President Trump has described President Vladimir V. Putin as “savvy” and “genius” for invading Ukraine, while bragging about his “very, very good relationship” with the autocratic Russian leader.
Mr. Trump has helped the Kremlin recast Ukraine as the villain rather than the victim in the war, and has publicly berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office and blamed him for starting the conflict and undermining peace negotiations.
But four months into his term, Mr. Trump’s preference for praising and excusing Mr. Putin has not stopped the bloodshed in a war he once bragged he would end in just 24 hours.
After weeks of Mr. Trump claiming he could leverage his relationship with the Russian leader to bring peace, Mr. Putin’s continued aggression has prompted even Mr. Trump to question whether he has been strung along.
“We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not and if he is we’ll respond a little bit differently,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed at what happened, a couple of nights now where people were killed in the middle of what you would call a negotiation.”
After a call between the American and Russian leaders last week yielded no breakthroughs, Mr. Trump appeared ready to distance himself from negotiations altogether and said it would be up to Russia and Ukraine to stop the fighting.
Russia then, over the weekend, unleashed one of its largest aerial campaigns against Ukrainian civilian targets. That prompted Mr. Trump to describe Mr. Putin as “absolutely CRAZY!” and to warn that Russia was “playing with fire.” Mr. Putin’s spokesman in turn dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments as an “emotional reaction.”
It is unclear that the friction signals a fundamental breach between Mr. Trump and the Russian president. Mr. Putin has been a central character in both of Mr. Trump’s terms in office — Mr. Trump suggested in 2018 that he believed his Russian counterpart more than U.S. intelligence agencies about whether Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election — and Mr. Trump has often spoken admiringly of Mr. Putin.
And although Mr. Trump has hinted at the possibility that he could impose a new round of sanctions on Russia if Mr. Putin does not budge on peace talks, he has yet to take any action. Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he was still intent on negotiating with Russia and he wanted to see how talks played out over the next two weeks.
“At this point we’re working on President Putin and we’ll see where we are,” Mr. Trump said.
But Mr. Trump is facing growing pressure to take a harder line. A chorus of foreign policy experts and members of Congress says it has seen enough to conclude Mr. Trump is the one getting duped.
Senate Republicans have increasingly called on Mr. Trump to ditch his friendly approach to Mr. Putin and impose penalties on Russia. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a close Trump ally leading a bipartisan push to place sanctions on Russia, has argued Mr. Putin is “playing us all.”
“The president is the last one to figure out that Vladimir Putin doesn’t want a peace deal, that he’s playing for time, and he’s been playing the president, and it’s about time the president wakes up and understands that,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
The White House declined to answer specific questions about how Mr. Trump would proceed with Mr. Putin or the effectiveness of his approach thus far.
“President Trump has been clear he wants to see a negotiated peace deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in statement, which also cast blame on the Biden administration. “President Trump has also smartly kept all options on the table.”
Until now, Mr. Trump’s preferred option appeared to be enticing Mr. Putin. After publicly berating Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Trump sent a personal emissary to Moscow, Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer serving as his special envoy, to negotiate with Mr. Putin. Mr. Witkoff picked up Mr. Trump’s rosy language, saying that he spent the meeting developing “a friendship, a relationship” with Mr. Putin.
After his clash in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump, Mr. Zelensky has refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump’s approach, making it difficult for the administration to use him as a scapegoat. Mr. Zelensky this week called for himself, Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to have a three-way summit, something Mr. Trump said he was willing to participate in if necessary. For now, he said, the administration was focused on speaking with Mr. Putin.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has shown little willingness to send additional foreign aid or weapons to bolster Ukraine.
Mr. Trump at times has approached Mr. Putin as if they have a shared bond.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Mr. Trump said of the Russian president as he sat alongside Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, alluding to the investigations into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with what the intelligence agencies determined had been a Russian operation to tilt the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor.
This year, Mr. Trump dismantled the Justice Department effort to collect evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine for eventual prosecution in international courts.
The result is a more emboldened Mr. Putin with little incentive to end the war, according to foreign policy experts, an outcome they argue Mr. Trump should have been anticipated.
“It does sound like from his various comments that Trump is starting to understand what was clear from the beginning of all of this, which is Russia is the problem here,” said Richard Fontaine, who is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former Republican national security official. “Russia is the obstacle, Russia is the reason this war started in the first place, not Ukraine.”
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supports taking a more hard-line stance against Russia, welcomed Mr. Trump’s “acknowledgment that Vladimir Putin is a brutal dictator — a fact that Ukrainians have been living with every day since Russia’s unprovoked invasion began.”
But Mr. Trump has made threats of economic penalties against Russia before, only to back off. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Mr. Trump’s recent comments about Mr. Putin represent a “change of words, not a change of actions.”
“There are things he can do right now — sanctions is one, but also giving the Ukrainians what they need to defend themselves,” Mr. Meeks said. “He’s been played by Putin for a long time. He’s been played by Putin from the very beginning.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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