The US president will only get the peace deal he so desires by playing hardball with the Kremlin

Con Coughlin Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor

28 May 2025 6:13pm BST

Donald Trump has warned Russia that it is “playing with fire” by persisting with its military offensive against Ukraine. This is all very well, but his threat will count for nothing unless it leads to the White House adopting a more robust attitude in its dealings with the Kremlin.

Among the worst features of Trump’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict has been his inability to maintain a consistent line towards Vladimir Putin. One minute he is praising the Russian autocrat as being a “smart” guy with whom he can do business. The next he is berating Putin for being “absolutely crazy” for maintaining Russia’s missile and drone attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.

The constant fluctuations in Trump’s approach to Russian aggression are all part of his unconventional effort to bring hostilities in Ukraine to an end.

The American president’s boast that he would end the fighting within 24 hours of taking office was patently absurd. But the official position of the Trump administration remains that it is committed to ending the conflict, even if this requires Ukraine to make a number of unpalatable territorial concessions.

Despite formulating an outline peace deal, which was widely condemned for rewarding Russian aggression, the penny finally seems to have dropped for Trump and his senior national security team that Putin has no genuine interest in seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

All the indications suggest that Putin’s desultory engagement in Trump’s peace efforts are little more than a blatant attempt to play for time to enable his forces to achieve tangible gains on the battlefield.

Arguably Putin’s most telling comment on the conflict since Trump took office was made in a documentary broadcast on Russian state television earlier this month to mark his 25 years as president. He declared that Russia had the “strength and means” to push the Ukraine conflict to its “logical conclusion”.

That certainly appears to be the approach Russian forces have adopted in recent months on the battlefield. All the indications are that Moscow, far from giving serious consideration to agreeing a ceasefire, has intensified its military effort.

Last weekend saw the Russians launch one of their largest combined aerial assault on Ukraine since its invasion in February 2022. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that Moscow is “preparing new offensive operations”.

The Russians appear to be making territorial gains in the north-eastern region of Sumy, where they are attempting to create “buffer zones” along the border to prevent Ukraine from launching any fresh Kursk-style operations to capture Russian soil.

Trump has been forced to concede that, despite his administration’s attempts to negotiate a ceasefire, the Russians have shown no real interest in agreeing a deal. Despite Trump’s public insistence that his most recent two-hour phone call with Putin went “very well”, and that “some progress has been made” in ending hostilities, the read-out provided by US officials to their European counterparts told a different story. Putin is not interested in ending the conflict, they reported, because he believes he is winning.

The dawning realisation for Trump that Putin is simply “tapping me along” has led him to become increasingly intemperate in his attitude towards the Russian leader, denouncing him as being “absolutely crazy”. The US president has warned that the only reason that the Kremlin had avoided “really bad things” from happening was because of his personal intervention.

Even for a pathological narcissist like Trump, it must now be undeniably evident that his contribution to the Ukraine crisis has made matters a great deal worse, not better.

Russia’s recent advances on the battlefield are a direct consequence of Trump’s vacillation. They have served to promote the belief in Moscow that the West lacks the will to defend Ukraine’s interests.

Yet, were Trump to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards Putin, the situation could quickly be reversed. The US president has previously threatened the imposition of secondary sanctions aimed at ending Moscow’s black market oil activities, which have helped to fund his war effort.

With the Russian economy suffering as a result of falling oil revenues, Trump could inflict serious damage on Russia’s war effort if he were to follow through on his threat to extend the West’s sanctions regime against Moscow. The White House is said to be giving serious consideration to the imposition of punitive secondary sanctions that would be applied to countries, such as India and China, which continue to buy Russian oil, gas and raw materials.

And it is still not too late to revive Ukraine’s military fortunes if Washington agreed to provide Ukraine with the equipment it badly needs. With long-range missile and air defences, Kyiv could take the fight to Moscow at the same time as sending a strong and unequivocal message to Putin that the US will not tolerate the use of any nuclear weapons.

Putin may have outwitted Trump in his attempts to end the war, but the US president still has the means to ensure that the Russian despot does not succeed in winning the conflict.

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• Owen Matthews

Trump’s threat to crush Putin is nothing but empty words

Deep down, Washington appears unwilling to pay the price of launching a trade war on Russia

May 28, 2025

This week Donald Trump threatened the “downfall of Russia” if Vladimir Putin continued to swallow more of Ukraine, calling the Russian president “absolutely crazy”for “sending rockets into cities and killing people”.

“I don’t like it at all,” the US president warned the Kremlin, doubling down on his “VLADIMIR, STOP!” injunction just two weeks ago.

But what could Trump actually do to crush Putin’s war machine and bring the defiant Russian dictator to his knees?

He need to look no further than the US Congress, where the Republican-led Senate has already prepared a Bill of swingeing sanctions against Russia that serves as a blueprint for economic Armageddon.

The Graham-Blumenthal Bill, supported by a remarkable 81 out of 100 senators, has been sponsored by long-term Trump loyalist Senator Lindsey Graham.

It calls for 500pc tariffs on any country trading with Russia. That includes China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and South Africa, as well as many EU countries which continue to import Russian liquefied natural gas, oil and fertilisers.

It even includes the US itself, which is dependent on Russia for imports of yellow-cake uranium – as well as major American multinationals such as Boeing, which relies on Russian titanium.

In short, the Graham-Blumenthal Bill is the economic equivalent of a nuclear strike.

But like an intercontinental nuclear strike, launching a global trade war against Moscow will have unpredictable but disastrous blowback in the US itself.

Cutting off Russian energy exports will send oil and gas prices spiralling and plunge swathes of Europe – whose supply chains have already been stretched to the limit by green policies such as closing German and Spanish nuclear power plants and switching to renewables – into blackouts.

And to enforce the energy embargo, the Graham-Blumenthal Bill envisions erecting punitive sanctions many times bigger than the tariffs being negotiated by the Trump White House against China and the European Union.

The US Congress is usually sceptical of legislation that threatens to devastate not just the US economy but the world’s. So why has the Graham-Blumenthal Bill attracted so much support – including from many Ukraine-supporting Democrats, as well as many Maga Republicans?

The simple answer is that the Bill is entirely performative. Nobody in the Senate (not usually the originator of legislation, any more than the House of Lords is in the UK), nor the White House, actually expects it to become law.

For Democrats, it’s an opportunity to show their disapproval of Putin and their support for Kyiv. For Republicans, it is an exercise in the politics of the grand gesture, giving Trump a negotiation point in future horse-trading with the Kremlin.

As the Bill makes its way through various Senate votes and committees, Trump can tell Putin that Congress wants him to cut Russia’s economy off at the knees. “If you don’t play ball,” Trump can threaten, “I’ll actually let them do it.”

The problem with this strategy is that nobody in the Kremlin seems to believe it’s going to happen either. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, dismissed Trump’s latest statements about the Russian leader as an “emotional” reaction.

And rather than brace for coming sanctions, Putin’s team continues to talk up a series of supposedly great joint business projects that will await US companies once a peace deal is struck over Ukraine.

Indeed, rather than moving towards punishing Russia, the overall vector of Trump’s White House is towards preparing for an eventual normalising of relations.

“Russia wants to do large scale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic ‘blood bath’ is over, and I agree,” Trump wrote immediately after a two-hour phone call with Putin last week that he described as “excellent”.

When Trump announced his “liberation day” sanctions on trading partners around the world in early April, Russia was largely exempt.

He has dismantled the US Justice Department’s involvement in international efforts to collect evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and refused involvement in a proposed international tribunal.

On the third anniversary of the war, Washington even refused to vote for a United Nations declaration that identified Russia as the aggressor in the invasion.

So when Senator Graham warns Russia to end the bloodshed or face “bone-crushing sanctions”, calls out China and India as enablers if they continue buying Russian oil, and declares the US will “no longer be a bystander,” is he defying Trump or secretly toeing the Republican party line?

Actually, it’s both. A handful of Republican senators really do support Ukraine and are ready to stand up for draconian measures against Putin. Many more are ready to provide Trump with whatever rhetorical ammunition he needs in his ongoing power games with the Kremlin.

But what nobody in Congress is willing to do is sacrifice US jobs and global prosperity in order to follow through on the apocalyptic blueprint contained in Graham-Blumenthal.

There remain plenty of other weapons in Trump’s arsenal. He can choose to sell US weapons to Ukraine, paid for by European donors. He can sell those same weapons to Europe, with end-user certificates that allow them to be re-exported to Kyiv. Or at the pro-Ukraine end of the spectrum, Trump can scrap all restrictions on the use of US weapons to strike targets inside Russia that were previously imposed by the Biden administration.

Washington could also deploy a costly and comprehensive air defence system known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, designed to intercept and destroy short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase. That would mark a serious, practical step towards delivering a practical, rather than just a political, solution to Ukraine’s long-term security and ability to defend itself.

In the meantime, though, Trump seems content to move to the sidelines of a peace process he once boasted he could resolve in 24 hours. For the moment Putin remains intractable, and Washington is unwilling to pay the price of coercing him.

Europe, likewise, continues to voice political support for Ukraine, while increasing its imports of Russian liquefied natural gas and fertilisers. And Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, continues to press for more meaningful economic sanctions in vain.

“Only a feeling of total impunity can allow Russia to launch such strikes,” wrote Zelensky after the biggest Russian missile attack on Kyiv since 2022 earlier this week.

But as long as none of Ukraine’s supposed allies are willing to pay the price of such sanctions, Putin’s impunity will continue.