If anything his latest statement takes, President Donald Trump’s loss of patience with the Kremlin appears to be gathering pace.
Speaking from a golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, along with British Prime Minister Kiel’s Preferred, Trump unexpectedly shortened the 50-day deadline in Moscow, imposed two weeks ago, agreeing to a peace deal with Ukraine or facing harsh new economic sanctions.
“Yeah, I’m going to have a new deadline of about 10 or 12 from today,” Trump told reporters Monday.
“There’s no reason to wait. I want to be generous, but I don’t think there’s a right progress,” the president added.
In that case, it is not clear why Trump decided to wait another 10-12 days before carrying out his threat of imposing high tariffs on Russia and imposing severe secondary sanctions on Russian oil-buying countries.
But that is the latest indication that Trump is well-known for his infamous flip-floping rhetoric in the Ukrainian war, which has been rushing for months while Kiev and Moscow denounce the continued bloodshed, and now appears to have taken a more consistent tone that is generally critical of the actions of the Kremlin and its powerful leader, Vladimir Putin.
“We thought it had settled down many times, and then Putin goes outside and starts launching rockets in cities like Kiev, killing a lot of people in nursing homes and more,” Trump said earlier Monday.
Trump also renewed the threat of tariffs and sanctions and pondered whether the Kremlin would surrender.
“You’re probably thinking that you’d want to make a deal based on common sense. We’ll know,” Trump said.
But after years of stubborn refusal to compromise, the suspense has killed no one.
The Kremlin has consistently ruled out ending wars in Ukraine until it achieved its greatest objective. These include the imposition of strict military and foreign policy restrictions on postwar Ukraine, which has acquired a vast Swas of yet-unconquered Ukrainian territory and essentially conquering Kiev to the Moscow will.
The threat of sanctions against Russia, already one of the world’s most authorized countries, is unlikely.
Just moving that threat forward over weeks, as Trump is doing now, could have little impact on the Kremlin’s tough calculations, especially given that sanctions threatened by Trump are widely regarded as toothless or impossible to implement in Russia.
For example, 100% threatened tariffs on Trump’s Russian exports are considered virtually meaningless in countries that trade worth billions of dollars each year.
Potentially important is Trump’s threat to punish tariffs or secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russia’s oil. But the biggest importers of that product are of course India and China. Turkey is a major client, as is the case with many European states. Moscow has serious doubts that even Trump will launch the United States into a global trade war over Ukraine’s issues.
And even in the unforgiving events of Chinese, Indians and Turks, everyone who agrees to stop buying Russian oil is profound. It could possibly rob global inflation at US pumps, as well as gasoline prices, causing crude prices.
Even before the US President’s latest remarks, Kremlin insiders were publicly scoffing Trump’s ultimatum.
“50 days! Previously it was 24 hours. Previously it was 100 days. We’ve been through all of this,” Russian veteran foreign minister Sergei Lavrov took to SN earlier this month.
Now, the latest 10-12-day window has sparked even stronger rebuttals.
“Russia’s actual reaction to Trump’s ultimatum is the same as all ultimatums in the last 500 years,” Russian political analyst Sergei Markov wrote in Telegram.
“Walking! I’m going to hell,” he added.
