Vladimir Putin’s top aides are snickering behind Donald Trump’s back because they think the Russian tyrant is playing the MAGA leader like a fiddle.
British spies have repeatedly shared with their U.S. counterparts intercepted calls and texts between ranking Kremlin officials ridden with laughter at what they perceive as Trump’s willingness to take Putin at his word on his invasion of Ukraine.
“We have continually shown them intelligence that shows the Russians are lying,” a senior UK security official told The Spectator on Thursday. “The Russians are privately mocking Trump over his naivety about Putin’s intentions. Putin doesn’t want to end the war.”
Trump has long expressed admiration for Putin, an accused war criminal who presides over one of the most brutal autocracies on the planet, while lambasting Ukraine, a U.S. ally, amid the Russian president’s years-long invasion of the embattled Eastern European country.
Trump called his counterpart in Moscow on Feb. 12, 2025, soon after assuming office for the second time. He emerged from that exchange claiming that both sides in the ongoing conflict “want peace.”
The same day, Russian forces launched four missile strikes, 110 air strikes, 45 rocket strikes and 17 drone strikes against Ukrainian targets. In just one of those attacks, seven people died.
He called Putin again on March 18 and said the Russian president had agreed to halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
But Russian forces went on to bomb an energy station in the northeastern Sumy region of Ukraine on April 2, and damaged power lines outside of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.
In August, Trump greeted Putin with a red carpet reception and military flyover at a historic summit in Alaska. He told reporters ahead of time that a ceasefire deal was “close.”
He made no further mention of it at a frosty press conference held after those talks were concluded.
Trump then announced in October that Putin had agreed to meet with him again in Budapest to discuss terms for an end to the war.
The U.S. later pulled out of that summit. Officials said they were frustrated with Moscow’s unwillingness to budge on its hardline demands for an armistice.
In December, Trump said he’d held a “good and very productive call” with Putin ahead of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago. He used a press conference after that meeting to repeat Putin’s claims that Ukrainian strikes had targeted one of the Russian president’s residences.
Kyiv denied those allegations. Russia has failed to produce any evidence that those attacks actually took place.
On Jan. 29, Trump claimed Putin had agreed not to fire on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv for a week due to extreme cold across the city.
The Kremlin later narrowed that window to Feb 1, and resumed strikes immediately after it had passed.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
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