Donald Trump is peeved. His officials are starting to spin that his plans for almost instant peace in Ukraine may take a lot longer, while Vladimir Putin’s business envoy heads for the White House, supposedly to make amends.
Yet what it truly reveals is that the 47th president continues to be played by the Kremlin.
Trump has unleashed a trade war, expressed colonial designs on two Nato members, scrambled Ukraine’s defensive war plans, shown public contempt for Europe and set about the pillars of American democracy with a sledgehammer.
Trump has shown a remarkable ability to interpret Moscow’s deepest desires and to deliver on them.
That the US president is now saying he is “pissed off” with Putin and is considering – considering – increasing tariffs and sanctions on Russia, is play acting.
The US-Russia trade account is worth about $3.5bn (£2.8bn). That’s nothing. The US doesn’t do enough trade with Russia to make sanctions or tariffs mean anything.
A meaningful threat, one that he has used and applied to Ukraine, would have been in the military realm.
To force Kyiv into agreeing to a ceasefire, Trump cut military aid and then refused to share its intelligence with Ukraine at a time when the Russians were, surprise, surprise, launching a massive offensive to retake the Kursk region from Kyiv’s troops.
The 30-day ceasefire on the Black Sea and a cessation in attacks against energy facilities is desperately needed by Moscow, not Kyiv. Ukraine now rules the Black Sea, and its targeting of Russian energy systems is bringing the war back to Russia.
Cutting military aid and intelligence sharing meant that European nations, including the UK, have rushed to Ukraine’s aid and are frantically planning for a new world without the US security umbrella that has kept them safe for 80 years – and been mostly funded by the US taxpayer.
America’s global power and reach are waning by the day as a consequence of Trump’s assaults on the West and his slavish behaviour towards Moscow.
And yet the White House sees no need to reverse this.
Rather, in a series of meetings and calls over the weekend, officials inside the White House and the state department acknowledged that Putin is “actively resisting Washington’s attempts to strike a lasting peace accord and discussed what, if any, economic or diplomatic punishments could push Russia closer to a deal,” Reuters reported.
Only a team that saw no problem with exploiting Russia’s invasion and mass murder in Ukraine to try to force a minerals deal by handing control of most of Ukraine’s resources forever (plus backpay on previous funding for its war plus interest) could have been blind to Russia’s agenda.
Russia wants all of Ukraine’s resources too. The US has indicated, not that it is theirs to gift, that the 20 per cent of Ukraine that Russia has already stolen is Moscow’s for the keeping.
Russia has been keen to encourage the Trump regime to end the US isolation of Moscow and get back into business with the oligarchs and crooks who run the multinational Russian federation, or empire.
To further this idea, Kirill Dmitriev, the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and Putin’s special investment and international economic adviser, is heading to talks in the US with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East and Russia envoy.
Witkoff was using an unsecured personal mobile phone when he was part of the infamous Signal group on which secret military operational plans were being discussed by Trump’s top intelligence officials, including the heads of the CIA and the director of national intelligence.
Dmitriev, who has a Harvard MBA and is an old friend of Trump’s inner circle, will play Witkoff like a violin and his tunes will be all Russian.
