Trump says Putin pissed him off. How will Trump respond?
Last month, President Trump became peeved at Volodymyr Zelensky because, during a session with the press, the Ukrainian president (1) reminded Trump that Putin is a serial violator of peace agreements and ceasefires and (2) questioned whether Trump’s mineral deal would be sufficient to guarantee Ukraine’s security.
After this session, Trump suspended U.S. aid to Ukraine and stopped providing intelligence about Russia military maneuvers and impending attacks. As a result, according to reports, Ukraine was unable to defend itself against attacks that resulted in the deaths of Ukrainian civilians. The pause also appears to have helped Russia gain territory in the Kursk region.
After Zelensky yielded to this pressure, Trump turned his attention to Putin. And now, Trump says he’s “pissed off” at the Russian dictator. Apparently, it was Putin’s insistence that Zelensky be removed and a transitional government be installed that upset Trump. Putin also insists that Ukraine not be allowed to rebuild its army.
In response, Trump said that if he’s unable to make a deal that stops the war, and that if he thinks it’s Russia’s fault, he will impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil sales so that “if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States.”
It’s possible that, as a result of this threat, Putin has softened his position, though I haven’t seen evidence of this. It’s also possible Putin eventually will soften.
But it’s also possible that the threat was just talk by Trump. And it’s possible that, even if carried out, Putin will not yield.
We don’t know how serious Trump is (or was) about further economic measures against Russia. But we do know that Russia was not hit by a tariff yesterday, while Ukraine got a new tariff of 10 percent. (For a discussion of the comparative tariffs and some of the complexity involved in figuring out the extent of the overall hit, see this piece by Jim Geraghty.)
What Trump may be missing when he assesses the effect of inflicting yet more economic pain on Russia is (1) the depth of Putin’s desire to conquer that nation (which he denies is a nation) and (2) his need to make significant progress towards that end to justify the great hardship his war has caused Russia.
As to the first point, Putin (like a great many Russians) regards Ukraine as Russian. The saying goes that Moscow is Russia’s heart, St. Petersburg its head, and Kiev its mother.
Why Russia’s mother? Because Russians say their nation was founded in Kiev during the 800s, a hotly disputed claim. Thus, when Russian soldiers kidnap Ukrainian children and send them to Russia, they are, in a sense, returning them to their mother — or so Putin can believe.
Putin has publicly lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union, calling it a tragedy. This doesn’t mean he will invade Hungary. But the loss of Ukraine is, in Putin’s view, far worse. It’s a breakup of Russia itself. No one should question his willingness to see Russia suffer great economic hardship —greater than it has already endured — in order to remedy that breakup.
As to the second point, it’s true that Putin, as a dictator, is insulated to a considerable extent from public opinion. But I’m sure he remembers what the consequences of Soviet ineffectiveness in the Afghan war were for the Communist dictatorship.
Putin’s war against Ukraine has gone better than the war in Afghanistan. But it has been anything but a success. Marc Thiessen writes:
In 2022, Putin planned for a war that would last weeks but now finds himself in a protracted conflict that is bleeding Russia’s human, military and financial capital dry.
In 2024, Russian forces took a grand total of 1,609 square miles of territory, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). That is an area equivalent to about 15 percent of Haiti. Most of the territory captured was composed of fields and small settlements, none holding any strategic significance.
These glacial advances came at a cost of more than 427,000 Russian casualties either killed or wounded in 2024. That is almost twice as many Russian casualties in a single month in Ukraine as the United States suffered over two decades of fighting in Afghanistan. Even pro-Putin Russian analysts admit that the average Russian soldier now survives less than one month on the front lines before being killed.
Putin might not care about losing men, but he is also suffering unsustainable losses of military equipment. Ukraine destroyed 12,000 Russian tanks and armored combat vehicles and 13,000 artillery systems in 2024. Indeed, Putin’s supplies of armor are so low, he has been forced to turn to Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles, some dating to the 1950s. He is even recommissioning old Soviet tanks that were being used as movie props by Mosfilm, Russia’s largest film studio.
The Russian defense industrial base cannot keep up with the current pace of losses. According to ISW military analyst George Barros, Russia loses about 350 tank and artillery barrels each month, but can only produce 20 replacements. At current attrition rates, the Wall Street Journal reports, Russia will run out of tanks sometime next year.
Putin’s economic position is even weaker than his battlefield position. Russia’s war spending (which is estimated at 41 percent of all state expenditures in 2025) has unleashed double-digit inflation, skyrocketing interest rates and catastrophic labor shortages. Last year, the price of butter rose 30 percent, and Russians are now stealing butter to resell on the black market. Russian businesses are struggling to hire because of the exodus of skilled workers fleeing the country and the massive death toll of Russian men aged 20 to 50 in Ukraine. Russia’s budget deficit grew 14-fold in January, and Putin has been forced to spend 24 percent of the liquid cash reserves in Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. If the current rate of war spending continues, Russia’s liquid assets will be fully depleted by 2030.
From all of this, Thiessen concludes that Trump has “enormous leverage” over Putin. “If Putin refuses his demands for peace, Trump can unleash an Iran-style maximum pressure campaign on Moscow that would devastate Russia.”
On the other hand, the vast amount of “sunk costs” Russia has incurred likely compels Putin not to settle for an agreement that doesn’t yield major territorial gains for Russia and, even more importantly, doesn’t set the stage for future Russian success. If all those lost lives, destroyed equipment, and economic hardship yield only territory the size of 15 percent of Haiti, with no reasonable prospect of more gains in the near future, Putin will surely be judged a failure by his countrymen. No leader, not even a dictator, can stomach that.
The combination of the two factors cited above helps explain why Putin has “pissed off” Trump with his recalcitrance. It’s why he wants a “transitional” government to replace Zelensky’s and the promise that Ukraine’s military will not rebuild.
I’m for applying even more economic pressure on Putin in the hope of bringing about peace. But I am also for applying big-time military pressure or the threat of it. I’m talking about supplying Ukraine with more and better weapons, as well as removing restrictions that Joe Biden placed on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons.
These measures aren’t some “neo-con” fantasy. Trump himself talked about them during the campaign, when he promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war and do it very quickly, even in one day.
Trump’s plan was (1) to tell Zelensky that if he didn’t cooperate in reaching a settlement, American military aid would be stopped and (2) to tell Putin that if he didn’t cooperate, we would provide Ukraine with unprecedented levels of military aid.
So far, Trump has delivered on only the first prong of his plan. If Putin isn’t budging in response to the threat of new sanctions, Trump should deliver on the second prong — a vast increase in military support, or at least the threat of it.
Unlike Thiessen, I don’t think Trump wants to play hardball with Putin. I think he sees the Russian tyrant as potential partner, not an adversary.
Therefore, I’m not confident we’ll see those secondary tariffs Trump is talking about, let alone the stepped up military assistance he talked about before. But let’s see.