
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