Donald Trump

Everything indicates that Putin is going to dump Trump again

Niclas Vent

Reporter

This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Published 2025-10-17 14.02 

 

Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Two months have passed, and everything is the same.

The presidents of the United States and Russia are planning a new meeting.

The risk is imminent that Trump will be dumped again.

The meeting in Alaska on August 15 was a fiasco.

It was a great guess in advance.

Now Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet again, and the feeling of déjà vu is palpable.

Before Alaska, Trump set a series of deadlines for Putin to agree to peace (all of which were passed without action) and warned of "very tough consequences" (which still shine with their absence).

Putin is only interested in peace on his own terms, and if he is to come to a different conclusion, he must be pressured to do so.

Even before this meeting, there are several signs that Trump may finally have understood this:

• Trump has been nasty to Putin on social media, describing Russia as a paper tiger and saying that Ukraine can take back all the territory Russia has conquered.
• The US has given Ukraine targeting data on oil and energy infrastructure deep inside Russian territory, a truly important contribution that hits Russia where it hurts.
• The president has said he is close to approving deliveries of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, a long-range weapon far superior to anything currently in Ukraine's arsenal.
• Trump has had success – indeed, as a peace broker in the Middle East, which could perhaps strengthen his determination to get somewhere with Russia as well.

Ahead of tonight's meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, there were hopes that those signals would translate into increased pressure on Russia.

The phone call between Trump and Putin yesterday, in which they agreed to meet in Budapest within a few weeks, dashed those hopes.

 

A Tomahawk missile is fired from an American ship. Photo: Ford Williams / AP

If we takea few steps back, the positive signals now resemble mostly irrelevant noise.

Basically, there is pressure on Russia that is simply not needed there.

Trump has indeed imposed higher tariffs on India, as a punishment for India buying Russian oil, but otherwise there are no new harsh sanctions against Russia in place.

At the same time, the flow of money from the United States to Ukraine has stopped.

Ukraine can get American weapons – as long as the money comes from the increasingly thin wallets of Europeans.

Among other things, the talk about Tomahawk missiles means little if the expensive weapons are to be squeezed onto a Ukrainian list of needs that Europe cannot afford to pay for anyway.

The number that Ukraine could receive in the best case scenario is also too small to make any decisive difference.

Trump claims that in the phone call yesterday he asked Putin if he “would mind if I sent a few thousand Tomahawks to your opponent?”

It is an unrealistic and frankly embarrassing flexing, when the US has only budgeted to build 57 Tomahawk missiles next year.

 

5,000 Ukrainians still live in the border town of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine – without water and electricity. Photo: Oleg Petrasiuk/AP

The situation can be boiled down to two simple statements:

      1.There are things the US can do to pressure Russia into peace.
      2.Trump has repeatedly shown himself extremely unwilling to do them.

Putin has his goals. He is not deterred by words. He has also shown himself skilled at playing on Trump's vanity and appealing to his delusions.

Anything other than another fiasco meeting would therefore be a real shock.

If you want to take some comfort, I offer this:

The worst fears from the beginning of the year have not come true.

Trump could just as easily have abandoned both Europe and Ukraine, and placed himself even more clearly in Russia's corner.

In this situation, one may perhaps be happy for the little things.