Trump has once again given the Kremlin a ‘couple of weeks’ to buy himself more time to do nothing
WASHINGTON DC – Not even a week after President Donald Trump’s fateful summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, the US leader’s strategy towards the Kremlin and its war on Ukraine is in tatters.
Nebulous at best, Trump’s plan in Alaska involved unleashing “very severe consequences” against the Russian President if he failed to embrace a ceasefire, or provide clarity over his intention to end the conflict.
Now Trump is once again kicking the ball into the long grass, and using his favourite formulation in so doing. “We’re going to find out about Putin in the next couple of weeks”, the President told Fox News. “It’s possible that he doesn’t want to make a deal”, he conceded.
Trump constantly reaches for the “next couple of weeks” formula when he faces a fork in the road and decides to buy himself more time. But the world can now see nakedly that he is willing to give the Russian leader as much time as he demands. Trump has threatened Putin with tighter sanctions, “very severe consequences” and, as he put it only on Tuesday, “tough action” if he doesn’t bring the war to a close. He has never followed through on any of those threats.
By now, the Russians see him coming. After Putin secured the imprimatur of respectability by being permitted to set foot on American soil for the first time in a decade, Trump’s top aides have spent this week insisting he evinced neither weakness, nor any willingness to broker peace on anyone’s terms but his own.
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues from Europe of making “clumsy…unethical attempts” to lure Trump away from Putin’s orbit during Monday’s historic White House meeting. Far from any “breakthrough” on security guarantees for Ukraine that US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff trumpeted on American television last Sunday, Lavrov described Trump’s discussions with Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and his European allies as the “road to nowhere”.
Putin has spent the week letting his fingers do the walking. He told the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, on Monday that the Alaska summit persuaded him there was “emerging alignment” between Moscow and Trump over the peace process. On Wednesday he reached out to the leaders of both Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Istanbul and Riyadh were previously tipped as possible locations for any meeting with Zelensky that may eventually occur.
But Russian officials have waved away Trump’s claim that a meeting between the two leaders is imminent. Lavrov said any face-off “must be prepared in the most meticulous way”, and claimed that Putin had merely promised to “think about raising the level” of bilateral talks that have been the preserve of only lower-level officials so far.
Trump’s decision to give Putin another fortnight to mull things over flies in the face of White House efforts to portray him as an “Action Man” who has even cancelled a planned holiday at his New Jersey golf club in order to remain at the helm in Washington. His Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the President was “a man on a mission…he wants to strike when the iron is hot”. Observers can only wonder whether the iron’s faceplate will still be sizzling in a fortnight’s time.
Certainly, no major progress on peace or security guarantees for Ukraine appears to have been made across two days of Western military talks featuring the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. On Tuesday night he engaged with European defence chiefs, and then widened the circle on Wednesday by attending a virtual meeting of top Nato officials. Italian admiral Guiseppe Cavo Dragone said the meeting of the alliance’s Military Committee had been a “great, candid discussion…and that unity was truly tangible”.
But as that careful language demonstrated, there was no breakthrough on the issue of security guarantees, as European leaders continued to wonder what specific measures the Trump administration was considering beyond the President’s vague offer of helping “probably by air”.
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that he did not expect peacekeeping operations even to be tested by the Russians. “I think if a deal is made, I think Russia’s had it, they’ve all had it, and for an extended period of time I don’t think there will be a problem”, he predicted.
Zelensky and the European leaders who crowded into his Oval Office on Monday beg to differ.
