Putin has pushed Trump too far

Perhaps Donald Trump is not quite the chump the Kremlin has taken him for. Trump is “pissed off” with Russia over its foot-dragging over a ceasefire in Ukraine, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker. More, Vladimir Putin’s demands that Ukraine’s government be replaced with a transitional one as the price for peace negotiations made Trump “very angry.”

If Putin has any sense at all, he’ll take those words very seriously. Because like an orange version of the Incredible Hulk, the Kremlin won’t like Trump when he’s angry.

Over the last month Putin has worn his trademark smirking smile at all his public appearances. And well he might, as the new US administration seemed to spontaneously have switched sides from Kyiv to Moscow. Senior Trump officials began to parrot all kinds of Kremlin narratives over Ukraine not being a real country, about the legitimacy of referendums conducted in occupied territories after the 2022 invasion, and about the “huge upside” of future cooperation with Russia. Ukraine, in the meanwhile, was thrown under a bus. Its president was humiliated in the Oval Office, supplies of hardware and access to intelligence were suspended and its mineral wealth carved up. The world seemed intent on proving to Putin the wisdom of the old Chinese proverb that one should sit quietly by the river and wait for one’s enemy’s corpse to float by.

But inevitably, because Putin is arrogant and lives in a bubble of yes-men and old KGB apparatchiks, he immediately overplayed his hand. Putin pretended to agree with the principles of the peace process, but decided to deploy salami tactics to delay the process for as long as possible. Trump had bullied the Ukrainians into agreeing to a complete ceasefire on land, sea and air for 30 days without preconditions. Putin’s counter-offer was a 30 day suspension of attacks on energy infrastructure – which he didn’t bother observing anyway. It seemed as though the Russians believed they were negotiating with toddlers, who would somehow mistake the shiny “30-day ceasefire” headline for actual cooperation.

The failings of Trump’s national security team may be legion – but they are not fools, and they know delaying tactics when they see them. The honeymoon period that followed the two-hour Trump-Putin phone call on February 12 came to a juddering halt this weekend. Two pieces of Russian braggadocio proved too much for the Americans to bear. Grigory Karasin, who led the Russian delegation in the ceasefire discussions with the US last week, said a ceasefire may not come “this year or at the end of this year” – adding, not entirely tactfully, that “it would be naive to expect any breakthrough results at the very first meeting.”

Actually, breakthrough results immediately is exactly what the Americans were expecting. Anything else just isn’t the style of Trump’s move-fast-and-break-things new administration.

Putin piled on the overreach by floating the idea that Volodymyr Zelensky and his government should be replaced by a UN-approved administration until a peace deal. While Trump may himself have questioned Zelensky’s legitimacy and even called him a “dictator”, the Kremlin’s plan to simply remove him was a step too far. The fact that Trump declared himself “very angry” at Putin’s proposals was even a strange kind of vote of confidence. Only we’re allowed to beat up on Zelensky and orchestrate Ukrainian politics to our liking, Trump seemed to be saying. You Russians, back off.

Most ominously for the Kremlin, Trump actually set a clock ticking under a ceasefire deal that the US expects to be done fast – and if it’s not, Washington will crack down hard on Russia’s oil exports, the one commodity which is most vital to feeding Putin’s war machine.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault… I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said. “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25 to 50-point tariff on all [Russian] oil.”

Secondary sections would mark a colossal escalation in America’s economic warfare on the Kremlin. Though hundreds-deep thickets of sanctions have been imposed on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s main exports – oil and gas – have never actually been restricted in any meaningful way. The closest to an actual sanction is a price cap of $60 a barrel on Russian crude – but since the market price is currently $64 that “sanction” is close to meaningless. Imposing what Trump called ‘secondary tariffs” on Russian oil would be the opposite – absolutely deadly for the Russian economy.

The question is whether Trump will actually be ready to pay the cost. India has become a major importer of Russian crude, as has China. Does Trump propose to start a trade war with both? And Europe remains a major importer of Russian crude oil – indeed Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, continues to operate major refineries in the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria. And in 2024 Russia was Europe’s second biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG), and indeed increased its LNG imports from Gazprom by 25 percent over the year. In the three years of the war European consumers have contributed far more to the Kremlin’s coffers in the form of payments for oil and gas than they have provided Ukraine in support of their resistance. US ‘tariffs’ against Russian oil would be devastating to Europe too, and send world oil prices skyrocketing.

Trump has put the ball back in Putin’s court. A deadline for a ceasefire of April 20 – Easter – has been floated. Soon we will see just how smart or otherwise Putin really is. Having taken Trump for a pushover, it’s more than likely that Putin will soon reveal himself as the real fool at the table – one who doesn’t know better than to provoke a much stronger opponent into an unpredictable display of fury.