Putin hasn't gone crazy and he hasn't changed.

Nor is it clear that he's miscalculating.

On Sunday, after Russia hammered Ukraine with the largest aerial attack of the three-year war, President Trump declared:

I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.

There’s nothing CRAZY, or even crazy, about Russia shooting missiles and drones into Ukrainian cities and killing lots of people. Such attacks are not uncommon in modern warfare. Putin has ordered them for the rational purpose of demoralizing his enemy with the hope of pounding it into submission. He’s playing to win.

It’s true that the latest attacks are larger than any of the earlier ones. But ordering them is rational, not crazy.

For one thing, Russia’s advances on the ground have been harder to come by in recent months. Last night, I heard a military analyst say that Russian territorial gains, never that impressive, have decreased in each of the past four months. At the same time, the cost in Russian lives lost per square mile gained has increased month-to-month.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s air defenses have been exposed, increasingly, as inadequate. Under these circumstances — less progress on the ground and increased opportunities in the air — it makes plenty of sense for Russia to step up its aerial assault.

The increased assault also makes sense in the context of the Russia-Ukraine peace talks. If Russia is interested in a settlement, its stepped-up killing of Ukrainian civilians might provide the enemy with more incentive to grant concessions.

If Russia isn’t interested in a settlement, which I think is the case, the stepped-up attacks might frustrate Trump, causing him to wash his hands of the “peace process.” And given the lack of appetite within the administration to keep spending money on Ukraine, Putin can reasonably believe that if/when Trump ends peace talks, he will either end or cut back on U.S. aid to Ukraine.

It’s true that by incurring Trump’s stated displeasure, Putin risks making Trump more sympathetic to Ukraine and thus more willing to provide aid. Trump is now talking about new sanctions against Russia. But talking about sanctions and implementing them are two different things. Moreover, it’s unlikely that, with Russia already heavily sanctioned, Putin worries much about new sanctions.

Stepped up U.S. military aid to Ukraine is different. Putin certainly does not want that.

Putin must have calculated that Trump won’t punish Russia by increasing military aid, even in the wake of stepped up Russian bombing. Putin may be wrong, but Trump’s statements and behavior evince no willingness to spend more for the defense of Ukraine than the U.S. is currently spending.

There’s also the fact that, even as Trump criticizes Putin, he also attacks Zelensky. After the Ukrainian president complained that U.S. had not (as of that time) called out Russia for its deadly air attacks, Trump said:

Likewise, President Zelensky is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.

It remains to be seen whether Putin is correct in his belief that his stepped-up bombing campaign won’t cause Trump to take meaningful action against Russia. But even if he turns out to be wrong, Putin hasn’t gone crazy. He will simply have miscalculated.

Trump is also off-base when he claims that “something has happened” to Putin. This seems like a self-serving statement intended to explain Trump’s inability to deliver on his promise to end the war quickly.

I agree with Rich Lowry that Putin “is the same guy who launched a second, brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, following up from his initial invasion in 2014.” He’s also the same guy who relentlessly bombed Syrian civilians. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Russian bombings directly killed thousands of Syrian civilians, about a quarter of them children.

To be fair, there’s no way we can know whether Putin has changed the way he talks to Trump. Perhaps he’s less conciliatory these days.

If so, it may be because unlike during Trump’s first term, Putin is engaged in a brutal war he needs to win and therefore has nothing much to offer in peace talks. He may also have concluded that Trump won’t take action against Russia in response to stepped-up bombing, and instead will limit himself instead to statements about how he feels — statements like:

I’m not happy with what Putin is doing.

I’ve known [Putin] a long time, always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.

If a Democratic president responded this way to Russian aggression, he would be ridiculed the way Jimmy, “Mush from the Wimp,” Carter was. Trump would probably be leading the charge.

For me, Trump’s disapproval of Putin “needlessly killing a lot of people” harks back to John Kerry’s complaint that Putin was behaving “in a 19th century fashion” when Russia first invaded Ukrainian territory. Of course Putin behaves the way expansionist autocrats behaved in the 19th century. Why would anyone expect otherwise?

Of course Putin “needlessly” kills a lot of people. That’s what ruthless expansionist autocrats do (and more so than they did in the 19th century). The question is always, what is the West, and the U.S. in particular, prepared to do about it.

I’m not equating Trump with Kerry or Carter. Maybe now that he belatedly sees Putin for who he is, Trump’s displeasure will translate into meaningful action against Russia. I hope so.

As Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens.