America is back in the business of arming Ukraine, thanks to President Donald Trump’s patience finally wearing thin with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
Putin “talks nice, and then he bombs everybody in the evening,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “It’s a little bit of a problem there, I don’t like it.” Putin’s latest round of terror-bombing Kyiv made Trump do a 180 on weapons supplies to Ukraine, promising that “we will send them Patriots, which they desperately need.”
The decision comes after a temporary freeze on weapons shipments to Ukraine, “driven by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby after a review of U.S. munitions stockpiles that showed dangerously low reserves,” according to Fox News.
Translation: Putin is so intransigently unserious about peace that Trump is willing to take some risks to help change his mind.
“We get a lot of bulls*** thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump finally admitted a week ago, following a record-setting Russian air attack on Kyiv. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Putin responded to Trump’s criticism with an even larger air raid that struck a maternity hospital.
“You’ll be seeing things happening,” Trump promised the next day, including taking another look at a sanctions bill working its way through the Senate.
Trump has “grown warmer towards the idea of a sanctions bill,” according to Just the News. After previously dismissing the new sanctions as “very harsh,” Trump said late last week that he’s “looking at” the measure “very strongly.”
Over the weekend, Trump announced he would sell multiple Patriot missile defense systems to Europe, and Europe would then transfer them to Kyiv. “I haven’t agreed on the number yet, but they’re going to have some. Because they do need protection. But the European Union is paying for it. We’re not paying anything for it. But we will send [them].”
It took Trump a while to arrive at where I thought he’d begun, but it looks like we both made a mistake or two.
Trump came (back) into office promising to negotiate a swift end to the Russo-Ukraine War. While that was probably always a longshot proposition, Trump very oddly surrendered the opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength.
Something changed sometime after the election, and I won’t hazard a guess what that was, but Trump turned back on his early promises to continue weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Part of the reason was almost certainly our depleting stockpile, and maybe the other part was his businesslike relationship with Putin.
Granted, neither Putin nor Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky showed serious interest in peace — as I covered in depth for our VIP subscribers back in March: Off-Ramps to Nowhere.
Remember that infamous March White House summit when an uppity Zelensky tried to lecture POTUS and VPOTUS? Trump (with an assist from JD Vance) famously put Zelensky in his place. Since then, Zelensky has been much more amenable to a peace conference.
It seemed as though Trump thought his friendly relations with Putin would be enough to bring him along, too — but it just didn’t work out that way.
Their relationship has since soured like last month’s milk, thanks to Putin’s relentless (and militarily useless) missile and drone attacks on civilian targets in Kyiv. Trump never struck me as someone who enjoys getting played — certainly not twice.
Never doubt that President Trump wants peace — more so and more effectively so than any American president since at least Ronald Reagan.
“I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anybody,” Trump said in March. “I’m aligned with the United States of America. And for the good of the world.”
It took a little longer than I’d hoped for Trump to recognize that Zelensky wasn’t the only sticking point. But so long as Putin was going to continue being so… well, so very Putin about peace, Trump’s return to form was almost certainly inevitable.
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