As President Trump looked ahead this week to his high-profile, high-risk meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he reflected momentarily on the curious and confusing relationship between the two men. “I got along well with Putin,” he said.
Intriguingly, he used the past tense. Over the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has expressed rare frustration over the Russian leader’s unwillingness to make peace in Ukraine. But as the president elaborated earlier this week, he sounded eager to switch back to the present tense when the two sit down in Alaska on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s affinity for the iron-fisted master of the Kremlin has perplexed much of the political and diplomatic world for the past decade, challenging assumptions, fueling investigations, reshaping elections and upending alliances. Now the relationship faces its most critical test as Mr. Trump seeks to broker a halt to the war in Ukraine: Is he ready to put serious pressure on his Russian counterpart? Will Mr. Putin again win over the president to his way of thinking? Or is the bromance really on the rocks?
For all of his recent complaints about Russian intransigence and demands that the war stop, Mr. Trump has still largely held back from harsh criticism of Mr. Putin personally, preferring to use words like “disappointed” and “not happy.” He has aimed his sharpest broadsides instead at Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former caretaker president who has engaged in belligerent talk, a way of avoiding going after Mr. Putin more directly.
And in recent days, Mr. Trump has seemed to pivot back to his posture from earlier in the year, when he directed more blame for the war on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, even though it was Mr. Putin who invaded his neighbor in the first place and has rejected American proposals for an unconditional cease-fire.
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