Trump ditches carrots and swings stick at Putin at Ukraine summit

A week ago I had the distinct feeling that it was Groundhog Day, or as the Russians call it. Dien Surka.

President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had a phone call amid threats from the United States to pressure Russia by supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. The result was an announced U.S.-Russia summit in Budapest.

Last August, with the United States threatening to impose additional sanctions on Russia, President Putin met with President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff. As a result, a US-Russian summit was announced in Alaska.

You’ve already seen it.

But it looks like Groundhog Day is over.

The Alaska meeting took place with minimal preparation and no results.

However, the Budapest summit was canceled. To be fair, I barely had time to be “on.” Now President Trump has canceled it.

“I didn’t feel like we were going to get where we needed to go,” the US president told reporters.

And that’s not all.

Trump previously did not follow through on threats to put more pressure on Russia, preferring carrots over sticks in his dealings with the Kremlin.

Now he has put the carrots away.

Instead, he imposed sanctions on Russia’s two major oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.

It is highly unlikely that President Putin will make a U-turn on the war. But this shows President Trump’s frustration with the Kremlin’s unwillingness to make any compromises or concessions to end the civil war in Ukraine.

Russians don’t take kindly to sticks.

Putin told reporters Thursday that the new U.S. sanctions were an “unfriendly act” and an attempt to put pressure on Russia.

“But no self-respecting nation or self-respecting people decides anything under pressure.”

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was less diplomatic.

“America is our enemy and their talkative ‘peacemaker’ is now fully on the path to war with Russia,” he wrote on social media. “The decisions made so far are an act of war against Russia.”

Thursday morning’s edition of the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets was slightly less dramatic, but certainly not favourable. The newspaper criticized the “fickleness and capriciousness of (Russia’s) main negotiating partners.”

So what has changed?

Instead of rushing to the summit. Like the second summit, this time a more cautious attitude was taken around President Trump.

He asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to set the stage for a summit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to see if there was a reason to travel to Budapest.

That did not happen, and it soon became clear that a new summit was now unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

Russia is vehemently opposed to Donald Trump’s idea of ​​freezing Ukraine’s current front lines.

The Kremlin is determined to take control of at least the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. It seized and occupied most of it.

But President Volodymyr Zelensky refuses to hand over the Donbas region, which Ukraine still controls, to Russia.

Moscow would have welcomed a second US-Russia summit.

The first was the Kremlin’s diplomatic and political coup in Alaska. Putin’s red carpet welcome in Anchorage symbolized Russia’s return to the international stage and the West’s failure to isolate Moscow.

For the past week, Russian state media has been mulling the idea of ​​a summit with President Trump in Europe, but the European Union has not been at the table. Russian commentators have described the proposed meeting in Budapest as a slap in the face to Brussels.

At the same time, few seemed to believe that even if the Budapest summit went ahead, Moscow would get the results it wanted.

Some Russian newspapers have called for Russian troops to continue fighting.

“There is not a single reason why Moscow should agree to a ceasefire,” the Moscow Komsomolets declared yesterday.

That doesn’t mean the Kremlin doesn’t want peace.

Yes. But only on those terms. And right now, this situation appears unacceptable to both Kiev and Washington.

These terms include more than just territory. Moscow is demanding that what it calls the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine are addressed. This is a catch-all phrase that extends calls for Russia to halt NATO’s eastward expansion.

Moscow is also widely seen as maintaining its goal of returning Ukraine to the Russian orbit.

Is Donald Trump ready to increase pressure on Russia?

if.

But you might wake up one morning and find yourself back in Groundhog Day again.

“Russia is again leading in the Trump game of tug-of-war,” Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote after the Budapest summit was announced.

“In the weeks leading up to the Budapest meeting, President Trump will be pulled in the opposite direction through phone calls and visits to Europe, and President Putin will try to pull him back to our side.”