President Donald Trump was not particularly perturbed by Vladimir Putin’s overnight bombardment of Kyiv — the largest Russian assault since the leaders met two weeks earlier. European leaders spent the morning trying to get him there.
In a flurry of social media posts designed for an audience of one, they pointed to Russia’s barrage of several hundred missiles and drones as proof that Putin is not sincere in his overtures for peace.
But on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insinuated that the attack on Ukraine’s capital that killed at least 19 people, including four children, was an understandable response to Ukraine’s assault on Russian refineries over the last month.
Trump “was not happy about this move, but he was also not surprised,” Leavitt said, reiterating that the president wants the bloodshed to stop but blamed both countries for the lack of progress in negotiations. “These are two countries that have been at war for a very long time. Russia launched this attack on Kyiv, and likewise, Ukraine recently dealt a blow to Russia's oil refineries.”
The administration’s neutral response to the Russian attack comes despite the public pleas from European allies who insisted that Russia’s onslaught is more than tit-for-tat.
“Russia has no intentions of ending this war,” wrote Finland’s president, Alex Stubb, in a post on X.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who like Stubb was one of seven European leaders who met with Trump last week at the White House alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also lamented the attack featuring more than 600 missiles and drones in a single night: “this is Russia’s idea of peace,” he wrote. “Terror and barbarism.”
Stubb, Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and others condemning Russian attacks and publicly questioning Putin’s intentions are “trying to use last night’s attack on Ukraine to appeal to Trump’s reluctance to see casualties,” said one senior European official, who like several others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “They hope to make him more resolute.”
While constructive talks among U.S. and European officials about how to guarantee Ukraine’s postwar security when the war ends are ongoing, there is a clear disconnect about the prospects for peace in the near term. The Trump administration has vacillated between insisting Putin is ready to negotiate in good faith and resignation that the war will continue for some time.
“Perhaps both sides of this war are not ready to end it,” Leavitt said. “The president wants its end, but the leaders of these two countries need it to end.”
Trump did impose additional tariffs on India this week, raising the rate to 50 percent as punishment for purchasing Russian oil, but the White House has refused to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia.
Ukraine has made Western-backed security guarantees a central demand in any settlement to prevent further Russian attacks. After Zelenskyy and some of his key European backers gathered at the White House earlier this month, Trump’s administration signaled it would support a European-led force helping guarantee Ukrainian security, providing intelligence assets and battlefield oversight and taking part in an air defense shield.
But while Trump said afterward that he would like a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy, and that the Russian had agreed to the idea, Moscow has backtracked on a peace summit and ruled out several proposals to fortify Ukraine’s future security.
That’s left Kremlin-watchers and European leaders increasingly doubtful that Putin is serious about making peace.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, addressing the press before a meeting with Macron in southern France, dismissed Trump’s assertion that a Putin-Zelenskyy summit had been agreed to and would happen soon.
“It is obviously not going to come to a meeting between President Zelenskyy and President Putin — unlike what had been agreed between President Trump and President Putin last week, when we were together in Washington."
Starmer, who’s developed a strong rapport with Trump, was blunt in blaming Putin, who he wrote was “killing children and civilians, and sabotaging hopes of peace.”
A second European official confirmed that the morning messages were an effort to influence Trump’s thinking, although the person was not optimistic that the attacks would lead Trump to ratchet up the economic pressure on Putin.
“He’s been upset about [Putin’s] bombings for months, but there’s yet to be any actual response beyond words,” the second official said.
Brett Bruen, the president of a Washington-based foreign affairs think tank and a former diplomat during former President Barack Obama’s term, went far beyond the implicit critiques of European leaders determined to keep Trump in the fold.
“Putin punked Trump,” Bruen said, noting that Putin left the Alaska summit having made no concrete concessions. “As we saw with Kim Jong Un, Trump often puts the summit before the substance or even some semblance of a strategy. But, these large recent strikes on Kyiv are the Kremlin really trying to drive home the point that Moscow's most meddlesome man is the one wearing the pants in this relationship.”
After months of mounting frustration with Putin for escalating the war and ignoring his pleas to negotiate, Trump seemed to wipe the slate clean with the Russian leader during their summit in Alaska. Welcoming Putin’s plane with a red carpet on the tarmac, Trump left their three-hour meeting with little beyond his own declaration that he’d received an assurance Russia would accept some security guarantees for Ukraine, just not future membership in NATO.
But since the meeting, the Kremlin has shot down the possibility of sending European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and suggested that talks about security guarantees that didn’t give Russia a say were a “road to nowhere.”
Nevertheless, Trump since meeting Putin has reverted to a rhetorical both-sidesism, telling reporters earlier this week that “it takes two to tango” as he essentially shrugged about whether there would be a Putin-Zelenskyy summit, something he announced just 11 days earlier that both leaders had agreed to.
“I don’t know that they’ll meet — maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” Trump said on Monday.
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