Last week, only days after his latest phone conversation with President Putin, US president Donald Trump told president Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves. Days beforehand he had insisted that only he and Putin had the power to broker a deal.
Now, in the wake of the war’s most intensive weekend bombardment of Ukraine by Russia – with 370 missiles and drones killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens, Trump has described Putin as “crazy”, saying he was shooting missiles and drones into Ukraine’s cities while talks continue, “for no reason whatsoever”.
“He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin I’ve known him a long time,” he said. “Always gotten along with him. But he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.” And he told journalists he was considering levying additional sanctions against Russia, which he has threatened several times. The EU is working on a new package of sanctions.
Ukraine and its European allies wonder , however, whether the unpredictable US president is signalling a moment of re-engagement with what can scarcely be described as a peace process, at last recognising Kyiv’s frustration with Putin’s dissembling. More fundamentally, is this a prelude to a decisive and final walking away, abandoning the US’s three-year-long project to support Ukraine, a war he had previously promised to resolve in just 24 hours ?
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The weekend strikes underscore how months of diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire have failed to yield a breakthrough as Putin drags his feet on agreeing to any temporary truce, adding conditions that he knows Ukraine will not accept. An agreement to exchange prisoners was the only concrete outcome from ceasefire negotiations held this month in Istanbul – the first time the two sides have engaged in direct talks since the early months of the war.
Not for the first time, observers wonder about the real intentions of the US president.
