Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.
Has the penny finally dropped with U.S. President Donald Trump that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has no serious interest in peace talks and is in no hurry to halt his war on Ukraine? Is Trump’s bromance with the Russian leader, whom he described only last month as “very kind,” finally over?
The mercurial Trump’s midweek comments certainly prompted a flood of speculation on the matter. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” he said, indicating he’s finally understood he’s been played by the Russian “good guy” — and now he means to get tough.
“Trump has now figured it out that Putin is the problem,” former U.S. envoy to Ukraine Bill Taylor confidently declared. “So what President Trump has to do is put pressure on Putin, which he can do.” And he’s not wrong.
Trump not only voiced his irritation with Putin this week, he also promised to resume deliveries of crucial defensive munitions to Ukraine, just a few days after the Pentagon had announced it was going to do some stocktaking. “We’re gonna send some more weapons we have to them. They have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump said, as U.S. and Israeli officials stood alongside him. “They’re getting hit very hard now.”
But will Trump really apply the kind of pressure that might, just might, give Putin pause? That remains unclear — with Trump, you never know. And that’s part of the problem.
With its abrupt shifts in policy and tone, reversed decisions, extended deadlines and ultimatums, and threats to bring the house crashing down, his whiplash diplomacy may have worked on real estate business deals in New York. But this is the big leagues, and Putin could easily conclude — as he clearly has before — that Trump’s bark is worse than his bite, and that he can just wait things out.
Certainly, this week’s Trumpian huffing and puffing seemed to have little impact on the Kremlin. The Russian response was bellicose, setting yet another record by targeting Ukraine with 728 drones overnight on Tuesday. Residents of Kyiv and other major cities across 10 provinces were forced to spend the night in air raid shelters, including metro stations.
Of particular note was that Russia mounted the biggest aerial attack of the war on Volyn Oblast, near Poland, on Tuesday night. “It was the most massive enemy attack with UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and missiles on our city and community,” Lutsk Mayor Ihor Polishchuk noted in a social media video.
The following night, there was another massive air assault involving 18 missiles and around 400 drones, primarily targeting Kyiv. Employing a new tactic to presumably try and confuse air defenses, some even passed by the Ukrainian capital only to reverse course and return to target Kyiv. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov simply underlined Moscow’s nonchalance in the face of Trump’s threats: “We are taking it quite calmly,” he told reporters midweek, adding that “Trump, in general, tends to use a fairly tough style and expressions.”
The escalating drone and ballistic missile assaults demonstrate the necessity for “biting” sanctions on all major sources of income that help finance the war, including penalties on those who buy Russian oil, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram this week. And Trump saying he was now considering supporting legislation that would see steeper sanctions imposed on Russia — including 500 percent tariffs on countries buying Russian oil, gas, uranium and other key exports — was no doubt music to his ears.
Trump only has to say the word and that legislation will easily pass. The bill already has more than 80 co-sponsors in the 100-seat chamber. And according to a Republican foreign policy expert who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely, by his estimate, 95 senators would vote in favor — though it’s unlikely the bill’s passage would be before the August recess, he said.
However, it wouldn’t add much to the powers Trump already has, the foreign policy expert noted: “Substantively, the bill is nothing but important symbolically. Unless it’s changed in a very significant way, it doesn’t actually force anything because it gives the president the right to determine whether Russia is negotiating in good faith. It is up to him to apply sanctions or not, and he already has the ability to determine the Russians aren’t negotiating in good faith and has the authority under U.S. law to apply more sanctions anyway,” he said.
Kyiv never had any faith that Trump — or anyone for that matter — could secure a favorable peace deal. Instead, Ukrainian officials long pinned their hopes on the U.S. president growing exasperated with a recalcitrant Russian president, leading Trump to back them more directly and substantively. They don’t believe Putin will agree to anything short of abject Ukrainian surrender unless forced to by military means.
Trump, on the other hand, appears to think he can cajole Putin into a fair settlement by threatening to unleash unrestrained economic warfare. He talked about it back in January, posting on Truth Social: “We can do it the easy way, or the hard way — and the easy way is always better,” directly addressing Putin. The U.S. president also said he was ready to slap tariffs and even impose more sanctions on Russia, if the Russian president failed to negotiate an end to the war. That was five months ago.
But there’s no evidence such threats will cut it. The Trump team’s assumption that the Russian revanchist can be persuaded to negotiate for economic reasons seems dubious in the extreme.
Earlier this year, analysts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman argued there’s little incentive for Putin to stop the war, as he’s reached the point of no return. “The war has hardened Putin’s resolve and narrowed his options. There is no turning back: Putin has already transformed Russia’s society, economy, and foreign policy to better position the Kremlin to take on the West,” they wrote.
“The war has become a wealth transfer mechanism channeling money to Russia’s poor regions, and many economic elites have moved into the defense sector to cash in on lucrative opportunities. Elites have, by now, adjusted to the system’s current configuration, enabling them not just to survive but to profit,” they said.
Certainly, Russia’s economy shows signs of high inflation, labor shortages and overdependence on state spending. But thanks to the Chinese and Asian markets, widespread sanctions-busting and import substitution, the country has economically weathered the war better than most predicted.
Meanwhile, since the start of the war, Western leaders have thought that sanctions and economic pain would bring Russia to heel, only to be disabused of that notion time and again. There’s nothing in the history books on collective international sanctions to inspire confidence either.
Sanctions have been turned to again and again — increasingly since the 1920s — with rather mixed results. “While the use of sanctions has surged, their odds of success have plummeted,” noted Cornell University historian Nicholas Mulder in a recent book “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War.”
Tracing the post-World War I rise of international sanctions as a coercive weapon aimed at preventing wars or quickly curtailing them, Mulder noted: “The most successful interwar sanctions, against Yugoslavia in 1921 and Greece in 1925, involved threats rather than actual application.” And aside from those two occasions, he said the results have been rather poor when it comes to preventing wars, significantly shortening them or prompting regime change. In fact, the more they’re used, the more their chances of success decline.
So, while Trump may be impatient for a peace deal — one that would allow him to go about the bigger prize of resetting relations with Russia — threatening or imposing sanctions is unlikely to do the trick. Will his impatience lead him to do more? So far, there are few signs of that.