“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,’’ President Trump told reporters on Sunday afternoon, just before boarding Air Force One for a short trip from his golf club in New Jersey to Washington. Hours later, he posted about the Russian leader, saying, “He has gone absolutely CRAZY.”
Mr. Trump’s rare criticism of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia came after a weekend of the largest bombardment of Ukrainian cities over the past three years, mostly aimed at civilian targets, from residential areas in Kyiv to university dormitories. The Russian attacks also happened only days after Mr. Trump had what he described publicly as an “excellent” two-hour phone call with Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump promised would immediately lead to direct peace negotiations.
Mr. Trump has long said he enjoys a “good relationship” with Mr. Putin, and it was not the first time he expressed shock that the Russian president was unleashing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. A month ago Mr. Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP” as a barrage of missiles and drones hit Ukraine, including crowded playgrounds. But Mr. Trump has never linked the attacks with his own decision, reaffirmed last week, to refuse to join the Europeans in new financial sanctions on Russia, or to offer new arms and help to the Ukrainians.
The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russian’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.
The pattern is a familiar one, several outside experts and former government officials said. Mr. Trump signals he is pulling back from a conflict he often describes as Europe’s war, then expresses shock that Mr. Putin responds with a familiar list of demands that amount to a Ukrainian surrender, followed by accelerating attacks. Mr. Trump episodically insists he is “absolutely” considering sanctions, including on Sunday.
Yet each time when he is forced to make a decision about joining Europe in new economic penalties, he has pulled back.
“Russia said no cease-fire and Trump is increasingly washing his hands of it,’’ Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm, wrote on Monday. The result is that “support for Ukraine continues to recede in importance for the Americans,’’ he added. Mr. Bremmer predicted that “what comes next is more fighting — expanded Russian attacks across Ukraine, fewer restraints on Ukraine targeting inside Russia.”
The latest cycle of this odd interaction between the American and Russian leaders happened just last week. Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire for a summit meeting soon with Mr. Putin, declared that only he and the Russian leader had the power and influence to end the war. Yet by the time they were done talking in their call last week, Mr. Trump had changed his position, saying it was now up to Ukraine and Russia to end the war in direct negotiations.
In a subsequent conversation with the leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Finland, along with the European Commission, Mr. Trump had yet another view: Mr. Putin thought he was winning the war and would press his advantage. According to several officials briefed on the conversation, Mr. Trump made it clear he had no intention on putting pressure, much less harsh economic sanctions, on Russia.
“He said, essentially, ‘I’m out,’’’ said one of the officials, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to describe the conversation.
Mr. Trump, the official said, clearly meant that he was disengaging from the conflict in an echo of Vice President JD Vance’s public statement that “we’re more than open to walking away.” Mr. Trump also made clear that he was pulling back from a commitment he made just a few weeks earlier to the leaders of France, Germany and Britain to join an economic crackdown on Russia if it refused a cease-fire.
Mr. Trump is usually eager to threaten economic penalties, whether they are tariffs or sanctions, to influence the decisions of other nations. But he has repeatedly carved an exception for Russia.
When he announced his “Liberation Day” sanctions on trading partners around the world in early April, Russia was largely exempt. After Mr. Trump’s phone call with Mr. Putin last week, White House officials said that sanctions on Russia had a poor track record and would not be in U.S. interests.
Mr. Trump’s withdrawal of pressure on Russia goes beyond economics: He has dismantled the Justice Department effort to collect evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, for eventual prosecution in international courts. On the third anniversary of the war, the United States refused to vote for a United Nations declaration that identified Russia as the aggressor in the invasion, putting Washington against the position taken by its NATO allies but on the side of North Korea.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has not wanted to repeat the Oval Office blowup with Mr. Trump in February, has been careful not to criticize Mr. Trump, as he has veered between pleas to Mr. Putin to stop and refusals to pressure Russia. But in his own social media post on Monday, Mr. Zelensky pressed for more economic sanctions, writing that “only a feeling of total impunity can allow Russia to launch such strikes.”
Mr. Trump himself has clearly hoped to get beyond the conflict, and just last week was musing about the possibilities for a normalization of relations with Moscow. “Russia wants to do large scale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic ‘blood bath’ is over, and I agree,” he wrote after talking with Mr. Putin.
Missing from Mr. Trump’s zigzags is any explanation of why he has been unable to use his relationship with Mr. Putin to persuade him to halt the violence, even for a 30-day cease-fire. When he was running for president, Mr. Trump often argued that Mr. Putin ignored Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama during their presidencies because he didn’t “respect” them. Things would be different when he got into office, Mr. Trump said, arguing that he would end the war in “24 hours.” (He has since said the comment was sarcastic.)
On Sunday Mr. Trump’s tone was different. “I’m not happy with what Putin is doing. He’s killing a lot of people,’’ he said. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time. Always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.”
Later he wrote that Mr. Putin’s ambitions were to retake all of Ukraine, contradicting what his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said two months ago in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
“Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?” Mr. Witkoff asked Mr. Carlson in late March. “For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine.”
But on Sunday Mr. Trump wrote of Mr. Putin: “If he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”
Dmitry Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, dismissed Mr. Trump’s statements about the Russian leader. He termed them an “emotional reaction.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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