Donald Trump rarely calls out Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Sunday night, he did so and warned him to stop targeting Ukrainian civilians or trying to take over the entire country.
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It is rare that Donald Trump calls out any authoritarian leader… After all, who knows where his next business opportunity may come from? It is even rarer that the US president explicitly criticizes his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, to whom he owes his first term in office.
However, on Sunday night, Trump took to social media suggesting that the Russian president has changed somehow.
“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” the US president wrote in a social media post. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”
Setting aside that Russia has been committing war crimes from the moment it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, that Putin hasn’t changed at all, and that Russia has consistently been targeting civilians, a more reality-based assessment of the situation on Trump’s part is still noteworthy.
After all, not too long ago, he was still calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s democratically elected president, a “dictator,” which is a label Trump and others in his administration seem unwilling to slap on Putin.
The US president also stated that he believes that Russia “wants all of Ukraine, not just a piece of it,” which isn’t some unique insight he has come up with on his own.
What is interesting, however, is that Trump seems to be setting some boundaries in the conflict by warning Putin that, if he does try to take all of Ukraine, “it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”
Of course, one explanation for the social media post is that the US president, who had promised to end the conflict on the first day of his second term in office (and perhaps even before then), is simply trying to force both parties to come to some kind of agreement so that he can take the credit for ending the conflict and secure the elusive Nobel Peace Prize he has been chasing.
And toward that end, Putin firing missiles into Kyiv is just not helpful.
Of course, Trump wouldn’t be Trump if he didn’t also take shots at Zelenskyy, who played a central role in his first impeachment, and Joe Biden, who defeated him in 2020.
“President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does,” Trump wrote. “Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”
Of course, what Zelenskyy is saying is simply that he would like to have his country back, which Trump doesn’t like because the peace proposal he is pitching would result in Ukraine ceding some territory.
Finally, the US president made it clear that he is not to blame for anything that is happening.
“This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not ‘Trump’s,’” he wrote. “I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.”
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
