“He's very nice all the time," Donald Trump said of Vladimir Putin this week. "But it turns out to be meaningless."
You think?
The US president may be the last person in the Western world to reach this epiphany about the Russian strongman, whom Trump has lionized despite his bloody invasion of Ukraine.
In a comment typical of his unique brand of profane statesmanship, Trump accused Putin of spinning “bullsh*t” after he stalled and refused every US offer for a ceasefire in the war.
So, rather remarkably, five months after erupting against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump seems to be leaning towards Kyiv rather than Moscow.
Let’s not make too much of this. Every time Trump has criticized the Russian leader this year, he has followed up by leavening his remarks. But this time does seem a little different. After repeated phone conversations with Putin, Trump is angry that his push for a peace deal in Ukraine that might yield the Nobel Prize is going nowhere.
From a Western perspective, the Russian leader may be guilty of an extraordinary self-inflicted political gaffe. He could have had a US-backed peace deal that Ukraine’s allies in Europe feared would reward his aggression, lock in territorial gains, and set down in stone that Ukraine would never have a path to NATO membership.
But imposing Western logic on Putin’s calculations is always a mistake.
Putin made clear before the invasion that he sees the war in Ukraine as righting a historic wrong — both over Russia’s age-old claims to the territory and his wider grievances that date back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Russia speaks of the “root causes” of the war — code for Russian grievances that include the existence of a democratic government in Kyiv. It sometimes refers to Moscow’s claims that it is threatened by NATO’s expansion after the Cold War, and to its desire to see alliance troops withdrawn from states once in the Soviet Union’s orbit, such as Poland and Romania.
The Russian leader may never have intended to end the war. Calculations by Trump and his aides that Putin could be persuaded to do a “deal” — the central assumption of the president’s entire world view — were misguided. After hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, continuing the war may even be necessary to Putin’s political survival.
For years, countless US and European observers have tried to convince Trump of the risks of negotiating with Putin.
It’s stunning that it it took the US president so long to get it.
