President Donald Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone Trump claims to know "very well," seems to be on the rocks.
During a cabinet meeting earlier this week, Trump said Putin has given the U.S. "a lot of bull----" regarding the war in Ukraine. The comment was a sharp departure from Trump's previous overtures to the Russian president. To one analyst, it seems like Trump is "admitting the obvious" by being so frustrated with his Russian counterpart.
Susan Glaser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote in a recent essay that Trump has finally been forced to admit the "embarrassing reality" that Putin has no interest in ending the war in Ukraine.
"It sure did take Trump a while to admit the obvious, that the peace deal he promised to deliver within twenty-four hours of returning to office does not exist—a hundred and seventy days later," Glaser wrote.
Trump has flip-flopped sides in the Ukraine war several times throughout his second administration. Earlier this year, he invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House to discuss the war, only for the meeting to devolve into a lecture from Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Glaser noted that Trump's recent embrace of Zelensky is a welcome development, but there are still several issues to sort out.
"This is the play that many foreign-policy hands expected Trump might run back in January—it would be a smart bid for leverage in forcing Putin to the negotiating table, they figured, and would have the added benefit of shattering the conventional wisdom that Trump was willing to sell out to Moscow," Glaser wrote. "But not only did that not happen; Trump leaned hard in the other direction, fawning over Putin, voting with Russia at the U.N. Security Council, berating Ukraine’s President in the Oval Office."
